Maybe *this* will help...
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We've all heard of the collosally stupid "I thought it was a cup holder" type of
users, but I never thought I'd personally come into contact with one
(albeit indirectly).
My wife works as a secretary for a small, local company. One of her
co-workers, who recently retired, was an older woman who was in charge
of accounting (and by "in charge of", I mean, "she was the only one in
that dept"). She was the nosy, malcontented type of coworker who had no
logical reason to justify her processes, but still insisted that they
were the "right way" to do things. Needless to say, not many around the
office were too fond of dealing with her. Since it's such a small
company, they don't have an IT dept, and for some inconceivable reason,
this lady (who I'll call "Kathy") was put in charge of their legacy
system. It's some kind of ancient, bass-ackwards piece of junk software
whose name escapes me at the moment, but suffice it to say that it isn't
very reliable, and Kathy's "support" of said software was even less
reliable.
So one day, my wife tries to run the legacy software... she
double-clicks on her desktop icon, but nothing happens. She tries a
couple more times, but can't get it to open. Normally, my wife will just
call me with any computer-related questions, but when it comes to the
legacy system, Kathy is her only option. So, quite reluctantly, she
calls Kathy over to help. The first step of Kathy's troubleshooting is
for everyone (in the entire company, no less) to log-off from the system
and reboot... you know... to "reset" everything. This didn't work. Kathy
tries several other completely ineffectual approaches, and eventually
they're all just sitting there staring at my wife's desktop wondering what
to do. At the time, my wife had a lovely picture of some remote,
tropical beach as her desktop background image, and it was while staring blankly at
this image that Kathy had an earth shattering revelation.
She turns to my wife and in all seriousness says, "Well this might be
the problem. See here... your icon is in the water. I bet if we move it
up onto the land, it will work."
......I can't recall what they eventually did to solve the problem, but
I'm assuming it involved a snorkel and some swim fins.
WATYF
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ok....odd
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After that, I'm going to need a Tab.
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so... did moving the icon onto land help?
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Why wasn't this on the front page? Beautifully written and the punchline was hilarious to the point of disturbing my co-workers. Thank you for a brilliant start to the week :)
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<FONT face=tahoma,arial,helvetica,sans-serif>Brillant! I really liked her "earth shattering" revelation...
Pretty much like the movies where the hero accidentally looked at something that reminds him/her in the slightest way of the ONLY solution... Though in our case, our hero really didn't find the solution (or did she? o_0)...
</FONT>
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Actually she may have been right.
An activeX control could be written which stored "water" and "land" as seperate bitmasks then determined whether an application could be opened depending on whether the icon fell on water or land. The idea being that you could "lock" applications by dragging them into the water. Im not saying this was the case, but it was a good idea to move the icon back onto land - worth a try.
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@Cthulhu said:
but it was a good idea to move the icon back onto land - worth a try.
No. No it was not.
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OMFG!!!
I would say that's front page worthy, except it didn't deal with an inept IT person.. just an old "secretary" being assigned to IT. But still.. that is the most retarded thing I've ever heard of! I've never seen even a user be that friggin' inept. At least the CD-ROM drive does look like a cup holder to those who don't know.. but actually thinking a picture in the background behaves as if it were real?! I wonder what she'd have to say about my dual-screen cosmos picture with all sorts of supernovae and the like. Geez..
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@AbbydonKrafts said:
OMFG!!!
I would say that's front page worthy, except it didn't deal with an inept IT person.. just an old "secretary" being assigned to IT. But still.. that is the most retarded thing I've ever heard of! I've never seen even a user be that friggin' inept. At least the CD-ROM drive does look like a cup holder to those who don't know.. but actually thinking a picture in the background behaves as if it were real?! I wonder what she'd have to say about my dual-screen cosmos picture with all sorts of supernovae and the like. Geez..I disagree, this is front-page material except for its brevity. My sister-in-law worked for an art supply business where the "IT Department" consisted of the owner's wife who was so incompetent that she made all 60+ employees in the company NOT use custom background images (like the beach image included with Windows XP by default) because my sister-in-law's immediate supervisor had twice given the entire office a nice computer virus outbreak by "changing the desktop background". Yes, there are people this stupid working in positions of power in this world every single day. Needless to say, when I heard my sister-in-law's story, just like this one, I started laughing uncontrollably.
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@AbbydonKrafts said:
I would say that's front page worthy, except it didn't deal with an inept IT person..
As long as it involves someone filling a supposedly professional role, it's a WTF. Just about everyone who makes the front page is incompetent. It's more or less the fact that they're "professional", *paid* incompetents that makes for the WTFery.
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Ok.. majority rules. I mainly meant that it didn't deal with someone coming in claiming to be an IT professional, getting the job, then proving how much of an idiot they really are. In this case, it looks more like an assignment by an even-more-inept supervisor along the lines of "Hey.. you know how to change your screen resolution. I'm going to put you in charge of IT"
And WhyTF is this thing word wrapping all of the sudden?! Grrr...
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I think that having everyone in the entire company log off to troubleshoot one user's problem is almost a bigger WTF than the icon thing.
Both are great, though. Front-page material.
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Again, we need a third "the daily" front page variant, "The Daily OMG!" (perhaps in green or purple, but never brown) comes to mind.
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Thanks for the comments, all. Actually, I did submit this to the front page, and I got an email from Alex saying I should post it on the Sidebar, so I did. I'm actually a fairly new reader, so I wasn't sure what goes on the front page and what goes on the sidebar.
In any event, it's a shame that this lady retired a few months ago, because I'm sure I would have gotten a few more great stories out of her.
WATYF
