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