Technological stupidities

[Jack McSlay]

Do you have any studid, funny and/or ridiculous stories involving computers, electronics  or related stuff?

Back in college, they had a bunch of servers for the multiple services in the network. But none of them were actual servers, but custom-built PCs (and some pretty old) and once there were some problems with the one responsible for user logins:

Teacher: Why am I having problems logging in?
Intern (not me): We're having some difficulties with our server.
Teacher: Where is this server? I want to talk to him!
Intern: [sarcasm] He went to the restroom. [/sarcasm]
Teacher: Ok, I'll come back later then.

[Drayco84]

I was once in the frontlines for DSL tech support for about 2 years and the things I could tell you if they weren't repressed by my subconscious... However, people just didn't seem like they understood the concept of an external modem... Once or twice, somebody tried connecting the phone line to the modem in their PC and wondered why their "high-speed" internet only moved as quickly as dial-up. (And that's assuming it still worked and the PC wasn't getting the DSL signal instead, which will cripple dial-up and make normal phone use rather hard.)
To be honest, while they DO make internal DSL modems, finding a PC with one is incredibly rare, (And by 'Rare' I mean that I never encountered a single one during my time there. And the ones that claimed they had one actually had a dial-up modem.) especially since anyone worth their salt would probably prefer a more portable/mobile external modem with a router if so desired, and far more importantly, very, very, few PC makers ever put DSL modems into their PCs. Most preferred to install ethernet cards as they were far more adaptable, and cheaper. But, most of you probably already knew that...

The other thing that I encountered was... Well, let's just say I got this more than once...

Me: What's the model of the modem?
Cus: Modem? What's that?
Me: The box that we sent you.
Cus: Oh. It's a Dell.
Me: No sir, the box that we sent you...
Cus: Oh! It's a... (near-random modem model).

To be honest, I also got "HP" once... But hands down, "Dell" was the most popular response...

[VAE]

In our long computer lab exercise, i found out my lab group partner is a complete n00b after the following exchange (it was an exercise based on analysing a stock market price graph and then making a program to make a profit buying and selling, he was doing the first part)
"I wrote it like they suggested and i am not getting the line."
"Did you load the data correctly?"
"Yes"
*I look around for some time trying to find an error*
I do not think.. did you load the data?
Yes! I told you!
*I  print out a random data point... it is 0*
"The data is not loading correctly.. the function looks allright, have you not accidentally called it after the graph is done?"
"You have to call the function? Writing it isn't enough?"
*Two fingered hit on his head a'la uncle from the jackie chan animated series*

[superluser]

Oh, I've got a few.

http://www.milk.com/true-stories/stupid_computer_users.txt
http://www.milk.com/true-stories/stupid_computer_users_2.html

to start.  Then there's a rather infamous tale where I misconfigured fetchmail and managed to bounce 5000 some messages back to their original senders.  That was a decade or so ago and I haven't had a fit of stupidity that great ever since.

[Ryudo Lee]

I've got a whole bunch of them... far too many to write here.

There was one attorney who was jumping up and down that her monitor had gone black and she couldn't work and had to have it fixed NOW!  So I rushed in... and pushed the power button on the monitor.

Same attorney, she said she minimized Word and couldn't get it to come back up and it had to be fixed NOW!  So I rushed in... and found that Word's title bar was down at the bottom of the screen... click and drag.

Different attorney, same firm, nicer person.  He said that his sound had stopped working.  So I went to check it out... and had to turn his speakers on.

There's a term we use for people like this: educated idiots.

[Jack McSlay]

once I decided to teach a crash course in game programming. And I was using a projector connected to the computer and to display the source code through an IDE that supports code folding, and, typically, the symbol for unfolded code for it is a minus. But this particular IDE used a regular minus instead of a minus inside a square like many others do.

One of the suddents were unable to compile his code. I went there to check his code and found something along those lines:

Code Select Expand


- int foo(int a){
-     if (a == 1){
         return 10;
     }
     else  return 20;
 }


That's right. He copied the code exactly as he saw in the projection screen, including a minus before each code block. Thankfully he didn't type the line numbers as well.

[Dannysaysnoo]

After changing a graphics card in a computer once, I forgot to plug the motherboard back in after I'd closed it up again.

[Tapewolf]

One of my childhood friends had a Commodore C16.  He'd never seen a joystick before, and had it back-to-front, so that when I tried to use it, moving it up moved the character down.  He was convinced it was supposed to work that way and could only play the game (Dork's Revenge, IIRC) with the stick turned like that.

I've seen lots of people selling tape decks on ebay with the machine threaded completely wrong - I suppose that's forgiveable.
But then you have stuff like this:
One UMOJC amplifier, not tested

...in case you've missed the problem with it, this one - which admittedly I did myself - should be clearer:
http://i89.photobucket.com/albums/k216/tapewolf/scraps/umojc.png


On the computer side of things, I've had people from Local Authorities who, according to the person taking the call, seemed to be using the mouse correctly except that she was placing it against the screen rather than the desk, a customer or two who wanted a thermal printer that could print in colour, and one client who wanted to be able to print on both sides of the ticket (again, using a roll-fed thermal printer).

[Reese Tora]

and I just forget to plug stuff back in before I close up my computer case.
(I once spent several months without a working DvD drive before I opened the case to connect it again- I noticed it pretty quickly, but since I rarely use it, it took the purchase of a new game several months later to get my to shift my butt and fix it.)

It's amazing how many new hires at my company need to call me because they looked at the pictures in our email setup instructions instead of reading them (the screen shot of the email configuration shows the user name field with "username" in it instead of "username@domain.tld" but the written instructions indicate that the full email address must be used as the user name)

Or don't bother to follow them entirely (yes, the outgoing server requires authentication, it's in the instructions, you need to go click that in the advanced options)

[Tapewolf]

and I just forget to plug stuff back in before I close up my computer case.

I once plugged the onboard video connector in backwards (I was convinced it was keyed and didn't think to check).  The ribbon cable glowed orange which made me think I was dreaming for a few seconds until it started to fill the room with smoke, at which point I came to my senses and cut the power.  It completely fried the video chip, but aside from that the rest of the motherboard worked, bizarrely enough.

[VAE]

and I just forget to plug stuff back in before I close up my computer case.

I once plugged the onboard video connector in backwards (I was convinced it was keyed and didn't think to check).  The ribbon cable glowed orange which made me think I was dreaming for a few seconds until it started to fill the room with smoke, at which point I came to my senses and cut the power.  It completely fried the video chip, but aside from that the rest of the motherboard worked, bizarrely enough.

OOh, i did a similar thing (it was a power supply wire, one of the two pin ones, in a  old machine, i plugged it on a short teeth) (my excuse is that i was sick then) In about a second the isolation on it dissappeared in a layer of smoke....

[RobbieThe1st]

I think my only experience that way was plugging in a PC speaker backwards - Before this happened, I had the speaker itself wrapped in a piece of paper towel and taped to the case for a few months. When I removed the paper towel and tied it in place properly and powered the machine on.... Well, I have a speaker with the negative wire all shriveled.
Surprisingly enough, it didn't seem to hurt the motherboard...

[Jack McSlay]

Tho I thankfully don't have a background of frying hardware, in my early computing days, I removed the windowspartition with an MSDOS one in an attempt to get better compatibility with DOS games

[Drayco84]

Tho I thankfully don't have a background of frying hardware, in my early computing days, I removed the windowspartition with an MSDOS one in an attempt to get better compatibility with DOS games

I can top that!
When I was young and used Win95 (Or was it Win 3.1? Eh, I think it was 3.1. I really hated 3.1...) , I once had an issue where Windows itself wouldn't load and just dumped me into the DOS prompt. So, kinda annoyed, I deleted the entire Windows directory.
Needless to say, the hard drive had to be reformatted and the OS reinstalled. (Back in those days I only used a PC for games. Which was a good thing because I think the HDDs got reformatted and the OS reinstalled every few months...)

[hapless]

When I was a young cub, I was experimenting with DOS batch files, trying to learn the quirks of the syntax...
Well, at some point I wanted to start clearly, and as I was playing in C:\, and the files in question had names like datafile.txt, testfile.bat, and so on, I did "del *file.*"... And well, if you don't know already how crazy the CP/M-compatible wildcards used by old DOS are... well, learn that everything between an asterisk and following dot is silently ignored.
Yup. del *.* in C:\ .
Luckily, DOS del doesn't touch hidden and system files, but AUTOEXEC.BAT and CONFIG.SYS both went away... and as I totally had no idea what I was doing back then, I had DOS crippled for a very, very long time...

Also, just last year, after an all-nighter of coding, I overwrote the only copy of finished file with the old backup (copied from left panel to right instead of other way round)... while IMing with the guy I was doing the work for... first he thought I was joking. Then he cried with me. Then I got myself up and redone the thing in another hour... fortunately I still remembered most of the stuff I done, so it was mostly a matter of writing it down again.

[Tapewolf]

I did "del *file.*"... And well, if you don't know already how crazy the CP/M-compatible wildcards used by old DOS are... well, learn that everything between an asterisk and following dot is silently ignored.
Yup. del *.* in C:\ .

I got into a habit of always doing "dir <expression>" before trying it with delete.

You've just reminded me of a 'prune' program I wrote once.  The idea was simple.   Say you had a directory structure like:

c:\stuff\things\pictures\junk
c:\stuff\things\pictures\photos
c:\stuff\things\pictures\images
c:\stuff\things\sounds

The command:
PRUNE c:\stuff\things

...would remove 'things' and everything inside it, e.g. 'pictures' and 'sounds'.  It worked by entering that directory, getting a complete listing of all files and subdirectories.  The files it would remove - the subdirectories it would enter and repeat the process.  When the directory was clear, it would remove it and go back to wherever it was before.

I compiled it up and created a new directory to test it in.  It sat there for a long, long time.  Eventually I realised that the disk light was on the whole time.

What it had done was remove everything in the directory, and when it searched for subdirectories, it found one called ".." and entered it.  For those who don't know, ".." is a virtual directory that means 'go up one level'.
For instance, if you did:

c:
cd \stuff\things
...you would end up in 'c:\stuff\things'.

If you then typed:

cd ..

...you would end up in 'c:\stuff'.

In short, it managed to escape and went off on a killing spree, deleting about a third of the disk before I realised and stopped it.  It did, in fact delete its own source code and executable.

Fortunately, I was running DRDOS which had a very sophisticated undelete utility, and was able to recover the whole lot in about 30 minutes (MSDOS couldn't recover the first letter of the filenames, DRDOS stored them somehow.  I never found out where, even with the kernel source).
What was most interesting was that after I had undeleted everything, all the directories which had been affected had lost their '..' and '.' directories, which is rather fascinating because they're not actually 'real' directories to begin with.
They mysteriously came back after I rebooted, though.



About 10 years later I managed to repeat the exact same mistake while writing a remote kill function.  It was only supposed to erase itself, but again, managed to escape and started to delete the entire disk.
Out of curiosity we allowed it to continue for about 15 minutes (it was a test laptop that we could re-image so nothing of value was lost).
Intriguingly, the amount of disk space went down as it deleted things.  We could only assume that it was XP's self-repair mechanism trying frantically to replace the system files as it destroyed them.

When we decided to call it a day, we found that we couldn't stop it because CTRL-ALT-DEL had no effect - task manager had already been deleted.  We had to pull the battery out and reinstall it.