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“My wife has complained that OpenOffice will never print on Tuesdays” (2009)

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Re: “My wife has complained that OpenOffice will never print on Tuesdays” (2009)

#141

Post by jeffrallen »

DoubleGlazing wrote: post #63
hazeii wrote: post #36

Some years back I had a case where a co-worker complained his mouse didn't work in the afternoon. Eventually I went to have a look, and he demo'ed the issue; sure enough the mouse was completely unresponsive. Luckily I guessed the issue immediately and quicky demonstrated - with a shrug - that the mouse "works fine for me". Thing was I'd spotted there was strong sunlight through the window hitting the mouse; guessing…

I was an admin for a company that had lots of open plan offices. In one of these offices a specific row of computers kept failing. Although they were cheap (Compaq Evos with NT4), they were pretty damn reliable throughout the rest of the company. Lot of head scratching ensued about the fault. Nothing really made sense. Totally by chance we found out what was wrong. One Saturday when the office was empty and with no a…

If you'd kept asking the 5 whys you'd have gotten to the real problem: noisy machines in open offices. You should have thanked the lady who put the paperclips on the fans.

Re: “My wife has complained that OpenOffice will never print on Tuesdays” (2009)

#142

Post by shanecleveland »

hazeii wrote: post #36

Some years back I had a case where a co-worker complained his mouse didn't work in the afternoon. Eventually I went to have a look, and he demo'ed the issue; sure enough the mouse was completely unresponsive. Luckily I guessed the issue immediately and quicky demonstrated - with a shrug - that the mouse "works fine for me". Thing was I'd spotted there was strong sunlight through the window hitting the mouse; guessing…

As support IT in an office, I have a lot of mouse "issues", particularly with the wireless Apple Magic Mouse ... using it turned around 180 deg., making things disappear by not recognizing that the surface can be used to scroll horizontally, battery dying ... to name a few.

Re: “My wife has complained that OpenOffice will never print on Tuesdays” (2009)

#143

Post by jolmg »

dunham wrote: post #106
hazeii wrote: post #36

Some years back I had a case where a co-worker complained his mouse didn't work in the afternoon. Eventually I went to have a look, and he demo'ed the issue; sure enough the mouse was completely unresponsive. Luckily I guessed the issue immediately and quicky demonstrated - with a shrug - that the mouse "works fine for me". Thing was I'd spotted there was strong sunlight through the window hitting the mouse; guessing…

Back in college (90's) we had a professor who, about once a year, would send an email to help desk saying his monitor had gotten blurry and he needed a new one. We'd go to his office, wipe off the thick layer of dust and it'd be as good as new again.

Did you try showing him the issue and how to handle it on his own?

Re: “My wife has complained that OpenOffice will never print on Tuesdays” (2009)

#144

Post by shanecleveland »

Problems like this make us IT folk seem magical. I routinely remove blank spaces from "empty" fields, rename files without slashes, quit and reload applications "doing something weird." The list goes on. Just this morning I changed an exclamation point a "1" to fix an error with a calculation.

Many of these things can and should be programmed to work, despite the user error. But just as it can be hard for users to understand the fault in their ways, it is difficult for the programer to consider many of these possibilities when deploying applications.

Re: “My wife has complained that OpenOffice will never print on Tuesdays” (2009)

#145

Post by john-tells-all »

Japhy_Ryder wrote: post #52
hazeii wrote: post #36

Some years back I had a case where a co-worker complained his mouse didn't work in the afternoon. Eventually I went to have a look, and he demo'ed the issue; sure enough the mouse was completely unresponsive. Luckily I guessed the issue immediately and quicky demonstrated - with a shrug - that the mouse "works fine for me". Thing was I'd spotted there was strong sunlight through the window hitting the mouse; guessing…

That is absolutely hilarious. Flashback to a similar technology `sleight of hand` - Back in middleschool, when JavaScript's window.open allowed you easily to launch a fullscreen window with no browser chrome, and setting the background-image to a screenshot of the desktop... it was so entertaining watching students and teachers alike try to use the machine and thinking it was frozen!

My favorite version of this:

- screenshot someone's desktop

- set the background to the screenshot

- iconify all the apps

They'll click around in increasing panic on the "apps" on the background, before they realize what happened :)

Not that this ever happened to me, of course. I'd never fall for it again.

Re: “My wife has complained that OpenOffice will never print on Tuesdays” (2009)

#146

Post by goutham467 »

In my new office, whenever any of my colleagues standup from their chair my external monitor would go blank, it was not happening consistently, especially when I called any of colleagues to see it. It drove me mad for days, I checked whether there were any loose connections, etc., but later after searching for the issue online, I found out this https://support.displaylink.com/knowledgebase/articles/73861...

Re: “My wife has complained that OpenOffice will never print on Tuesdays” (2009)

#147

Post by tzs »

notacoward wrote: post #59

This is why one of my favorite features in the original MacOS filesystem was type/creator fields (four uppercase letters each). Yes, it was possible for developers to create collisions, but it was still better than the UNIX method of applying fragile heuristics to the file contents. IMO it would still be a good idea to replicate this (minus the four-character limitation) with a standardized extended attribute, fallin…

It also had some way of quickly finding what apps were on a volume and what file types they handled.

This meant that if you had a file and did not have the correct app to open it, all you had to do was insert a floppy or CD that contained a Mac volume that had a copy of that app, and then you could open the file.

Most apps would run fine off a CD, so you could keep a CD with all the big apps that you rarely used and just insert it whenever you had to deal with a file using one of those apps.

Re: “My wife has complained that OpenOffice will never print on Tuesdays” (2009)

#148

Post by MayeulC »

john-tells-all wrote: post #145
Japhy_Ryder wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is absolutely hilarious. Flashback to a similar technology `sleight of hand` - Back in middleschool, when JavaScript's window.open allowed you easily to launch a fullscreen window with no browser chrome, and setting the background-image to a screenshot of the desktop... it was so entertaining watching students and teachers alike try to use the machine and thinking it was frozen!

My favorite version of this: - screenshot someone's desktop - set the background to the screenshot - iconify all the apps They'll click around in increasing panic on the "apps" on the background, before they realize what happened :) Not that this ever happened to me, of course. I'd never fall for it again.

Tape on the bottom of the mouse is another common joke these days.

If the OS you are using has a taskbar, also set it to auto-hide, preferably in a random location.

As always, that kind of elaborate joke is best kept short. I also like replacing someone's shell with `wine cmd`, but nowadays the best protection for myself is that nobody seems to be able to use my computer (sway, full of shortcuts that you have to know in order to do anything). I'm similarly dumbfounded when at my friend's computers. Luckily, this is all fixed by opening a good old POSIX-compliant shell :)

Re: “My wife has complained that OpenOffice will never print on Tuesdays” (2009)

#149

Post by outworlder »

aphextim wrote: post #118
dantheman0207 wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had a similar story. I set up a home pc for recording tv and hooked it up to the main entertainment system. I built it on a budget so it did it’s job but later on as we switched to more HD content it struggled occasionally. I went off to college. My mom noticed the fan noise was increasing and found it distracting. She wrapped the pc in a couple of blankets to cut down on the noise. When I came home the thing was i…

I am not sure if the following is true or one of those stories that gets recycled. While I was working at Best Buy - the Geek squad told us a story of an older Lady who brought in a computer wrapped entirety in plastic saran wrap, to prevent the virus from escaping the computer and infecting people. She thought it was okay as she containing the virus and continued to use the computer before it turned off and didn't t…

Oh, never underestimate people.

On the Pentium Overdrive! days, a guy came to my father's shop complaining that the computer wouldn't turn on. Turns out that he had installed the process in a different orientation "to see if it would go faster". Spoiler alert: it didn't.

Neither the CPU nor the motherboard failed (nor did the fancy overdrive socket). Once the CPU was installed correctly, it worked again.

Re: “My wife has complained that OpenOffice will never print on Tuesdays” (2009)

#150

Post by annoyingnoob »

These are always fun. I've seen a number of them over the years.

1. Speech Recognition typing random garbage - user claims to be hacked.

2. Ambient light sensor on laptop turns off screen - user says my computer works at home but not at the office.

3. Set email background and font to white - user says he can't type new emails but can type replies.

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