'It's your fault!' Technological inept stories.

[Deserted]

A few years ago I ran a program on a computer belonging to my brother's friend. All the program did was identify the installed hardware and write a log to a text file.

Of course, at some unspecified point after that, the computer "stopped working" and it was all my fault.

Also, while I was in the Navy, I tried to fix a coworker's pc. I no longer remember the details (this was in the mid-90's) but I managed to clear the "recent documents" list. I found out the next day when he slugged me and accused me of deleting his "stuff". He was so angry at me that he had to be physically restrained while I exited stage left at high speed.

Fortunately, the system I'd installed it on was one I'd picked up specifically because it had DOS in *ROM*.

Holy crap! 1980's, anyone?

I want a machine with a small *nix system in ROM. QNX4 had a demo version that fit the entire OS, including network stack & drivers and a complete GUI, on a single 1.44mb floppy. Burn that baby to an EEPROM and I'd be good.

My mother is a perfectly typical example of "can't learn, won't learn" when it comes to computers. She's the type who keeps a book full of detailed instructions that she uses whenever she needs to know something - and she insists on writing it herself after seeing it demonstrated *and* repeating it herself.

That's my mother, too. She kept detailed instructions on how to do everything. She had a full page of notes related to shutting down.

(Worst thing is, she's the one who taught me how to use computers in the first place...)

[Chromatix]

Here's the thing - we've repeated the process of making these books of instructions for:

- Amstrad PCW
- BBC Micro
- Acorn RiscPC
- Windows ME (yuck)
- MacOS X

...and possibly even one or two others I've forgotten about. Even the stuff that was almost the same from one machine to the next had to be instructed and written afresh.

For example, she has never *generally* grasped the different functions of the left and right mouse buttons, even though a central tenet of the RiscPC's interface is the distinct Select, Menu, Adjust functions for the mouse's three buttons, which I remember emphasising (since 1994!) by using only their names to identify them. She only gets the mouse buttons right because which button to use is included in every written instruction.

[Deserted]

For example, she has never *generally* grasped the different functions of the left and right mouse buttons, even though a central tenet of the RiscPC's interface is the distinct Select, Menu, Adjust functions for the mouse's three buttons, which I remember emphasising (since 1994!) by using only their names to identify them. She only gets the mouse buttons right because which button to use is included in every written instruction.

Well, ok, my mom wasn't that bad.