You have to love them

[cloudy.thoughts]

Just joined the forum (hello <waves>) and thought I ought to post one of my own...

This is an phone call I had with a user - a school teacher - way back when computers were first being introduced in to schools here in the UK.

She phones me and say she's just moved the computer in to the class room and now it just beeps when she turns it on, nothing on the screen. So I ask the obvious question, is the screen plugged in to the computer? Yes it is. Is it turned on? Yes, the switch is on. Is it plugged in to the mains? Yes, its plugged in. Is there anything at all on the screen? No, its blank. Eventually I think to ask her to put her hand up to the screen - do you feel any static? (it was an CRT in those days). No, no static. So I get her to go get another CRT and try it. We go through the same sequence. Still nothing.

Eventually, after going though everything again, and again, we do find the problem. She'd plugged the computer in to the mains, and the CRT in to the computer, but never thought to plug the CRT in to the mains, despite having unplugged if from where she moved it from. Each time I asked if the CRT was plugged in to the mains she was saying yes. It transpires she thought the CRT got its mains by plugging it in to the computer.

It taught me my first IT support lesson - never underestimate the ingenuity of the customer to misunderstand even the simplest of instructions.

The sad thing is that this school teacher was my mother . And I'm still having to fend similar IT question every other week.

[lordlundar]

*reads title*
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Says who?

[Soulstealer]

The sad thing is that this school teacher was my mother . And I'm still having to fend similar IT question every other week.

*reads title*
*reads post*
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Says who?

Well in this paticular case he does have to love her.
Try having one that keeps going places on the internet without proper protection. The computer has had to go to the shop so many times.

Not to mention the time my dad got me my own computer for one of my birthdays it ended up being everyone's after she destroyed her computer again. My poor baby never had a chance after that.

[Lingering Grin]

Personally I think my mom chooses to forget.


She'll use the internet DAILY, playing some silly bubble game, sending email, stuff like that.

but she doesn't seem to grasp what a search engine is, she thinks EVERYTHING is just <whatI'mlookingfor>.com

Then the one time she did find something and didn't want to lose the page she asked what she could do cause she still wanted to use the internet.

So I told her simply "Just open another browser"

Mom: "I don't know how".
Me: "Whatever you did to open the first one? Do that again."
Mom: "I don't remember..."

......*sigh*

[Lingering Grin]

Oh I got one about my dad too!


Ok, now my dad is smart, he knows computers, if there's something I can't solve, I ask him.
However, he's also stubborn, and ALWAYS thinks he's right, even when you point out that's he's obviously not.


Now, he had a computer that had a hard drive failure (not a big deal, since it was my mom's computer and she doesn't keep much on it anyway).
So, I took a look at it, windows tries to boot, blue screens, and then reboots the whole damn machine.

My first thought: "Ok, registry got corrupted, no biggie."

Load up windows disk, run repair utility... doesn't work.

Me: "Crap..."

OK, pain in the ass time... reinstall windows completely... couples hours later (P.O.S computer takes about and hour and a half - 2hrs to install windows on it).... doesn't work.


Me: "Fuck..."


This is of course when my dad buts in, and think that *I* (the person who is A+ Certified) did something wrong.

Me: "No, the whole hard drive got corrupted, gonna have to format it.

I even went in to show him how you couldn't access ANY information, even through the command prompt. Basically, the only thing NOT destroyed was the boot sector (Which is why the computer, could try to boot windows, but failed horribly once it did).

Him:"No, you just gotta override the other windows."

So he sits down and tries to reinstall windows without a format... 6 TIMES!


Next day, I went over, formatted the damn thing and got it up and running within a couple hours while he wasn't at home lol.

[cloudy.thoughts]

Personally I think my mom chooses to forget.

Me too. She'll go week being able to send e-mails and save documents, then suddenly <poof> she forgets what he's doing and has renamed the iTunes folder and copied the whole iPhoto library to here desktop, twice. Then I get the most weird phone call at 6am (she gets up way too early for me) asking if she should delete all the icons that have suddenly appeared on her desktop.

Her other favourite is to 'convert' convert files by renaming the extension. I often get a .txt file in the e-mail only to discover its actually a JPEG image (often of a document she's printed, then scanned in again to e-mail me).

Well in this paticular case he does have to love her.

Sometimes I don't know why, but I do.

Next day, I went over, formatted the damn thing and got it up and running within a couple hours while he wasn't at home lol.

I find this is the best way too. It avoids the constant barrage of question about what I'm doing and narrative histories of every little dialogue box that's appeared on the screen - she writes down the details in a little book in case they are useful - they're but all out of context, although she remembers the meal of the day and what dad was doing in the Garden at the time without need of any book, and she interweaves this information in to the stories, presumably so I have the full picture.

So now when I visit I try to sneak up when she's cooking diner and just fix it. She gets a fixed computer I get lunch - its a symbiotic relationship.