Monitor != Computer

[Jay 2K Winger]

Short and sweet. This comes from my coworker, Fellow Whovian. (FW)

FW takes a call from a luser who reports that his computer has locked up, "So to try to fix it, I shut off the monitor."

...

FW: "...you... so, your computer locked up, and to try to fix it, you shut off the monitor?"
L: (realizing) "Oh, I, uh, I, uh, I shut off the computer."

FW and I about killed ourselves laughing at this guy.

[dalesys]

FW takes a call from a luser who reports that his computer has locked up, "So to try to fix it, I shut off the monitor."

Next, try shutting off the merrimack.

I meant, merriment!

[Ironclad Alibi]

Next, try shutting off the merrimack.

The Merrimack was shut off. However, a new operating system was installed and it was rebooted as the Virginia. But it was unstable and eventually blew up, ending with a blue screen (open water).

[sms001]

The Merrimack was ....

With that Alias, the puns just write themselves, don't they?

[MadMike]

When I saw the title of the thread, I thought it was going to be something like an incident that my wife was involved in years ago, when she first started using the computer.

It was back when I was still using Win98, or as they called it in the South Park movie, "Fucking Windows 98!" She decided to get on the computer while I was out, and apparently it locked up on her for no apparent reason, as they sometimes do, especially back then.

She called me on my cell phone in a panic, telling me, "OMG I broke the computer! I'm so sorry! I don't know what I did wrong!"

I calmly asked her what happened, and she told me, "The picture just froze and it's not responding! I broke the computer!"

I told her to calm down, that she didn't break it, and sometimes they just lock up like that. I told her to simply press the reset button, which was the smaller button just above the big one.

"What do you mean? There's only one button on here?"

I told her there should be two buttons -- the big one, which is the power button; and a smaller one above it, which is the reset button.

"I can't find it! I only see one button!"

We went back and forth like this a few times, before I finally figured it out. "Are you looking at the monitor?" I asked her.

After a couple seconds of silence, she said in a tone that was a lot more calm but also revealed that she was feeling stupid, replied, "Yes... OK I found the reset button... OK it's starting back up again... OK it looks like it's working now."

She's gotten a lot more comfortable using the computer since then, but she's still afraid to mess with it if anything remotely out of the ordinary happens.

[Moirae]

lol. I worked as an internet tech for 6 months. I was trying to help a lady do some troubleshooting and told her to click on the start button in the lower left of the screen. She insisted there was no start button. Turned out that she wasn't looking at the SCREEN, she was looking at the monitor.Yes, seriously.

[earl colby pottinger]

C64

Back when the C64 was popular it was often the kid's machine and the parents knew nothing about what the different parts were.

It turn out easier to have them pack 'everything' and when they got to the service center we had them take out only one part at a time (starting with the most likely unit first), for example no video was 85% the computer, 10% a bad cable and only 5% of the time a bad monitor (at-least the early designed monitors).

One guy bought all the parts, including the Commodore desk!