I have only ever made a user of computer systems I maintained blush (a fetching shade of crimson) was by pointing out that the mouse cursor would move the right way if the (wired) mouse had its tail point away from you when you moved it around, and ten minutes later pointing out that the image captured from the microscope would be the right way up if you rotated the camera 180 degrees. I think she didn't dare report any issues for at least a month after that

I find it an interesting and worthwhile challenge to resolve such queries without humiliating the person I'm helping. Saving their feelings, it's called. An interpersonal skill. Ways of doing that can include wildly exaggerating how common the problem is, inventing a hardware or problem ('I need to realign the camera'), or, in the case of the mouse, just visibly using the mouse the right way. Many people have unseen disabilities like dyspraxia and it is nice to be kind to them. In my experience, males outnumber females in this regard.

Someone with a faulty disc in her computer once messaged me about the "hard dick" and she was mortified so never I mentioned it again.

She left the lab to become a doctor, I hope she's got better at typing...

Wouldn't want to misdiagnose someone with a "slipped dick" now, would she?

She left the lab to become a doctor, I hope she's got better at typing...

Doubtful.

Hospitals have entire teams called coders , that do "medical coding" which basically means filling in the gaps on doctors historical inability to write legibly and modern inability to interact with technology with any degree of competence.

I find it an interesting and worthwhile challenge to resolve such queries without humiliating the person I'm helping.

Me too. My go-to tactic is to rely on the fact that there's so much bad design in software, a spot of light fibbing and pretend that whatever problem the user is having is down to that and, in fact, it caught me out when I first saw it myself. As I see it, they can't call me out for being stupid myself if they got caught out by the thing.

"Yeah, I know what you mean about not seeing the huge button with a picture of a printer on it and the word 'Print' underneath. It caught me out too first time I saw it. I think it's because they put it in the middle of the screen all on its own - that's just bad UI design because your eye is naturally drawn to the side where there's a bunch of other controls. Anyway, you know for next time. No, don't worry about it, I'm sure you won't be last person I have to explain this to"

Absolutely. I made sure no one else was within earshot (or even in the room). Just quietly pointing out the items were being used the wrong way round was sufficient to cause the blush. Note that she did first accuse me of borking the image processing system with a software update, which in her opinion had caused the errant behaviour of said rodent and camera. My protestations that the software update could not possibly be the cause were in vain, so I trundled over to the lab to see what was up.

She could laugh about the episode later.

..... Orgasmville!

Was it just a single trip, or was it booked for multiple times on the same day?

And after (what I'm sure was) good service what tip did they get?

At least he wasn't the rm -RF guy

Over a decade ago I worked at an engineering firm of about 300 people. In the main workshop / production floor out the back of the building was a prefab lean-to against the wall, which had been converted into a shared chemical lab space. No-one was really responsible for the room and as a result it was always a disgusting mess, with crap everywhere and usually completely filthy.

As a result hardly anyone tended to use it, and as it was tucked away in the corner tended to be used as a skiving spot by some.

A married couple (well, they were married - just not to each other) decided to have a bit of a fling in the lab one lunchtime, only for the H&S manager to walk in on them mid "performance" while conducting his monthly site walk-around...

I was told that among the list of infractions at their disciplinary was "not wearing correct PPE in laboratory areas"! Somehow they both kept their jobs.

Well, protection is important...

I used to work as a bench scientist in a new building, there was a competition amongst the couples in the building to "christen" the bed in the 1st aid room. I think victory was declared by more than one of the couple leading to discussions...

Why would the dispatcher blush if the announcement was made that all communications would be in plain text from there on ? She would have no idea previous comms had been seen....

Maybe she was waiting for the reply?

Maybe she'd seen RF Guy earlier, so knew he'd already been working on the system and she then put two and two together.

> Why would the dispatcher blush if the announcement was made that all communications would be in plain text from there on ? She would have no idea previous comms had been seen....

Guilt about past ms-deeds is an on-going process, surely!

Years ago we brought in a team of testers as part of a project and set them up in their own little sub-office, with a bunch of machines hastily cobbled together into a network using whatever kit was available.

When they uncovered a weird bug in the software they were testing I went over to do some debugging in their environment. Given the nature of the software and the issue they'd reported, the debugging involved plugging my machine into their network and using Wireshark to monitor packets coming and going - basically to help me identify if the software was behaving weirdly because it was getting bad data.

It turned out that the test network was assembled using a hub rather than a switch, so when I ran Wireshark I could see all of the network traffic from all of the test team. Instead of the data I was expecting to see, my view was swamped with HTTP traffic (this predated the ubiquity of HTTPS) for a number of specialist dating websites. Words were had about misuse of time, and the illicit connection of the test network to public Internet.

Going back over 40 years (before laptops) when I worked in Germany I had to go with a female (married) colleague to visit a customer in the US.

We were given a temporary email address from the company we could use to talk back to base.

Our second day at the office, I logged on first while my colleague went for a coffee.

I found a long, very sexually explicit email from a colleague about the things they had done together, and what he wanted to do when she got back.

As a shy 25 year old it was an education.

When she came back with her coffee. I just mentioned there was an email for he. She didn't say anything, but there were no more emails like that.

I certainly saw her in a different light from then on.

I've told this story before. Apparently the IT head in the first firm I joined was having an affair with his PA. In those days communications was done using VAX mail. They had some sort of break up or falling out and she wrote him a heartfelt missive via email but unfortunately put the entire text in the To: field ... including the word ALL. The Vax did as it was told...

Many years ago around 2002 I was the go to IT not IT guy in the office. I didn't mind as it was generally just things like fixing printers or helping actual IT when they needed someone technical. A lady in the office asked me to look over her email settings as it was playing up. I noticed a rather large folder with exchanges between her and her fella. That wasn't the problem but she was quite shocked to learn every single one of her emails would also be on the server IT had full access to. It's strange when I think back how many people used to treat their work email as their personal email.

I used to work for a large retailler, we had shops all across the country, the shops were serviced by our own fleet.

One winter, one of our drivers had a heart attack it seems, and his big white lorry crashed off the road and into a snow drift. The wagon wasn't found for a few days.

After this incident, the fleet manager installed GPS trackers in all the wagons, but "forgot" to tell the drivers.

A few weeks later, the fleet manager noticed a pattern, one driver, we'll call him Gary, because that was his name, always took a detour when he was delivering to a few shops, and parked up for about 90 minutes. At first we assumed he was taking a break, until we noticed he was parking his 40 tonne HGV on residential streets.

It seems Gary was conducting a number of affairs with ladies in these towns.

I'm sure the other residents of the streets he was parking on were glad when he was handed his P45...