News: 1617350649

Not all that unusual, publicity or marketing in need of brightness.

... we often lamented that the brightness knob didn't seem to work on the users. DEC had a (not very) official Field Service Memo on the subject, somewhat similar the the IBM "Mouse Balls" one.

When you meet a user, where turn off/turn on help fails, then that user should be removed from the list in plain good BOFH style. You know it, I know it, we all know it. Can we please get some Darwinian population control going and ensure the survival of the fittest (computer user)?

To be fair it happened to me on a car I bought on the other side of the country. It started to get dark, I turned the lights on, but the dash didn't light. Cue pulling over, checking fuses etc.

Turned out there was a brightness thumbwheel on the steering column that I hadn't seen (and probably got moved when the car was valeted)

We have a graphics designer here who shouted loudly and constantly that she absolutely had to have a Mac to do her job. She was working with Photoshop, had one of the best machines in the company, but it wouldn't do. When asked what a Mac would give her that her current PC wouldn't, she kept falling back on stuff like "you can click this key and that key to do this...", "the monitor's better" or "a Mac's just better".

We showed her the equivalent hotkeys in Windows, bought her a new, decent monitor (because that's actually a reasonable request for a graphics designer) and then showed her the specs for her current machine compared to the £2k+ machine she was proposing. Then we started giving a list of reasons why we wouldn't be buying one (mostly surrounding the fact that it wasn't cost-effective to spend the time figuring out how to attach it to the Windows domain, train support staff on how to support it, or spend a daft amount of money on a machine that's worse than her current one in every measurable way). IT helpdesk said no. She raised it to the engineers. They said no. She then raised it to her boss (head of Marketing, who bought it completely), who raised it to the IT director. Who laughed, then said no.

Then they raised it to the MD. So often, in fact, that he ended up storming in to the IT director's office and told him to get the damn thing because he's fed up hearing about it, and that the head of Marketing / graphics designer had better produce the increased workflow promised.

She got her Mac. We had to hire in a technician to hook it in to the domain & network (and it fell off again within days). Her performance actually went down. But on the plus side, all the technical issues she kept throwing our way (along with comments like "this wouldn't happen with a Mac") suddenly disappeared because she refused to admit that her beloved piece of Apple-ware had any problems.

Whew, that feels better. Sorry, that word is one of my triggers.

"because she refused to admit that her beloved piece of Apple-ware had any problems."

Or maybe she cottoned on to the fact that she'd given you the perfect excuse to simply tell her she's the one who knows about Macs, not you. We Linux folk use the same approach to the family Windows users.

Had the same thing. But in my case they bypassed me and bought from a separate budget. Caused so many problems the CEO FINALLY banned any IT kit I didn't approve.

The knob was the PR guy, not so bright!

I recently received a request to inform a manager as to what specification of "the cloud" he required. I hinted that the specification of the virtual machine might depend on what he planned to do with it but I was promptly told not to be pedantic and that nobody has time for smart a$$ backchat. Fortunately for me, that ended the discussion and the manager cracked on with a tame Windows desktop support droid. A day later I heard the machine promptly ran out of ram...whatever that is.

We once had a client in the late 90s who obviously read too many wank-wordy business books and told us that we had to make his site "XML". We asked a little more and he explained that at the time it had .asp at the end of some pages, and he had been told that meant it wasn't XML, and it needed to be XML.

When we tried to explain the difference between scripting platform and markup, he was having none of it. We were just trying to pull the wool over his eyes with technical mumbo jumbo, which wasn't going to wash, since he knew what he was talking about.

After a good laugh in the pub that night, we decided we'd change the mapping in IIS for handling .xml files and then do a find/replace on all the links in the site, and charge for a site rebuild. Unfortunately they downsized him out the door before we could, and whoever got his web site brief hadn't read about XML and the myriad of benefits it would bring if they rebuilt their site on the "XML platform".

Fun fact – a Back To The Future of today would send the Delorean to the 1990s, after the events of Philip's story.

Yeah - but until recently they had the perfect update for the "Who's President?" joke.

I have the best part of 30 years in the IT game but it's still easily done.

Yesterday I installed the Swiftkey keyboard on my phone, and then spent the next 30 minutes googling why on earth it has no backspace key. I was backswiping in the text field thinking some fancy gestures might work.

Eventually I noticed when I turned my brightness up that there was a backspace key but it was black, and the keyboard was a dark colour (maybe as I have dark mode on my phone). Quick change of theme, and suddenly all is good.

The annoying thing is I remember looking at the layout early on and wondering why with all the space down the sides of the lower rows, they hadn't used it with a backspace key.

but have you encountered one whose specialness did not extend to fiddling with a brightness knob? Or finding that pesky power switch?

Early 80s, minicomputer pathology lab systems, large disk drives each with a chunky power button on the front illuminated when switched on. Depending on the amount of storage needed, and on whether they had mirrored disks, the number of disk drives could vary from two to six.

A customer phones me up one morning. He's a consultant biochemist, doctorate and umpteen qualifications, so he has some intelligence, but of course he isn't - and doesn't have to be - a computer expert.

"The system's not coming up!".

So we start going through the usual stuff - it closed down OK last night, there IS power to the console and main processing unit, etc etc.

I didn't know his exact configuration, so I asked "Are all the disk drives turned on?".

"Oh yes, of course!".

Just then, a colleague who did know his configuration came in. I gave him the phone.

"Are both disk drives turned on?".

"Oh no, one of them isn't.".

Is the most common response I receive when I tell users to use Finder to open applications they have not kept in their dock. I cannot really complain because it means IT support as an industry will survive a good while longer; as even 1st line helpdesk analysts will still have work, so long as there are *those* users!

It used to be and still is pretty common with servers, that the POST takes forever. Usually, the larger the box, the longer the wait. After 10 minutes of gentle humming and no signs of live, is this thing dead on arrival or we just have to wait? And then (but not always) The Logo appears, a good omen!