Your mouse can't reach that Excel cell? Buy a 'desk extender' said help desk bluffer Welcome once more to On-Call, our Friday rummage though readers' recollections of tech support jobs that produced odd endings. This week meet "Wendell" who told us he "worked at a company in the mid-80s, when Windows was just starting to appear." "Of course, the 'executives' insisted on having Microsoft Office, specifically, …
Alternatively, a tread mill for the mouse would have allowed it to reach the left edge of the screen.
If you don't have a little treadmill, you can place a beachball in a dish of water and place the mouse on top of the ball... by rotating the ball you make the cursor go anywhere you want.
Alas, that joke won't mean anything who only started using computers in the last 15 years or so
I have (un)fond memories of having to delint mouse rollers on a regular basis, especially at university. To paraphrase the old joke about household dust, I was essentially evicting the last prevoius user...
"Essential pieces of kit for a support person was a heavy-duty paperclip ready to unbend to eject reluctant floppies"
We had an alternative need for a paper clip. An HP tape drive was for some reason "smart" and would "learn" the arcane back and forward movements and currents of air needed to get the end to separate from the rest of the spool, waft it to the take-up spool and attach it there. (Why they didn't just let the operator thread the tape I don't know.) The drive would occasionally get into a state where it would go back and forth with no useful outcome. I suppose it had learned bad habits. There were a couple of contacts on the top of the deck a paper-clip's bread apart that had to be shorted to restart the learning process. Adding this facility always seemed to me to be a case of solving the wrong problem.
My favourite is this one, from September 26th 2003.
http://dilbert.com/strip/2003-09-26
Generally speaking I don’t ‘get’ Dilbert. I prefer Calvin & Hobbes and Alex. But when Dilbert hits the spot, it really hits the spot. But the top strips, for me, are still The Real Ale Twats, Mickey and his Monkey Spunk Moped - and many others from Viz.
"But when Dilbert hits the spot, it really hits the spot. "
The same for the Peanuts strip - or B.C. - or The Wizard of ID - or The Perishers. They all contain observations that reflect many walks of life.
Newspaper current affairs cartoons have a good record of hitting the spot too. In the UK from Lowe in the 1940s - then post-war Giles - and nowadays Matt and Rowson.
"Or it's just being economical with the truth."
A lie by omission - or massaging the meaning of a word. "I did not have sex with...." being a famous example.
A youngster in confessional/boasting mode said he slept with a woman after a party - "but we didn't have sex" - which turned out to mean "did not have penetrative sex".
A lie by omission - or massaging the meaning of a word. "I did not have sex with...." being a famous example.
I presume that's the case of a certain Clinton and his interactions with a certain Lewinsky.
The beauty of that was Starr accused Clinton of lying about not having had "sexual relations". Starr was forced to define precisely what "sexual relations" were and, when Starr fucked that up, Clinton could quite rightly say, 'by that definition, I did not have "sexual relations". Lewinsky did, but not me'.
With Clinton having not had "sexual relations" by his opponent's own definition of that, he could hardly have lied when he said he hadn't had "sexual relations". It was Clinton's alleged lying which were grounds for impeachment. No lie, no impeachment. Starr blew his own case.
Sweet n Sour Labrador
Eventually I was taken into the lounge to meet Davina’s father. He wasn’t too impressed.
‘You look a mess,’ he said.
‘I should think so. I’ve just been raped by your Afghan.’
The whole family was there so I had to go around the room meeting aunties, uncles, grannies, brothers, sisters – the whole Jacobson hunting set.
… About an hour later, they brought in tea and cucumber sandwiches. While we were all chatting away, Sebastian appeared, limping slightly.
Luckily, he was too knackered by now to pay me any attention. Instead, he sat down in the middle of the room and started methodically licking his bum.
Now isn’t that embarrassing? I mean, where do you look? No one’s going to say anything, are they? They’re not going to say, ‘Stop licking your arsehole, Sebastian.’
In desperation, to break the acute embarrassment of the occasion, I said, ‘
Cor, I wish I could do that.’
It was just to break the ice – crack a little funny, that sort of thing, but you always know when you’ve said the wrong thing. People start spluttering and coughing and fingering their collars.
Thankfully, it was Davina’s mum who let me off the hook. She looked me in the eye and smiled sweetly.
‘If you give him a biscuit, he’ll let you.’
Indeed, but I was thinking specifically of its use during the Spycatcher trial by Robert Armstrong, the then UK Cabinet Secretary:
Q: So that letter contains a lie, does it not?
A: It contains a misleading impression in that respect.
Q: Which you knew to be misleading at the time you made it?
A: Of course.
Q: So it contains a lie?
A: It is a misleading impression, it does not contain a lie, I don't think.
Q: What is the difference between a misleading impression and a lie?
A: You are as good at English as I am.
Q: I am just trying to understand.
A: A lie is a straight untruth.
Q: What is a misleading impression – a sort of bent untruth?
A: As one person said, it is perhaps being economical with the truth.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economical_with_the_truth#Political_catchphrase
Indeed, but I was thinking specifically of its use during the Spycatcher trial by Robert Armstrong, the then UK Cabinet Secretary:
Years ago I was at a business studies A level conference for students & teachers. One of the speakers was a Chief Examiner from one of the exam boards and gave a talk on the structure of exams. He had invited questions and a student stood up and asked......
Student: "Why do you put trick questions in exams?"
CE: "Well we don't" (much amusement from the delegates many of whom started laughing.)
CE: "What we do is put deceptive questions in that are designed to get students not paying attention or who haven't studied enough to give an incorrect answer"
Student: "Would you like me to give you the dictionary definition of a trick question? I've got the dictionary here."
CE: "Okay go ahead"
Student: "A deceptive question that is intended to make one give an answer that is not correct or that causes difficulty. Sound familiar?"
CE: "On the basis of that definition young lady you are correct we do put 'trick questions' in and we do it for the reasons I listed." (Now looking a bit redder in the face than he had been).
She sat down to a loud round of applause.
Having done 'desktop' support for middle-management, Terry Pratchett's 'Lies to Children' comes to mind.
One was whining about having to keep signing stuff all the time -- so I scanned his signature and made a new Word template for him. He was really happy -- and I had a handy copy of his sig . . .
Is there a 'BFOH' club badge available?
"As were all our secretaries who could do a good rendition of their manager's signature for run-of-the-mill stuff."
Rendition? I'm pretty sure in a lot of cases the secretary's version of the manager's sig was the only one. The manager's effort would have been considered a bad fake.
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I was at school in the early eighties when we received a Mac Classic. And I distinctly remember, as part of our very first lesson, being taught that you could pick the mouse up and move it without the cursor moving. Of course, we were kids and had figured this out through experimentation (messing about). But the "IT" teacher - a Maths teacher re-trained - clearly thought this was beyond magical.
That was back in the days when you had to regularly clean the balls on your mice to prevent an accumulation of fluff.
Yep, even if you kept the rollers clean (and what a strangely satisfying job that was too - was it just me who played the game of "try to peel all the compressed crud off the roller into a single long strip"?), the only way to deal with all the other crap that got picked up by the mouse and thrown into the innards of the mouse shell was to crack it completely open and give it a good clean out every so often.
Annoyingly, despite the move to optical mice rendering ball and roller cleaning just a footnote in the historical record of computing, the growing trend to add scrollwheels and other mechanical gubbins elsewhere on the mouse body now means we STILL have the same problems of crap getting inside the shell and slowly building up to critical levels. I'm getting quite adept now at opening up the shell of my trusty old MX510 to give the scrollwheel mechanism a good clean out and restore smooth operation for another year or two...
...you kept the rollers clean (and what a strangely satisfying job that was too - was it just me who played the game of "try to peel all the compressed crud off the roller into a single long strip"?)
OK - embarrassing admission here:
I got irritated with the mouse pointer sticking in place when I moved the mouse, and I admit to removing the insert that kept the ball inside the mouse, and musing on where one could get new 'friction bands' to install on the rollers as the old ones had become rough in use, hence stopping the ball from rotating and thereby causing the pointer to stick. I resorted to chipping off the existing bands and using the bare rollers instead, which worked well. 'Good hack', I thought to myself.
Only much, much later did I realise the 'friction bands' were picked up crud, and new mice had pristine rollers.
You get much the same effect of a 'sticky' mouse pointer on optical mice if a fine thread or hair gets stuck in front of the camera. The tweezers on my Victorinox knife have been useful in this regard.
I remember we had computer lessons at my school and had a teacher who had used a computer before. He was therefore was considered qualified to look after a bunch of unruly kids for the lesson a week we had in the "lab". The school had Acorn computers and a few traditional games such as Chess, solitaire etc. but also Lemmings. The class split into roughly two groups those who could see the potential of computers and those who just wanted to play. I fell into the former category and would set the computer playing itself and then using another student two computers against each other. The teacher was impressed and offered encouragement which was nice. He was forever bemoaning students to be gentle with the mice or they will stop working..
So I looked into the files the games used and found the text files for the loading splash screens. So on Chess I backed up the original file and then modified the text. The two I remember were:
For chess I put "Welcome Professor Falken - would you like to play a gentle game of chess?"
For Lemmings "You're trying not to kill the Lemmings or your computer mouse."
I thoroughly enjoyed those lessons and thanks to my enthusiasm was allowed to use the computers after school. Thanks to my cleaning I also had the best performing mouse.
you had to regularly clean the balls on your mice
I have cats to do that for me..
(Not that we have any mice in our garden. Or rats - the only time we see those is when a new nest starts in the vicinity. We then find their uneaten corpses in the garden. One of our cats *really* hates rats - probably the senior male. Or number two female - she's an ex-feral farm cat..)
I recall a colleague demonstrating Windows 286 or 386 back in the day. He managed to move a window to the side of the screen so far that it was impossible to drag it back again. Presumably there was a keyboard shortcut or menu option to restore the window but that may have been beyond many novice users. It certainly wouldn't have happened with Mac System 6!
ALT+Tab to switch focus to the lost window
ALT Spacebar M
Then use the cursors to move your window back to your desktop then hit Escape or click somewhere with your mouse stop the errant window moving.
It didn't work on Windows 10 recently but I use 3 screens now, all of different sizes and resolutions which confuses my Surface's graphics chip.
There are lies, damned lies....and people who will just not believe anything that isn't a lie. I have had customers that flat out could not or would not understand or accept the truth, but a verbal little massage of the situation suddenly becomes a totally plausible rationale for handing over money for services rendered.
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