Das reboot: That's the only thing to do when the screenshot, er, freezes Welcome to Friday the 82nd of March. Or is it only us for whom the days are blurring? Luckily The Register is here to bookend your week with our regular On Call feature. Todays teutonic tale comes from "Ben" and concerns that most dreaded of all On Call incidents: the one where someone spots you and ushers you over to help. …
Once upon a time a colleague who will remain nameless to protect the guilty took a screen shot / copy of the desktop and saved it as the background to the desktop. He then moved all the shortcuts off the desktop and hid the menu bar. When our PFY returned was clicking on "icon" trying shortcuts menus getting more and more frustrated. Nothing would happen, rebooting no good. For some reason his distrust of the team guided him to enlightenment.
Good days
Other old ones:
"'Or the old ctrl+alt+arrow keys to rotate the screen...'
Those of us with cats who sit on the laptop keyboard for warmth when said laptop is streaming something to the TV are still intimately familiar with that one."
When I made the switch to Linux, my cat pulled those shenanigans on me as well (though it was a desktop and they just like to sit on my keyboard because they're needy jerks). In my Linux distro that combination switches workspaces. So, having dealt with somebody pulling that on me at work and learning how to undo what got done, my cats inflicted on me a new set of symptoms from the same disease. I did not see the "workspace #" words pop up so it took me a bit. (Duckduckgo + Android) = [all my current solutions] .
If I was prowling the floors of Building 225 at one place, I would in true BOFH style ctrl+alt+arrow key the screen orientation to any unlocked PC & tell their co-workers.
"I'm in Room 322 or thereabouts if Izzy wants to come & tell me what she did wrong, otherwise I'll be back in 20 minutes to ask her!"
Fair does that department always tried to poison me with weird confectionery from overseas trips.
Or setting someone's VMS prompt to "Help ?" and seeing how long they persevere trying to get out of "Help".
A good one was to set the DOS prompt to C:\DOS> and leave the user wondering just what the heck's going on, especially when a DIR shows no DOS files.
Or to change said prompt to something else like C:> ... leaving them in limbo just where the heck they are.
There are deeper levels of devilry available along those lines, back in the mid-80's I was working for ICL, VME Comms department, we were implementing x.400 for VME on the shiny new 3900 mainframe using even shinier new DRS300 terminals.
Great little thin client/office setup, pretty cutting edge at the time, I imagine we were essentially beta-testing them. They were semi-dumb terminals running off a box per team which were mainly just used as terminal hosts to get at the mainframes (with.... tada!!! - multiple terminal sessions on one screen... up to 4 I think, amazing, more than one terminal per box, woohoo!), but we managed to get some games going.
One feature of the new DRS setup, apart from not looking like a robotic version of ET's head, was you could change the fonts, and even edit them. The traditional trick for newcomers to our team was to do the N/M physical key switch but with added vim, editing the N and M and n and m characters in the typeface to swap those too.
This meant when you pressed N (which was actually where the M key should be) it displayed N, when you pressed M it displayed M but under the covers of course they were swapped.
So your lovely S3 code would look perfect, but say BEGIN or THEN, would be interpreted as BEGIM and THEM, the compiler would barf out and you'd be told BEGIN and THEN weren't valid S3 - in those days printing out code was still a thing (god, dot matrix printers grinding away, there are some things one doesn't miss !), and there it'd give away the trick but unless you compared with the keyboard at the next desk it was pretty proof against discovery.
Other old ones:
Swap mouse buttons
Remap mouse buttons to different functions (requires custom mouse application)
Small amount of tape on the optical sensor
Removing the battery of a wireless mouse
Swapping wireless mice between desks
Swapping wireless mouse dongles between systems
Swapping the mouse and keyboard outputs on a KVM switch. A colleague of mine did this by accident and spent a good few minutes trying to work out why everything had stopped working. He had a degree in engineering which made it all the funnier when he had IT support round to fix this.
Switching the language on unlocked mobile phones left on the desk to Greek, Russian or some other non-Lating langauge.
I quickly learnt how to change the language without having to look at the display. The first thing I did, once my new handset could be locked was to set a PIN, that stopped the problem.
@big_D: "Switching the language"
These days you don't even need to switch anything. I found out that Google present the initial Account/GMail login screens in the language they guessed from (I suspect) your IP. Now, assume you see everything in an unfamiliar language and an unfamiliar alphabet. That's everything, including an unobtrusive link or button you need to use to switch languages...
When I first came to Germany, I visited a friend and they lent me a computer, that ran German Windows. I had to go in and change the network settings and give it a dedicated IP address (back then, DHCP servers weren't that common in small companies). I had done it often enough in English that I could do by rote, click Start, click the "System" thing where Control Panel would be, then the thing where Network would be (was close enough, Netzwerk), then the adapter, then...
Just remembering which option was where in each dialog helped even though I didn't understand the language.
I have an AutoIt script, inspired by an old Verity Stob article ("Cruft Scale") that idles for N seconds (where 20<N<240), then jumps the mouse pointer an inch to the left, before going back to lurking again until the next time. I put it on PCs I build for people. It only activates if a particular filename is found in User's downloads folder.
-fake lcd crack
Back in the days of CRT screens, the thing to do was to create a 5px x 4px .BMP using Paint, and set every pixel to the standard Windows teal desktop color apart from the top-right one, which was set to magenta.
Set the bitmap as the desktop wallpaper, stretched to the screen size, and Windows would obligingly dither the single magenta pixel into a very convincing simulacrum of a badly discolored and expensively distorted CRT phosphor...
I've was in a mobile phone store years ago when a customer came in complaining that their phone wasn't working. The sales assistant listened whilst the nice bloke explained his problem in detail. His new phone he'd bought from them earlier in the day isn't working correctly. The "top" display has frozen and only the one underneath it works. Everybody where he works thinks it's laugh out loud funny that his new phone has gone wrong. He produces the offending feature phone and it becomes obvious what the problem is. There is a plastic scratch protector on the screen that has a copy of the phone menu printed on it icons, text etc.
The sales assistant I could see was finding this extremely funny but trying to be professional at the same time. She peeled off the protector and said it would now work fine. Realisation dawns on the bloke that he's not been the sharpest tool in the box and taking his phone quickly leaves. Whereupon the three of us left in the shop started laughing.
Similar story (don't work IT but I am in one of the more techie departments of my company). We get new mobiles every 3 years or so and while working away one of the more venerable members of staff's voice starts to breach through the protective wall of my headphones. This goes on for sometime with more and more mutterings of I'm doing that and shouting at the poor helpless object. Eventaly when this has reached the point where I can stand it no longer I wonder over to try and help. the problem they were trying to use the fingerprint sensor all while the anti scratch film was still in place. it took nearly 5 mins to convince them that this was not needed and would hinder phone use rather than help it.
A limited number of early Galaxy Fold samples were provided to media for review. We have received a few reports regarding the main display on the samples provided. We will thoroughly inspect these units in person to determine the cause of the matter.
Separately, a few reviewers reported having removed the top layer of the display causing damage to the screen. The main display on the Galaxy Fold features a top protective layer, which is part of the display structure designed to protect the screen from unintended scratches. Removing the protective layer or adding adhesives to the main display may cause damage. We will ensure this information is clearly delivered to our customers.
Samsung’s statement regarding the fold phone breaking because the "Screen protector" was removed
> That's a hoary old one, points deducted for lack of originality. Up there with plugging their mouse into a different machine, but still on their desk
Back in late nineties, we were working on personal workstations which anyone in the group could connect to and switch to root access.
And we were all running Netscape Navigator on these machines, as we were building a (fairly advanced, for the time) self-care system for an ISP.
And it turned out that Netscape allowed you to send instructions on the command line to the currently active browser process.
And a co-worker discovered this.
And so, one day, my machine started to throw up new browser windows, mostly pointed at playboy.com and the like, while I scratched my head and various team members joked about how I'd clearly been doing some dodgy surfing...
Ah, those innocent days, long before the features facilitating such japes became security risks...
> Ah, those innocent days, long before the features facilitating such japes became _recognized as_ security risks...
Bit of both, TBH. After all, these were the days when memory addressing was contiguous, CPUs could safely do branch prediction, and viruses either displayed a rude message or corrupted your hard drive, rather than locking the entire thing up and demanding that you send a bitcoin to a random Eastern European address. And this was at the dawn of the first browser war, so Microsoft hadn't yet managed to push the wondrously insecure Internet Explorer into a position of market dominance.
Or to put it another way: many of the threats we deal with today simply hadn't been invented yet.
Alas, things evolved, and as new attack vectors were discovered or invented, the hardware and software they target has adapted in turn. It's an ever escalating Mexican stand-off, and it's frankly shameful (if equally inevitable) how much of our computing resources have to be used to safeguard our data and activities, rather than doing something functionally useful.
Ah, those innocent days, long before the features facilitating such japes became security risks...
You mean the days before security risks were able to access such features. When the only people who could use that functionality were trustworthy people it was fine, the problem only appeared when people who just wanted to cause problems found out about them.
Is being able to access a bank vault a security risk? It is only a problem if the person accessing the vault is there for the purpose of stealing money that isnt theirs.
I would therefore argue that the only security issue that exists is the fact that we have allowed people to have access to computers without first checking that they come from a reputable background. The last time I went to a shop to buy a computer that could connect to "the network" the only information I had to supply was an email address, which was not checked against any kind of approved user list. When I gave the sales person my letters from a judge and a teacher vouching for my moral character she refused to check them and said that as long as I had the money she would give me the computer!
The youth of today with their liberal hippy nonsense... oh crap, when did I become an old person?
Our computing lab at uni had a room full of iMac G3's, which had a USB keyboard and mouse.
Some of us realised that you could plug a second mouse or keyboard in, and both would control the pointer. So as someone attempts to click on something, you move the second mouse so it looks like their pointer has a mind of it's own.
I also remember when I was at school and BackOrifice, was released. We had great fun 'spontaneously' rebooting people's computers.
At university, way back when CRTs were a rarity and punch cards were what you used... I had access to one of the terminals and wanted to 'reserve' it.
So I put the terminal in 'local' mode, typed in the standard login text, put it back in 'remote' mode and disconnected the keyboard, tucking the cable under the monitor so that it appeared to still be connected.
Nobody could login... and we weren't supposed to power-cycle the terminals, so I was able to 'unreserve' the terminal later, by reattaching the keyboard.
Worst is we did the same on a so called "Senior engineer" and it took him ages to work out what the issue was. Pretty much confirming what we already knew, he didn't deserve the title or pay of a senior engineer as he knew jack shit.
Feel guilty? No. He was an arsehole and would make you feel shitty when you first join. Monitor what you'd be doing when it wasn't part of his job, comment if you used a browser other than IE (back when they still thought IE was secure despite Firefox clearly showing it wasn't) and then eventually would go silent when he'd realise you knew more than him. For fear you'd expose he knew less than he should.
I was about a year in to my new roll over 10 years back. Learnt how to remote to my home PC via SSL tunnel created via Putty (another engineer showed me. He said as the traffic will just look like https traffic cause of the port we were using, 3rd line shouldn't notice). They didn't appear to. But, the engineer next to me that day, from another department noticed me on my home machine. He was nice, kept quiet.
Then I made the rookie mistake. Left the PC for a few mins, unlocked. Came back, all still fine.
Got home and took a few days till I noticed some icons on my home desktop that said something onlines of "wanker" "knob" etc I realised who'd been next to me, mentioned it to him. He laughed and said "That's why you don't leave your machine unlocked when you walk away from your PC"
:)
I'd use outlooks ability to send an email at a certain time so that it sent itself an email twenty minutes later much to the amazement of the user who'd be confused as how they had sent them self a rude email. When called by panic user I was able to enforce the don't leave your workstation unlocked message. Fun and pedagogic.
Windows 3.1.1 and in the study room of college in early 90s. Appears the computers aren't locked down and I had a bit of free software off a cover disc (I'm still looking for it to this day with no joy :( ). It was a screensaver or it might of been a standalone app that was like a screensaver that had tiny spiders on it. When it would kick off, it had taken a screenshot of your desktop and the tiny spiders would start to eat all the screen. All you had to do was move the mouse and it would stop and your work would look normal again.
Being the immature dick I was back then I thought it would be funny to stick this on all the study room PCs (I think there were 6) and set a timer for it to go off. Sat next to a lady one day and she panicked as it kicked off as she was doing her course work and hadn't saved.
Funny at first as caught a few before who moved the mouse and it stopped. But she was getting more panicked and backed away from the mouse. Under my breath I was shouting, just move the fucking mouse. I can't remember what happened. I couldn't own up as would off gotten kicked off the course. But, with hindsight I could of said I'd seen the issue before just move the mouse. But having just come from school, it wasn't the dun thing to be helpful or talk to other people.
I'm going to be my cranky annoying self, but I really feel it's a mistake to pull tricks like these on people you might need to rely on when you have a real problem.
Personally, in such circumstances, I might decide it's exactly the moment for me to go for a cuppa, and let you flounder...
A little off topic but you've reminded me of an observation from my oldest grand kiddie.
He was 8 when we'd taken him to the Amberley Museum. We had reached the exhibit about television and radio history. There were loads of elderly CRT sets, wheezing their last, entertaining the punters with generated historical test cards and sundry content. Some if it was in colour but an awful lot of sets were, naturally, monochrome.
Laddie looked thoughtful as we came away. Eventually he asked "When did they invent colour?"
We were some way from the exhibit by then, so his question was a bit out of context. We gently probed to work out what he was really asking.
It turns out he'd seen the monochrome TVs and understood that the pictures were old. He had put two and two together and come to the conclusion that the "Real World" (TM) had once all been monochrome.
Gentle explanation followed. Sweet kid.
Italo Calvino, Cosmicomics, Without Colours, http://www.ruanyifeng.com/calvino/2007/07/ch_5_without_colors.html
(A small number of the Cosmicomics stories are collected as "The Distance of the Moon", for the outrageous price of £1 https://www.hive.co.uk/Product/Italo-Calvino/The-Distance-of-the-Moon/21523008 or here's the whole lot https://www.hive.co.uk/Product/Italo-Calvino/The-Complete-Cosmicomics/11397953 )
I can't even begin to describe in detail some of the phone calls & texts (She never manages to send the picture of the screenshot shes texting me about) I've had with my massage therapist, after I upgraded her laptop to W10 & a SSD in January. Its not been helped with the lock down, I'd have solved them in the time it takes to drive there, 5 min's onsite & back again, compared to the 1 hour & up phone calls.
Won't boot she's on a external monitor that the back light has failed on & hasn't looked at the laptop screen itself.
That one was my fault in part so she wasn't seeing the Windows update messages...."do not reboot".
Trying to talk her into F8 for safe mode (Also above - Added a batch file running at startup calling bcdedit /set {bootmgr} displaybootmenu yes & a 5 second delay).
Outlook not working for her, shes so used to the web portal for e-mail.
One of her USB devices now doesn't like the port it's plugged into & causing the laptop to hang at the BIOS splash screen, having to repeatedly talk her through the concept of unplugging one USB cable at a time to establish which one it is (This was yesterday after she finally dropped it off last week for me to look at due to self isolating & picked it up the night prior ).
The concept of Windows updates applying themselves at 3am & her coming to find the machine hung if she can't find the correct USB cable (See above).
Complaining that the system has frozen with a pretty picture of a cave with time & date on & the keyboards not working - System is still working in the background & not ready for keyboard input at this precise moment (Also yesterday).
Icon - Needed one yesterday while helping her yet again.
> One of her USB devices now doesn't like the port it's plugged into & causing the laptop to hang at the BIOS splash screen
There is a BIOS setting for that. Either it is enough to change the boot sequence, or you have to disable USB boot at all. IMHO something you should do on the next real visit. I hope you have Autohotkey/Teamviewer/Whatever installed as service.
I suspect you've been in this game a similar amount of time to me.
I've taken to darkening most of the image, just leaving the target item bright. so instructions that say 'click this button' will highlight the button and dull the context.
Users really are dumb sometimes.
S'what I used to do, a hand drawn arrow, with spidery "click here" messages. In the early days printed on to a sheet of paper and given to the colleague(s) in need of help. That sort of thing. A few years later getting my hands on a decent free programme ( when personal computing was still not so common) that allowed me to annotate screen shots was a God-send. Can't remember what it was even called now, decades later.
Same here. Back in the day I'd just use paintbrush. It had everything needed e.g. a line tool to paint huge red arrows pointing to highlight whatever users needed to interact with, and the text tool to give it a helpful caption like 'click here'. It's about the only time pbrush was of any use.
MSPAINT LIVES!
I use rounded red rectangles to highlight what should be clicked. If the order is important I add numbers.
Why does Snipping Tool and its newer compagnion "cut and <whatever it is in english>" not have a simple "draw line" "draw rectagle" and "add text" ? Another needed extra: Draw an arrow.
Or when you get a ZIP file which contains a Word document (which, those of a technical bent will know are ZIP files by another name), the Word document contains only a bitmap screenshot of an error message which includes showing the helpful "copy to clipboard" button). Number of times I have had to re-type an error message sent in that form, despite reminding the sender that having the plain text is both more useful and less time-consuming to process.
...or the zipped Word document containing an embedded powerpoint containing nothing but a pasted bitmap which is a screen capture of the Putty terminal in which they've opened the relevant logfile in VI and scrolled to the least useful 25 lines. When what you asked for was "send me the logfile".
Yes, this happens on a quarterly basis to me, although sometimes the more advanced users will omit one of the layers.
Anonymous because I really like my customers and want them to keep liking me.
Even more annoying when you don't actually have PowerPoint installed yourself. Had that one, years ago, in an attachment respoding to my job application. Took me a significant amount of trouble to find a copy to install to find out that all they had attached was a map to their office!
I repeatedly had to try & tell children at a private school that you cant easily edit a picture once it's been saved into a PDF as its not a picture format like a jpg.
If they're here for the challenge, then teach them how to convert the pdf, save as an image format, import to edit.
That reminds me of an incident that I've probably posted on here before, but is worth re-telling.
I work in quite a large organisation where getting anything useful done inevitably involves filling in God knows how many forms and dozens of emails to assorted admin whallas, all of whom seem to be bound by as many different, and incompatible, policies, most of which I've never heard of. For example, the process for making new appointments is shrouded by many mysteries, which only our venerable HR department can (or claim to) understand, but only after at three different desks in the same office have been placated individually.
The appointment system is supposed to be all electronic: candidates download a word template (really!) fill it in and return it allong with their CV. Once the deadline arrives, HR send me paper copies of all those that demonstrate the minimum criteria for me to shortlist. I go through them, making a few notes identifying candidates worth shortlisting, along with possible interview questions, and then asked HR to send me the electronic copies of the shortlisted candidates. Their reply was "sure thing" but you'll have to return the paper copies first.. Experience showed that there's no point in arguing (it's policy innit), so I sent back the paper copies and the electronic versions duly arrived.
Imagine my surprise when I found the electronic copies had my own hand written annotations on them!
Sometimes this might be your only option though, particularly if capturing startup messages. I guess some hypervisors will have logging features for this stuff, but desktops don't, and sometimes a video is handy for catching very fast scrolling text. At one point I found the high speed camera in my phone useful to check whether a very hard to see fan was actually running or not.
Well, not entirely. Hardware-based remote control like Intel's vPro AMT system will give you full remote control/viewing of the target system via Ethernet or WiFi, regardless of OS & power state, provided it's been configured first. Super handy for remote Helldesk duties.
One of my colleagues regularly sends me phone camera screenshots, even though they have been told on several occasions about the existence of the magical [PrtScr] key on their keyboard.
(I figured that "[PrtScr] key; new email; [Ctrl]+[V]" was simpler to explain than the snipping tool... yes, some of my colleagues make the chairs they sit on look like Mensa candidates - at least the chairs have obvious utility. but I digress...)
What's even more impressive is that, somehow, this user's screenshots always appear *upside down* in the emails.
Either their phone is so old/unsmart that it doesn't know which way "up" is and thus auto-rotate the resulting picture, or (and?) they just don't know how to rotate an image.
Either way, it's additional processing that always brings an extra smile to my day, I can tell you! </drippingSarcasm>
(icon for their likely grasp of technical knowledge)
RTFS?
I received an email today with an attachment showing a Catalina error message which pops-up when trying to run my 32-bit app ...
"The developer of this app needs to update it to work with this version of macOS. Contact the developer for more information".
I sent my reply - "The error message is incorrect. Apple needs to update macOS so your app will work exactly as it used to. It is only not working because Apple will not allow it to work. Contact Apple for more information".
In all fairness, they did read that screen and they did what it said. Apple didn't say anything about why the app didn't work and told them to go talk to you. They did that. There's little the user could do at that stage; either you would have to update your app, Apple would have to reverse their 64-bit only decision, or they would have to downgrade their OS. The latter option isn't really an option because that's a lot to ask, plus the error message didn't tell them to do so.
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No. you can blame the companies for this. When did you last see a manual that stated more than the blindingly obvious bits, or even any manual at all, quite often? As soon as something gets beyond that initial start-up level, as in using the many and various controls within a device or programme the manual, index or whatever becomes resolutely unhelpful. And even the get-started manual will often stray into telling you to use some switch, menu or option that it a) doesn't define or b) give the location of.
When you have competed installation you need to place the 2nd level whooshdiggler into the wamabooxle filter. WARNING USING A 1ST LEVEL WHOOSHDIGGLER MAY INVALIDATE YOUR WARRANTY
And of course any such product specific terms or commands used in the manual will not appear in the Index if there is one (unlike "print" "save" "on" etc. which are all present).
I think I know why companies stopped writing manuals. At some point, they must have realized that, with their manuals online, I could download them before a purchase to do research on what their product could do and how complicated the process was. No, they want me to figure out those things only after the purchase, which led to the new idea of refusing to publish the manuals and only including a paper copy with their product. But then, people started scanning those and uploading them, so what more could they do? They just had to stop making the manuals. I'll still figure out how the feature works, won't I? Surely I'll keep buying things without any idea what they do or how.
These types of error are sometimes the hardest to solve especially if you wish to minimise embarrassment (in the work place this can be essential for long term success) . It is though an opportunity to be creative - nodding sagely, muttering about broken links in emails and showing a way around the problem would probably have been quicker than trying to explain the concepts of static images versus GUI. Ignorance is forgivable - will-full stupidity, not so much.
"showing a way around the problem would probably have been quicker than trying to explain"
Until next time. And the time after that. And the time after the time after that.
It's lack of understanding that produces these errors and the way to engender understanding is through explanation.
Helping the user understand what went wrong and how to have it not go wrong next time is very useful. However, even if the tech was busy and just wanted to do a quick solution, let me show you how the workaround would have gone.
Tech: "Right. Now instead of using this email, I want to try loading the program the normal way."
User: "But I'm supposed to use the new version. It's coming out now."
Tech: "Let's just try it."
User: Opens old program.
Old program: Works.
User: "This one works, but it's the old version. I'm supposed to use the new one."
Tech: "No, use that one. The other one isn't ready yet."
User: "The email says it's ready. They sent it to me because it's ready."
Tech: "No, they want you to use this one. They're just showing you what it will be like."
User: "I don't think that's right. You don't write this program; you're tech support. Trust me on this one. I use this program all the time."
Tech: "Trust me. The program you can open normally is the right one."
User: "Maybe you should discuss that with my boss, but he's not here. I'll get his boss."
Tech: "No, I don't need to talk to"
Tech: "Wait. Come back. No, really, it's just a minor"
Door: Closes behind user.
Minutes: Pass slowly.
Customers in line: Look angrily at tech.
Door: Opens. User comes back.
User: "This is the manager of my boss. She will tell you about the program update."
Manager: "What's the problem?"
Tech: "There will be a program update but the user thinks it was released now. They're trying to run a screenshot."
Conversation: Forks here. If manager is clueless you can end up in a loop. We will proceed on the fork where the manager knows what a screenshot is.
Manager: "I see. Can I see the message, please?"
User: Shows message to manager.
Manager: "Ah. You see here where the update is said to be coming out soon, but not yet?"
User: Yes.
Manager: "And this attachment is a picture ..."
Manager: Continues to explain situation to user.
Manager: Now annoyed at tech for not doing this themselves.
Isn't it a lot easier just to solve the situation well with a useful explanation that will probably prevent it in the future as well? Workarounds only work if the user understands why they're doing the workaround. They can cut out several contingent explanations, but if you provide no reason for your alternate suggestion, people will think you're just winging it and you don't really know what you're doing.
The users at my last place were incapable or unwilling of reading the e-mail announcements or following the instructions, treating it as a SEP.
Bit them on the ass when they were on-call & hadn't set up the 2FA (Or even signed into the Windows 10 replacement for the old one) on the branches "On-Call" laptop, when they were at home & ended up having to go back to branch to set up 2FA & deal with their own on call call-out.
For the record I printed out sheets & applied stickers with each Departmental On-Call Windows 10 laptop advising of this & that phone calls at 5pm for this would possible result in them staying in branch until 7pm gotta love multiple time zones across Canada, so they had best set this up in the morning. Those too were promptly ignored.
Icon - I give up, I need a beer!
On a similar note, I once gave a relative of mine explicit instructions how to get to my new home. I told him to drive to a certain town, then follow a numbered road in the direction of another named town, and after about four miles, turn left at XXX village onto a B road, then stop and call me for more instructions for the last half mile. Some time later, I received a phone call from him, he had arrived at the second named town, and couldn't find the B road mentioned. I asked him "What happened to 'turn left after about four miles at XXX village'?" "Oh, I forgot about that". He had driven an extra 12 miles past the village, and now had to drive 12 miles back again to find the village and turn (now right) onto the B road.
In London they don't even say "where used to be".
It's all "Go past [ famous name who used to live there but died in the 1950s] junction. Turn right at [service station that was demolished before you were born] corner. Bear left onto the [Pub that lost its licence in the 60s interchange]" and so on.
I recently saw a document which some marketing guy had developed, and was about to publish to the world. It was meant to look really modern. The diagram had a white background, and had off-white lines linking boxes. The diagram made no sense. If you tilted your screen a certain way you could faintly see the lines. When I changed the background to a different background, it was obvious (and still made no sense).
I also asked what the thatched cottage and museum icons meant, and suggested they have hover text to explain what the items were, but have not heard back from him.
My mate sent me a WhatsApp message with (what turned out to be a perfectly cropped screenshot of) a video thumbnail with the play button in the middle of it.
To my shame I was mashing the screen like a bloody idiot for about 5 seconds before the 15 watt pygmy bulb slowly glimmered to a dull red glow.
Bloody git... the only thing that made me feel slightly better was that he later admitted that he'd mashed his screen for a full 15 seconds *and* rebooted the phone, thinking it had frozen, when *he* first received the image.
my young niece (2yo, I think) trying to do pinch-to-zoom on a picture in a book
Reminds me of an occasion in about 2004 when the school's internet connection was down and a Year 8 (12/13 years old) class were in the library to do research (which would normally have been done in the ICT suite by copying & pasting from random websites into their essays then handing it in as their own work without even checking if it was actually relevant). I heard one of the children ask "How do you search it?" while staring bemusedly at a fairly hefty reference tome.
You are not alone.
Since lock down started we have had the following:
1 - One of the lads started working on a Saturday morning and then called his manager saying "I'm waiting in the daily stand up, where are you?"
2 - One of our customers called me on the Bank Holiday asking where I was as he was waiting on the meeting. This was at 2:30pm and he had been working since 8am and had had a lunch break.
Decades ago I had a big fight with my live in girlfriend. I wanted to argue it out because I was in the right for once, but she insisted on going to bed because I was in the right for once. I was fuming.
So I changed all the clocks, her watch, her car clock, the alarm clock by two hours. She had a 45 minute drive to work and arrived two hours before she could get in.
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent, but stealing someone's time is sweet.
I can't approve that, but otoh......
Years ago i was wanting to buy a pretty expensive calculator in a department store. They were displayed in a square counter sort of arrangement, with the sales staff on the inside. I stood near the one I was interested in. On this occasion the staff were over the other side, chatting. And ignoring the customer, me. They knew I was there, just not bothered.
So I got annoyed waiting, and decided to occupy myself. By collecting the price tickets, from in their little holders, walking round to where the sales staff were so engrossed in their conversation.
I simply said, "You've wasted my time, I'm wasting yours." Then dropped the pile on the floor in front of them and walked out.
Teardropping a Win95 PC of a colleague who's fond of browsing news sites instead of working. Its HDD died before I could teardrop it more, sadly.
I also did the wallpaper-icon trick.
As the I and l is most often similar, I retyped an user's login name , replacing I (Uppercase i) with lowercase L
He swore a blue streak until he jabbed the reset button.
Ah yes...long, long ago I was a sysadmin. We took care of the "Classified" side of the shop. I had an "Unclassified" desktop that they'd left me enough privileges to install a screensaver on. A really nice BSOD image. The other side would wander down to update somethingorother and invariably hit the power button first. At least they didn't complain to me...my other one said "Puppies, the other white meat".
top quality thread, some great responses, but for ME, the best bit of the article was :-
stretching metaphors past breaking point,
Who here, hasn't had to do this at least a million times, getting so that my response to anything remotely user ballsed up is damn nigh instantaneous and is fluent with total bollox as well :o)
ah yes, good times, and a sure sign that you have reached the part of your career when you are no longer the padowan, and are well on the road to full BofH righteousness
Scotsman sent by a Dutch head office to implement a domain policy in the German office, not thinking historically. The manager was great, he insisted everything was in English because localisation introduces errors. The engineer assigned to shadow me, not so great. Late in the evening as I was testing the policy he was briefly locked out of his laptop. Like for seconds, and not deliberate. Rather than saying to me he indicated his displeasure by smashing his laptop on his desk into tiny pieces for five minutes.
"Okay, I'll roll that back and we can call it a night"
Scary mad but it made my Dutch colleagues guffaw.
Probably posted this before, but where I used to work, each tech had a PC assigned to him. My colleague and I were working one saturday, and for various reasons, we weren't working in our own offices. We were working in an office shared by two technicians. One was Scottish and one was, shall we say, a little vain.At the end of the day, the vain man had Right Said Fred's I'm too sexy as his Windows NT Startup sound and the scottish one had Mull of Kintyre. The Scot loved his.. The vain man didn't.
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