Has anyone who works with computers ever made a mistake that was so random that they couldn't stop smiling about it? For example, I've just spent half an hour trying to figure out why my ASP code is putting a full stop in a text field on an HTML form... turned out to be a bit of dirt on the screen :bang: Anyone else, or is it just me embarassing myself for no reason
I dismantled a friends computer over christmas to install a hard drive that he had been given. It was one of those really unfriendly cases that make it difficult to get to anything. I spotted a good location for the new hard drive, but to get to it I had to remove the other two hard drives, the CD ROM and the memory. Then I opened the bag that he'd given me, with bits of his computer on the floor all around me, and found that it was an external USB drive.
Not me personally, but a user: I got a call that all his documents were printing a number "1" at the bottom of each page. This numeral was not on his Word document. I went to investigate, fiddled around with the document for about 5 mins then had a hunch . . . I opened the printer's paper tray and lo and behold, the paper he'd loaded in all had a small number "1" at the bottom of each sheet.
One of my favourites I volunteered to fix a friends computer, so she gave me a lift home from work, we picked up the computer, then went back to mine. Standing at the door, I had the computer cradled in one arm, and a backpack with a loaf of bread in on my other shoulder. Both started to slip when I reached for my keys, guess which one I caught
I was working on some accounting software soon after I left university and I was asked to write some code to do some printing. This was back when you had to do it by sending escape sequences down to the printer to get it to do anything useful. I finished writing the code and decided to check it out by printing off a quick sentence. Having done that I went round to the other side of the office where the printer was and saw it was churning out page after page after page. By the time I got there it had gone through half a ream and had printed a small smiley face on the top left hand corner of every page. I was a bit more cautious after that. A guy I used to work with told me that he had once got an error message from a DOS app he was working on that said 'The disk drive has run out of paper.' I guess technology has moved on since then
My mate had the nifty windows thingie on his task bar where you can swap the keyset at will... French AZERTY compared to QUERTY seemed appropriate... Needless to say I have never heard such violent language hurled at a computer before
You can also swap around the keys of two-finger typists for a laugh. "M" and "N" are good ones. Another good one is to wait until someone goes off on leave for a week and grow some cress in their keyboard: If you want to stay on good terms with them it's probably best to do it in an identical keyboard and then give them their own one back when the joke's up. Some people get quite attached to their keyboard!
