I have the image of the evil explorer falling into a pond full of pirhania.
That makes sense. The odds are that half the time he'll put it in right-side-right.
It has a cup-holder. It just holds the cup sideways. Darn. Jeff already said that.
Hmmm.
On 3/10/2010 11:54 PM Jeff Liebermann spake thus:
[...]
Ah; I think the saying that applies here is "No good deed goes unpunished".
-- You were wrong, and I'm man enough to admit it. - a Usenet "apology"
Most people are just too stoopid to be using a computer. They would be far better off and everyone happier if they stuck to using a typewriter.
-- Roger Blake (Change "invalid" to "com" for email. Google Groups killfiled due to spam.) "Obama dozed while people froze."
Hi!
But that shouldn't cause any *lasting* harm that turning the machine off and tipping it forward to let the disc slide out...at least with common 5.25" drive types. BTDT when my younger brothers stuffed a CD into the 5.25" drive of my then-fairly-new 386SX.
I would agree otherwise, because there are some drives that could do Bad Things to a disc and/or require extraction. I've got some drives that have oddly-designed slimline mechanisms or electronic insert/ eject features.
William
Hi!
alt.sysadmin.recovery is a good place too. There's an entrance exam. (Sorry, but the FAQ for the group says you're not to drop hints.)
Oh. Oh my. I think I'd have told him to just push it into the trash at that point, or maybe that I'd come by to perform the autopsy.
Later in this thread, I believe you relent a bit. I like to see the best in people, but really--they can't be "bothered" to make sure the disc is put into place the right way every time? What else (whose outcome might be significantly more serious) can't they be "bothered" to concern themselves with doing correctly? Driving? Voting? Wiring the house? Servicing potentially safety-sensitive equipment used by the general public?
I start thinking some very BOFH-ly thoughts when this kind of stuff rolls around.
William (sorry, think I got on a bit of a soap box there)
I spent several years as an IT consultant and you are 200% correct. I would much rather sit 8 hours in a NOC and monitor traffic and admin routers and other ingress/egress equipment than to deal with an office full of idiots.
That's nothing. Some morons are too stupid to shut the switch off when the gas pedal sticks.
I have read through the whole thread that is posted to date. I am going to make a few observations. First a bit of background. I am in a 55 plus community. I am more than 20 years on the plus side of that age requirement.
There are lots of seniors here. Some are computer savvy, some are really trying to learn and some are absolute technophobes. Computers here are used primarily for e-mail and web searching. I have become the local PC fixer. I see most of all the little anecdotes in this thread up close and personal.
Now a lot of these folks are part year residents owning a house here in Florida and one up north. In their younger days they were smart enough to amass enough money for this lifestyle without the need for computers. They hired the people they needed to do that IT stuff and used their talents elsewhere.
Some enjoy seeing the rest of the family using Skype, others get infected with malware sort of regularly regardless how many times they were told to update, update, update.
A lot of us have memory problems and refer to lapses as senior moments or CRS (can't remember shit). For those in this newsgroup, who seem to be demeaning, think about what you have to look forward to (if you are lucky enough to get to the retirement age).
I am not apologizing for the silly things that some of us do. It is life and I hope you last long enough on this side of the grass to be looked at by the new kids coming up who think you are old fools because you can't keep up with the latest greatest toys and tools.
So have a little compassion because what you see is where you are going.
A tradesman coming into our area said he hated to work with seniors. My response was that, in that case, I hoped he did not live long enough to be one.
So I wish you all my favorite thought. May you have health and wealth and time to enjoy them. And be kind.
Charlie (who started out testing germanium transistors)
Not this customers. However, I do have an occasional customer that drops his laptops off when he visits the area. However, he's not evil. He's a doctor that travels to some of the strangest parts of the planet, lives there for up to about 3 years, tries to leave the locals in better shape than when he arrived, and returns to civilization every few years. The laptops have come back full of fungus, green slime, mud, corrosion, and insect remains. I have to disinfect and deodorize the laptop before tearing it apart for a more thorough cleanup. A few years ago, it came back smelling of rotten Durian fruit:
I stock replacement keyboards in anticipation of his arrival. Also spare HD drives in case something dies. Most of the LCD's have the bottom part of the screen trashed, where capillary action sucks water into the LCD panel. Fixing his machines is like equipping an expedition.
I got him to buy a 3 year warranty extension from Dell on the last laptop (Dell Precision M4400). I haven't tried it yet, but I wonder what Dell would think if I mailed them the smelly fungus farm laptop for repair?
He has disk envelopes for most of his CD's. About half of them are inserted with the data side facing the window, where he can't tell what's inside the envelope. My guess(tm) is that the definition of "right side up" depends on which way the disk is inserted in the envelope.
-- # Jeff Liebermann 150 Felker St #D Santa Cruz CA 95060 # 831-336-2558 # http://802.11junk.com jeffl@cruzio.com # http://www.LearnByDestroying.com AE6KS
Been there, done that, and know the trick. (No, I'm not telling). The problem is that most of the posting are for or about sysadmins doing evil and dastardly things to customers and lusers. That's fine, but not very interesting to me. I have no intention of retaliating against paying customers. It's just that sometimes, I get a bit frustrated and need to unload. Methinks a repair newsgroup is more appropriate for a repair oriented rant.
I gave it about a 50% chance of being able to recover the keyboard. I was more worried about what was inside the keyboard that was causing the intermittent connections and sticky keys. I guess the alcohol and water washed it and the contact cleaner oil away.
Good slippery slope theory, but it doesn't apply here. The customer is quite wealthy. If I bothered to take his annual income, and divide it by the number of hours that he "works", he could easily afford my exorbitant rates instead of learning how to operate the computer by himself. Let's just say he has better things to do.
Sure. Biting the hand that supports my decadent and lavish lifestyle is not good policy.
-- # Jeff Liebermann 150 Felker St #D Santa Cruz CA 95060 # 831-336-2558 # http://802.11junk.com jeffl@cruzio.com # http://www.LearnByDestroying.com AE6KS
Ummm... me. I have an air compressor in the office, in my Subaru, and a big one at home. It's best to blow the dust and dirt out of machines outside before I bring them inside. Much less dirt and dust to clean up later. It's also useful for blow drying liquids and to accellerate evaporation, such as for keyboard cleaning. Before I bought the compressors, I used to blow out the dust with my breath, which I decided was not very healthy when I discovered black dirt in my nose and throat.
-- # Jeff Liebermann 150 Felker St #D Santa Cruz CA 95060 # 831-336-2558 # http://802.11junk.com jeffl@cruzio.com # http://www.LearnByDestroying.com AE6KS
The choice is dealing with things or people. I do better dealing with things, but it's dealing with people that generates the most revenue for me. I get bored easily and reading reports or staring at monitors all day does not do anything for me.
Working in IT or as a corporate hired gun is very different from helping individual customers and small companies with their computer problems. One of the major differences is that I can fire an individual customers if necessary. You can't easily do that in a corporate environment when one user gives you a problem. I've been doing this (and other things) since about 1983, and have only had to fire perhaps 4 customers.
-- # Jeff Liebermann 150 Felker St #D Santa Cruz CA 95060 # 831-336-2558 # http://802.11junk.com jeffl@cruzio.com # http://www.LearnByDestroying.com AE6KS
Out of curiosity - does rotten Durian fruit smell any different/worse than fresh ripe Durian fruit?
--
Dave Platt AE6EO
Friends of Jade Warrior home page: http://www.radagast.org/jade-warrior
I do _not_ wish to receive unsolicited commercial email, and I will
boycott any company which has the gall to send me such ads!
If Dell U.S. is anything like Dell U.K. , they would just reject it. Friend of ours sent his daughter's notebook back with a broken DC socket. They rejected it under warranty, claiming that damage to DC sockets was a user-caused problem, and not covered. They quoted him silly money to repair it. He could have gone to the local supermarket and bought something similar for less money than they wanted. It ended up at my colleague's repair shop, where it was repaired for the cost of a socket from a fleabay store, and an hour's labour. Companies like Dell do themselves no favours by having an attitude like this. Up until this point, the friend used all Dell computers both at home and at his (considerable sized) business, but he has now said that he will never buy from them again ...
Arfa
I don't recall the machine involved but it was in the days of monstrous tower cases and space eating desktops. I vaguely recall paying about $700 for the 1x drive and $100 for CD. I didn't think of tipping the case and I suspect it wouldn't have done any good. I carry a hemostat for moving jumpers around. I covered the jaws with tissue paper and gently extracted the CD.
Despite my success at this repair job, I lost the customer. The owners wife was the one that stuffed in the CD. I got the call on my pager and returned her call on a pay phone. When she told me the problem, I couldn't help laughing a little. That was all it took. She assumed that I was laughing at her lack of computer talent (which was true) and took it personally. Apologies were futile.
Those are really where you insert the credit card or dollar bills. I've fished credit cards out of those CD/DVD drives (the one's without a tray). Incidentally, I found a box of CD caddies buried in the office. I've often suspected they were invented solely to prevent users from shoving 5.25" floppy disks into the CD/DVD slot. Once
5.25" were safely obsolete, it was considered safe to release CD/DVD drives without a tray or caddy. (Yet another conspiracy theory).-- Jeff Liebermann jeffl@cruzio.com 150 Felker St #D http://www.LearnByDestroying.com Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com Skype: JeffLiebermann AE6KS 831-336-2558
I've never tasted or smelled the real thing, so I have no way to compare. The rotted version smelled like a restaurant dumpster. It also lingered in my office for several days and required washing the workbench and laptop bag with alcohol. I eventually gave the entire laptop an alcohol bath, which was a big help. I think the rotten fruit was mostly in the keyboard. I also had to throw away the carpet on the bench and a plastic trash can. I became somewhat accustomed to the smell after a few days, but visitors to my office were far less tolerant. How he made it through an international airplane flight, with this stench bag as presumably carry on luggage will remain a mystery. I forgot to ask.
There are some colorful descriptions of the smell at:
Deodorized Durian, which is most likely an oxymoron:
-- Jeff Liebermann jeffl@cruzio.com 150 Felker St #D http://www.LearnByDestroying.com Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com Skype: JeffLiebermann AE6KS 831-336-2558
I've seen hundreds of PCs with a caddyless CD-ROM drive and a 5.25" floppy drive.
Some data services continued to use caddies to ship & protect their data. A friend used them at a garage where he worked to find service data and replacement parts. He got one or two new caddies with disk every month, and had to return the disks & caddies they replaced.
-- Lead free solder is Belgium's version of 'Hold my beer and watch this!'
.... > He's not a dummy. He just doesn't care about
Customers can be strange - back in the stone age when I was running a HiFi store one customer would call me out about every month or so to balance the tone arm on his turntable.
Always gave an 'explanation' (the wife or the kids, or the cat etc) of how it became unbalanced.
I showed him over and over again how he could do it himself, but no - I would get a call a month or so later to come and rebalance it again.
A real dummy hey? No. He was a doctor!
Anyway, it was a nice little earner I guess - $30 a time was good money back then
David
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