Stupid customers
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Kinda reminds me of a quote that goes sumthing like this: The trouble with producing a foolproof design is that God keeps creating bigger and better fools. :)
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Kinda reminds me of a quote that goes sumthing like this: The trouble with producing a foolproof design is that God keeps creating bigger and better fools. :)
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"Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to build bigger and better idiot-proof programs, and the Universe trying to produce bigger and better idiots. So far, the Universe is winning." -- Rich Cook :-D
"These people looked deep within my soul and assigned me a number based on the order in which I joined." - Homer
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X| Lord save me from stupid customers. I think I might abandon writing setup guides etc and let people wing it. Before letting the customers loose on the guides I test them to make sure they are faily idiot proof. I do this by getting my seven year old son to go through the guides without my help (yes I pay him for it :) ) I figure if a smart seven year old can do it a dumb adult should be ok. Ha Ha Ha Ha..... This morning I got a user who couldnt figure out that where it says "NAME" you put in your name. ARGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGG :wtf::wtf::wtf:
- Back in 1989, we were still selling our software on 5-1/4" floppies. We got a call from a user that said she needed a new floppy disk because hers had become mangled by the floppy drive. It turns out that her secretary had tried to insert the floppy *between* the two floppy drives in the system, and had managed to get it about 3/4 of the way in before it just wouldn't go in any farther. Not to be disuaded, she tried numerous times, got mad, and finally started shoving on the diskette with the palm of her hand. Finally, it got all the way in, and that's when she told her boss that it "didn't work". We told them they'd have to return the original disk before we'd send them a new one, so they had to dismantle the machine to get it out. When we got it, it was torn, and looked like an accordian. 2) Got a call one day from a customer that was really mad. It seems that he had installed our software, gone to lunch, came back, and his monitor was apparently broken. Of course, he reasoned that because our software was the last thing he had installed, that must be the problem. I told him ther was NO possible way our software would have broken his monitor, or any other part of his compter. I told him to make sure the machine was on, he said "Of course it is." I told him to make sure the monitor was plugged in to the backk of the machine. "Of course it is." I told him tp make sure it was plugged in to an electrical socket. "Of course it is." By this time he's getting even more annoyed. I asked him if the monitor was turned ON. He said "Of course it is. What do you think I am, some sort of idio..." click - he hung up. His boss called later to apologize saying that he had walked by this idiot's machine and, knowing the idiot was at lunch, flipped his monitor off. 3) We actually got the infamous "Where's the ANY key?" call. I told the guy it was the big red switch on the side of the machine. 4) We've had people that actually called us and expected us to help them install Windows. 5) We had a guy call and ask if our software worked witha Mac. I said no, and that there were no plans to write a Mac version. He told me that since he had paid for the software, he expected to receive a Mac version or he'd sue us (he was a lawyer). After trying to be nice to him for almost 20 minutes, I finally just told him if he expected to be able to sue us into making a Mac version of our software, he was either the stupidest mother fucker on the face of the planet, or his law degree was from someplace like Cracker
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X| Lord save me from stupid customers. I think I might abandon writing setup guides etc and let people wing it. Before letting the customers loose on the guides I test them to make sure they are faily idiot proof. I do this by getting my seven year old son to go through the guides without my help (yes I pay him for it :) ) I figure if a smart seven year old can do it a dumb adult should be ok. Ha Ha Ha Ha..... This morning I got a user who couldnt figure out that where it says "NAME" you put in your name. ARGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGG :wtf::wtf::wtf:
[Not an aniti-American posting] My worst experiences have been with an American company, one very big electronics company comes to mind. I met the senior technical guy at this company several times, and now design a user interface so that even he can use it. He wasn't stupid, far from it. But any problem, any quirk, any bug would appear if he was in the room. If it could be made to go wrong he was the guy. We even had technical support people threaten to resign if they had to answer his support calls again. Also some of the very best people have been in America, but it would take 10 experts to even out this guy's negative abilities. To put this into perspective we soule normally get one support call per company per year. He called almost twice daily at one stage. Simon
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X| Lord save me from stupid customers. I think I might abandon writing setup guides etc and let people wing it. Before letting the customers loose on the guides I test them to make sure they are faily idiot proof. I do this by getting my seven year old son to go through the guides without my help (yes I pay him for it :) ) I figure if a smart seven year old can do it a dumb adult should be ok. Ha Ha Ha Ha..... This morning I got a user who couldnt figure out that where it says "NAME" you put in your name. ARGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGG :wtf::wtf::wtf:
Almost on a monthly basis, I have to educate one user how to log on, what a "desktop" is, the difference between left and right mouse buttons, etc.:confused: Give me Groundhog Day (w/Bill Murray) as an alternative. We had a user call saying her monitor was tilted. One of us went down and straightened the monitor and walked away. Another woman stuck a 3 1/2" floppy in the drive but with the clear plastic baggie still on it. Took our techie over an hour to pry it out. How many get this call after a power outage: "I lost all my work. Can you get it back for me?" "Did you save it?" "NO!!" This week we had an exec bring back a laptop drained of power.
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[Not an aniti-American posting] My worst experiences have been with an American company, one very big electronics company comes to mind. I met the senior technical guy at this company several times, and now design a user interface so that even he can use it. He wasn't stupid, far from it. But any problem, any quirk, any bug would appear if he was in the room. If it could be made to go wrong he was the guy. We even had technical support people threaten to resign if they had to answer his support calls again. Also some of the very best people have been in America, but it would take 10 experts to even out this guy's negative abilities. To put this into perspective we soule normally get one support call per company per year. He called almost twice daily at one stage. Simon
I've long wondered if there exists somewhere in the world my opposite. Time after time I've answered support calls and been frustrated by my time being wasted when there was no problem to fixed. In my last position I was becoming a bit paranoid, I think, because it really seemed that the machines missed me. If I didn't stop by each and every station on the network at least once a week, they would invariably fail. Yet most times I got a report of a frozen system or hardware failure, all I had to do was show up. Without even touching anything the damn thing would suddenly start working perfectly. I initially attributed it to stupid users, but after a time I had to revise that hypothesis - machines seem to like me. Weird. All of which doesn't change the fact that users are stupid. I never cease to be amazed that some people can operate the same piece of equipment, running the same program, for many years and still manage to do all the same things incorrectly at least once a day. Taking the 100 users I supported at taht last job as a fairly random sample, 87% of the people are too stupid to operate a toaster safely without adult supervision. Under no circumstances should they be allowed to own a computer unless there is a small child at home to teach them how. "How many times do I have to flush before you go away?" - Megan Forbes, on Management (12/5/2002)
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Almost on a monthly basis, I have to educate one user how to log on, what a "desktop" is, the difference between left and right mouse buttons, etc.:confused: Give me Groundhog Day (w/Bill Murray) as an alternative. We had a user call saying her monitor was tilted. One of us went down and straightened the monitor and walked away. Another woman stuck a 3 1/2" floppy in the drive but with the clear plastic baggie still on it. Took our techie over an hour to pry it out. How many get this call after a power outage: "I lost all my work. Can you get it back for me?" "Did you save it?" "NO!!" This week we had an exec bring back a laptop drained of power.
BTW, HP has started using installation wizards with moving pictures to show exactly what they mean. You can do the same using a tool called CamStudio by Rendersoft.
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Bangerman wrote: Anyone else have any dumb user stories? I once spent about an hour teaching this woman to use email. At the end of the whole thing, she asked me if her computer had "to be plugged into the wall" to do this :wtf: X| Needless to say I left as fast as I could...
I knew it would end badly when I first met Chris in a Canberra alleyway and he said 'try some - it won't hurt you'..... - Christian Graus on Code Project outages Damned nice for remote servers where using Enterprise Manager is like wadding through treacle while covered in velcro, upside down -Paul Watson on SQL Server Query Analyser
Megan Forbes wrote: At the end of the whole thing, she asked me if her computer had "to be plugged into the wall" to do this You have to be kidding me. I thought that stories of such idiocy were urban myth and that no one could really be that stupid.
"If a man empties his purse into his head, no man can take it away from him, for an investment in knowledge pays the best interest." -- Joseph E. O'Donnell Not getting the response you want from a question asked in an online forum: How to Ask Questions the Smart Way!
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- Back in 1989, we were still selling our software on 5-1/4" floppies. We got a call from a user that said she needed a new floppy disk because hers had become mangled by the floppy drive. It turns out that her secretary had tried to insert the floppy *between* the two floppy drives in the system, and had managed to get it about 3/4 of the way in before it just wouldn't go in any farther. Not to be disuaded, she tried numerous times, got mad, and finally started shoving on the diskette with the palm of her hand. Finally, it got all the way in, and that's when she told her boss that it "didn't work". We told them they'd have to return the original disk before we'd send them a new one, so they had to dismantle the machine to get it out. When we got it, it was torn, and looked like an accordian. 2) Got a call one day from a customer that was really mad. It seems that he had installed our software, gone to lunch, came back, and his monitor was apparently broken. Of course, he reasoned that because our software was the last thing he had installed, that must be the problem. I told him ther was NO possible way our software would have broken his monitor, or any other part of his compter. I told him to make sure the machine was on, he said "Of course it is." I told him to make sure the monitor was plugged in to the backk of the machine. "Of course it is." I told him tp make sure it was plugged in to an electrical socket. "Of course it is." By this time he's getting even more annoyed. I asked him if the monitor was turned ON. He said "Of course it is. What do you think I am, some sort of idio..." click - he hung up. His boss called later to apologize saying that he had walked by this idiot's machine and, knowing the idiot was at lunch, flipped his monitor off. 3) We actually got the infamous "Where's the ANY key?" call. I told the guy it was the big red switch on the side of the machine. 4) We've had people that actually called us and expected us to help them install Windows. 5) We had a guy call and ask if our software worked witha Mac. I said no, and that there were no plans to write a Mac version. He told me that since he had paid for the software, he expected to receive a Mac version or he'd sue us (he was a lawyer). After trying to be nice to him for almost 20 minutes, I finally just told him if he expected to be able to sue us into making a Mac version of our software, he was either the stupidest mother fucker on the face of the planet, or his law degree was from someplace like Cracker
Oh, Man! :laugh: That was so funny. :laugh: I've only just managed to pick myself of the floor.
"If a man empties his purse into his head, no man can take it away from him, for an investment in knowledge pays the best interest." -- Joseph E. O'Donnell Not getting the response you want from a question asked in an online forum: How to Ask Questions the Smart Way!
