Dumbest colleagues you have ever worked with 9

[JonC8191]

I thought the lady a few years back who thought the rest of us were idiots for believing that the moon landing happened would never be surpassed.

However ...

A current colleague turned down a free-of-charge flu shot the other day. Now she is disinfecting her work area because two people 1250 miles away have ebola.



I'm the reason why Paradise Lost

 

[Andrzejek]

Lady at work was getting a new computer, but she insisted to keep her old monitor. Why? She wanted to keep her old icons on her desktop.

A guy who figured how to use File Manager (Windows 3.1) decided to ‘clean the mess up’ with all the files on his hard drive. So he created a folder for dll files, another folder for exe files, and so on. Makes sense, right? A lot of his files were nicely organized, but his PC for some reason did not work anymore.

The sad or funny part is: you cannot make these stories up.


Have fun.

---- Andy

A bus station is where a bus stops. A train station is where a train stops. On my desk, I have a work station.

 

[djj55]

Have you ever seen a blog request on how to turn your monitor into a mirror?

djj
The Lord is my shepherd (Psalm 23) - I need someone to lead me!

 

[briangriffin]

20 years ago I was working for the help desk at a major car rental company. Late at night a call comes in from LAX to say they can't print rental contracts (a common occurrence). After a bit of troubleshooting it was determined that there was some construction going on outside, and a bulldozer had severed a power line. The entire car rental building was dark and without power, and her description of the problem was "I can't print".

 

[JCreamerII]

Going back over 25 years, I gave a user some key strokes to type, the question back to be was, did I mean the letter zero or the number zero.

Jim C.

 

[yelworcm]

I will often tell people to type "capital 3" for the # sign (on American keyboards, anyway). Usually people take it without reaction, but sometimes I get a person's brain to hang for a second, while they try to process that concept.

 

[flapeyre]

Back 30 years ago, when I was servicing typewriters (remember those?), I had a call on a Selectric that was dead. Turns out it was unplugged. And this was the engineering department of a large chain hotel.

-- Francis
Francisus ego, sed non sum papa.

 

[IPGuru]

did I mean the letter zero or the number zero.

Not necessarily as bad as it seems some software will treat the 0 from the numeric keypad differently to the 0 from the Alphanumeric region. WOC/NOC for the INDeX PBX & yes it does also need Num lock to be correctly set.

A Maintenance contract is essential, not a Luxury.
Do things on the cheap & it will cost you dear

 

[Westi]

My mother in law has a boyfriend in his late 70's and he redid her garden gate because it opened to the side away from the house and you had to walk around rather than just in and go towards the house. He rebuilt the entire thing and when he put the L shaped latch on he could not make it look upwards as he changed direction.

this is the type of latch on there.
I asked him why he did not turn it and he said it is not possible.
I took the screw out and turned it upwards again

he is a retired mechanical engineer :-D

The gate fell off the hinges about 3 months later because the screws where too short and someone had closed the gate too hard.

Joe W.

FHandw, ACSS (SME), ACIS (SME)


“This is the end of the world, make sure to buy your T-shirt before it is too late"
Original expression of my daughter

 

[Gunnaro]

That someone wouldn't by any chance be mrs Westi?

Kind regards

Gunnar
______________________________________
Mille viae ducunt homines per saecula Romam

 

[mjldba]

Many years ago we were using a packaged application that required the login and password to be entered in uppercase letters. One of our illustrious endusers was having difficulty logging in so I went to her desk to go over the basic login procedure. When I brought up the uppercase requirement she seized the opportunity to ask what she thought was an intelligent question.

"Should I hold down the Shift key or can I press Caps Lock?

 

[mjldba]

This happened to a guy I work with.

He was setting up a PC for a new employee and he was explaining the standard login ID and password requirements. She created her login ID but hesitated when entering her password .... she didn't know what to use so she asked my buddy what he used. He said the easiest thing to remember was his kid's first names entered as one word like billkathy.

She said she didn't have an kids so she asked him what his kids names were.

 

[DrB0b]

Had a user plug a USB cable into the LAN port on a laptop and couldnt understand why it wouldn't work.
A month and new laptop later, he called me saying the new laptop wouldn't turn on. After plugging it in and letting it charge for a minute, it fired right back up. This was not his first laptop...

Had an old lady bring me her monitor when she wanted her PC fixed instead of the tower.

Previous IT person here at my work had our financial server set up on a RAID 0 with NO backups..... Quickly changed that to a 5 with BUs.

Learning - A never ending quest for knowledge usually attained by being thrown in a situation and told to fix it NOW.

 

[kray4660]

It was a co-worker, but a friend that had gotten a new monitor and tried to get to work by using a USB cable from the computer to the monitor. It is a wonder it did not fry anything.

 

[Fixin]

I was asked to fix a phone jack in an office. I crawled under the desk and the lady at the desk near me said "My phone is beeping again". I crawled out and looked at the phone. No beeping. Made a call. Worked fine. I crawled back to my jack when she said "its doing it again"! I hit my head this time and rushed over. There was a snow plow outside her window cleaning the parking lot!

 

[IPGuru]

Not one I have worked with but this guy sounds like he would have been "Fun"

http://thedailywtf.com/articles/The_Joe_Board

A Maintenance contract is essential, not a Luxury.
Do things on the cheap & it will cost you dear

 

[cmeagan656]

IPGuru, great article! The comment sections has more great examples too.

Hope this helps.

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[Gunnaro]

Can't say I've had too many dumb colleagues, but there has been some memorable moments...

While rewiring a hotel, one got tired of pulling cables and volunteered to do the patch panels (that's the fun part IMO).
When testing the cables, I got faults on absolutely every outlet. He then revealed his diagnose of colour-blindness!
The following conversation went like this:

Me: You didn't find this handicap worth mentioning before punching thousands of orange, green, blue and brown wires?

Him: I usually manage feel the difference.

Me: You can feel the colour?!?

Him: No, I separate them by the twist rate difference on the pairs.

Me: *censored* - obviously you felt wrong - and these are Cat6, there's almost no difference on the green and blue twist rate!

Kind regards

Gunnar
______________________________________
Mille viae ducunt homines per saecula Romam

 

[edfair]

There was an IBMer who used lighter fluid to wash out the IBM-024 keyboard interlock disks then asked the operator to test it out. The whole place woke up when the vapors ignited. No injuries but the keyboard jumped several inches with the operator's fingers on the keys.

The lighter fluid was a shortcut for the longer process of taking the keyboard apart to get to the disks. And for those who don't know, the keyboard is filled with contacts that make and break 150v circuits controlling small magnet coils.

Ed Fair
Give the wrong symptoms, get the wrong solutions.

 

[flapeyre]

@Edfair -

We used to use IBM Cleaning Fluid for such tasks. That stuff cleaned anything. Don't know what's being used now, as 1,1,1-trichloroethane has been banned. I don't recall that as being particularly flammable, though.

We once used a gallon of it to kill fire ants at the branch office picnic. Worked great, but killed the grass.

-- Francis
Francisus ego, sed non sum papa.

 

[ajh1]

I had a contract programmer once on a structural engineering program. I gave him a spec for a particular variable that was sort of the typical form, C1 = 0.5 <= some equation <= 1.0. He came over to me and indicated he couldn't program that. When I asked why not, he said it had too many inequalities in it. I could think of several ways to do that. The troublesome part was I probably spent more time writing up the specs for him to code than it would have taken me to just code the stuff up myself.