Welcome to Shark Bait

Like everyone, I have had experienced my share of user tricks…One day I was in one of my users offices helping him with an application issue. While sitting in front of his computer, I noticed a very annoying shimmy on his screen – it looked like every image was vibrating.

Very strange.

Long, LONG ago--back in '77--I was a newly-minted CS graduate (when we didn't really know what a CS degree should be) working at a very large engineering firm. As the newbie, of course I got the jobs nobody else wanted; one was to write a program on the brand-spankin' new Prime 1 minicomputer to translate "aperture card" data from one power company's format to that of another.

I am just a regular, typical user of computers and software. I use them daily both at work and at home. For the past several years I have been confused about the big deal that is constantly being made about Microsoft including Internet Explorer, Media Player, and now possibly Security Essentials with the operating system when it ships.

Working at a small company, I often help out other employees with issues on their personal computers. If they can manage to unhook it and bring it to the office, I will take a look at it and hopefully fix their problem.

user calls reporting that her mouse isn't working this morning. She says she tries to move it and its all jerky.

I go out with a new mouse in hand and see the problem first hand .. its not that the mouse is jerky, its basically glued to the center of the screen. Try moving it and it instantly snaps back to the same area.

Fish is sitting in his office working when a salesman Marc arrives to complain about someone hacking his voicemail box. Seems Marc is getting huge amounts of voicemail spam. He is receiving hundreds of voicemails a day, and all of it, is trying to scam him.

"What do the voicemails say?" asks the fish?

"They are asking me for my security code" says Marc.

The recent posts about typing in literal versus expected characters, and the other one about the "Cupcake Theory of Computer Complexity" reminds me of this problem:

This user is a regional sales manager for our branch on another continent; all of IT is located in the USA, so we routinely handle some pretty odd problems by phone and VNC. The user in question is also extremely hard on our gear; when he came to visit the head office late last month, he brought not one but *three* laptops he had broken in the first quarter.

So I got a call one day, again from the same retail chain as before, and it was a frantic call from a store manager. She wanted to know where on the intranet was for medical forms for taking an employee to the hospital. Come to find out that an employee managed to get battery acid in his eyes.

A while back a former supervisor of mine was working with a collegue over the weekend. As they were returning from another department at our facility, our supervisor decided to split off and use the restroom. As he was talking to my colleague and entering the restroom, he didn't notice the 'Restroom Closed' sign taped on the door.