Newsgroups: rec.humor Path: nntp-server.caltech.edu!elroy.jpl.nasa.gov!swrinde!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!decwrl!parc!xsoft!hobbes!hcate From: cate3.osbu_north@xerox.com Subject: Life 4.B Message-ID: <1993Apr30.000640.9490@xsoft.xerox.com> Sender: news@xsoft.xerox.com Reply-To: cate3.osbu_north@xerox.com Organization: Xerox Date: Fri, 30 Apr 1993 00:06:40 GMT Lines: 324 ~Date: 15 Feb 89 ~Subject: Life 4.B ---------------------------------------------------- Told to me by my girlfriend: On her second year in college a professor came to their class and was telling them about his new students (freshmen). When he asked them to comment all their programs, this is what he got: - "This program is very nice" - "This program is very difficult" - "This program is very interesting"........ ---------------------------------------------------- At Calgary, the computer science department has an award called the Williams Cup (as in old stained coffee cup), which is given yearly to the student who hands in the most imaginative rendition of a regular programming assignment. Anyway, as the story goes, the cup was awarded to a student who'd done a desk calculator assignment. Seems that the prof hadn't specified that you had to do it in decimal, so his/her program did math with _roman_numerals_. The clincher for the award must have been his/her programming style, since of course, the documentation was in _latin_ 8-) ---------------------------------------------------- My favorite story is about a satellite link that went haywire every Friday at 3:00 PM. The company that owned the link immediately blamed the software in their communications controllers. Systems analysts were dispatched on site, and try as they did, they couldn't find a software bug that could be responsible. Finally, by dumb luck they found it. A bunch of factory workers let off at 3:00 started their weekend with a parking lot beer party and through their empty cans in the satellite uplink. A shift of security guards fixed that. ---------------------------------------------------- A friend worked for a company that made IC's. It seemed that every few months their yeilds would go down to about zero. Analysis of the failures showed all sorts of organic material was introduced into the process somewhere but they couldn't figure out where. One evening someone was working late and came into the lab. There he found the maintainence crew cooking pizza in the chip curing ovens! ---------------------------------------------------- I used to work in the Computer Lab at the Community College of Allegheny County,Allegheny Campus. CCAC-A has a 3 file server Novell Network in place. For most of the Fall, they were constantly loosing the hard drives in the Network during holiday breaks -- you could be assured that one or more of the file servers went down during a 3-day weekend, for example. The first thought was that power to the lab was being turned off on the long weekends, so the power to the file servers was wired such that power stayed on and could not be turned off except at the circuit breaker. Didn't help; turned out that the problem was a well-meaning security guard who thought that the servers were accidently left on, so he turned them off. NeXT solution? Hot-wire the power supply switches... so now they discovered that the guard was pulling out the power plugs! He no longer works in that building... ---------------------------------------------------- This tale is true, I was there. The DEC users group here occasionally has Q+A sessions with a representative of said company which sometimes become complaint and apology sessions. I remember one particular complaint from a Physics professor who claimed that his microVax was having problems with its tk50 tape drive and he had lost a fair quantity of data when the drive allegedly mangled a tape (magnetically, not physically). Some discussion ensued and the professor griped that he also didn't like the way that the screen display "flexed" every time they turned the equipment on next door. It turns out that the "equipment next door" is a largish Tokomak fusion reactor - the electromagnets in the thing have to be seen to be believed. (And this man is a physics professor - phew!) ---------------------------------------------------- Once upon a time in the MBA factory... About fifty prospective MBAs were learning how to run an IBM PC. The computer lab had a bunch of nice hard-disk equipped machines, with 1-2-3 and dBase and Word, etc, all lined up in front of a video projector. "Today we're going to learn how to use DOS to format a disk. Everybody have their floppy disk ready? Good. Put it into the disk drive. (No no, it goes in the *other* way...that's right....) "Okay, now to format a disk, you use the command FORMAT C:" ...and they all typed it in. (Format C: will reformat the C drive, the hard disk drive, it could take hours to rebuild and some data may have been lost. The teacher really was confused.) ---------------------------------------------------- The other story says that a customer wanted something fixed for a particular hardware setup for which we had no docs. The problem shouldn't be difficult to solve, but we needed the docs and the customer was really in a hurry. The person in charge of the thing asked the customer if he would be willing to FAX us a certain part of the manuals. After a moment's thought, he answered "OK, but only if you promise to FAX it back!" ---------------------------------------------------- I dont know if anyone else has repeated this one or not. I was at a DECUS conference about 6 yrs ago when a system programmer was laughing about programming a Dec machine to seek around on a disk drive enough to cause the cabinet to rock. Apparently this became some sort of a game, so that they actually wrote programs to make the drive cabinet walk around the room to particular locations... ---------------------------------------------------- There was an article in the Wall Street Journal this past summer that told of executives who were finally learning how to use/misuse their office computers. Two stories that I found particularly funny follow: 2. Another executive read that he should hit the Enter key, "the one with the elbow printed on it." He was seen later that day attempting to hit the enter key with his elbow. ---------------------------------------------------- Some computer-illiterate visitors were shown the CDC6400 at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. One of them asked how does the machine do all these wonderful things; their guide joked that it has a small man inside. While he was speaking, a CDC technician (the late Rachmim Moreno, a small man indeed) has just finished some routine maintenance and stepped out of the machine. ---------------------------------------------------- Real, real, true, swear-by-God story: A friend of mine was repairing a Russian EC-20 computer in Bangalore, India. He found an insulated wire soldered to a pin of a chip. Looking for the other end, he traced and he traced and he traced - 10 feet of wire, and the other end was soldered to an adjacent chip! As it turned out, they needed a 10 ns delay between the two pins. ---------------------------------------------------- 1) Back when core memory was in use one could "listen" to the memory with a transistor radio. A game amung system programmers was to access memory in such a manner as to produce recognizeble tunes on the radio. 2) Printers produce a buzzing with varying frequency depending on the text being printed (this is because of the rate at which the hammers strike the slugs in the print chain). The same system programmers would also compete to see who could print a job that played specific (and known) tunes. ---------------------------------------------------- I recall being shown a PDP-8 in Uppsala University two years ago. It had a program that would perform memory accesses so as to generate noise that could be picked up by an AM radio. I was most amazed to hear a *polyhonic* version of "The Entertainer" come from a PDP-8 :-) ---------------------------------------------------- While a student at UCSD in the middle 60's I had the opportunity to work many late nights in the computer punch card room on my physical chemistry lab calculations. One late night when the computer operator was obviously bored, he invited me into the sanctum sanctorum - the computer room. The computer was a CDC 3600 and had a curving CONSOLE about 8 feet long with several hundred lights and switches (in those days, there was no such thing as terminal input). On the far wall was a bank of a dozen 1/2" tape drives with vacuum column tape tension control. He loaded up a deck into the card reader (the only command input device) and started it. For the next 1/2 hour the computer PLAYED the Stars and Stripes Forever and assorted Sousa marches, using the tones on the CONSOLE (every light had its own tone) for the high low notes and the tape drives for the low notes. At the same time, all the lights on the CONSOLE were blinking on and off. Since I am now a full-time programmer, I finally appreciate the work it must have taken a system level programmer to do that. Talk about primitive audio devices! ---------------------------------------------------- 1.) An office secretary was presented with her first PC and given large amounts of instruction on how to operate it. Just before he left the C.E. asked the secretary "What must you do every Friday?" to which the secretary replied "Copy my data disks so I don't lose any information." Satisfied, the C.E. departed. One week later there was a phone call; "I can't read my disks!" so the C.E. went back to the secretary. Sure enough the data disks were corrupt and unreadable. "Have you got copies of these disks?" "Yes" "Can I see them please?" The secretary opened her desk drawer and removed several sheets of paper. Curiously the C.E. examined them to see each was a perfect photocopy of the data disks.... 2.) A site had an HP3000 installation with a number of large 300Mb disk disk drives. One week, two of the drives crashed, so they called an engineer. The engineer examined the drives, and noticed a little pile of sawdust on the floor by the side of them. Needless to say, there is no wood in the construction of these drives and the floor was concrete. The engineer repairs the drives and leaves, sorely vexed. The same thing happens a couple of days later - same two drives crash, engineer calls, sawdust, etc. This pattern repeats until one day they notice a maintenance man, who has a long plank of wood, walk into the computer room, wedge the wood between the two drives (the gap between them was juuust riiight!) and then proceed to saw the plank in half with an enormous rip-saw.... ---------------------------------------------------- This is the same company (my wife used to be CS manager there) where an irate customer couldn't save his records to disk. The error message he reported would only have appeared on a full disk, but he claimed that he checked the space remaining and it was "okay." Turns out that the program he ran to check remaining space on a disk drive returned the amount of free space, expressed in kbytes. A full disk, therefore, returned the string 0k (where 0 = zero). Then there was the customer who complained because the new software release wouldn't print. This customer just *knew* he'd caught the software company in a bug and he was demanding his money back. My wife stepped through the whole process, set up a duplicate system on her end of the phone, and spent a fair amount of time duplicating his situation. At last she determined that the only possible failure was that his printer wasn't on line. "I've managed to duplicate your error message," she finally told him after about three days of this. "Aha! It *is* a bug, and you'll finally admit it! Are you going to refund my money?" "Well, we'll see," she said. "First, look on your printer and see if the little green light marked 'on line' is lit." "No, it isn't. What does it mean if it's not on line?" "Well, it's like the lights are on but nobody's home..." He never asked for his money back again. ---------------------------------------------------- Heard recently from an IBM field service manager: A huge travel agency in Florida (a major booker of Caribbean cruises for blue-haired retired ladies) recently bought an IBM 3090 to handle the reservation database. When the deal was consummated, the proud new owner asked IBM to install it in a big glass room right behind the receptionist's area so all the customers could see the flashing lights and spinning tape reels as they walked in -- a testimony to the modernity of the agency. Good idea, except there are no blinking lights on a 3090. So the service manager offered to build some. They hired a theatrical designer to come up with a suitably futuristic "set", got curved glass walls to minimize reflections, and installed the mainframe behind the "real-looking" facade. The customer declared that it was exactly what he had in mind, regardless of what the actual computer looks like. Moral: the customer is always right. ---------------------------------------------------- ~Date: Tue 1988 May 31 11:34:07 ~From: arden@freude (Michelle Arden) ~Subject: How to handle Frustration: Shoot a computer today! An amusing Comdex story ... I'm looking forward to Siggraph in Atlanta. Shooting graphics boards, maybe? >From the N.Y. Times, w/o permission: The annual Spring Comdex computer show in Atlanta earlier this month meant a booming business for the Bulletstop, an indoor firing range in suburban Marietta where customers can rent firearms and bullets to shoot anything they please, as long as it is already dead and fits through the doors. The Bulletstop gave Comdex visitors a chance to vent their frustrations by venting PC's, printers, hard disks, monitors and manuals with lead. Paul LaVista, the owner, said about 10 groups of high-tech types came in during the Comdex show. "I'm not a computer whiz, but one group brought in what looked like a hard disk and blasted it," he said. "Another bunch brought in some kind of technical manual. The thing was enormous, about 2,000 pages. They rented three machine guns -- an Uzi, an M3 grease gun and a Thompson -- and when they were done it looked like confetti." "It must have been quite a show," LaVista said of Comdex. "Doctors and computer types usually have a lot of pent-up anxiety, but these folks were dragging when they came in. When they left they were really up. The range looked like a computer service center after a tornado." LaVista said PC's were popular targets year-round. "People are frustrated with them," he said. A year ago seven or eight men carried in a giant old Hewlett-Packard printer. "I ran an extension cord to it, and just as it started to whirr and spit out paper, they blasted it," he said. ----------------------------------------------------------------