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Firestorm

Veteran
Location
Southend on Sea
People CAN be that dumb - a colleague at a branch of my employer once asked a customer to send in a copy of the disk which they said was faulty and wouldn't work in their computer. In the post a few days later she received a photocopied image of the floppy disk...

Years ago in my job here, we used to use real 'floppies' - the old 5 1/4" floppy disks. The number of people who'd update the program on the disk with their monthly pension contributions and then staple the disk to the correspondence was staggering. None of them could understand that driving a staple through the disk surface would make it unreadable and they'd have to do it all over again.

The best were the ones who couldn't work out how to put the 3.5" disks back in the boxes. The outer box was open at both ends so you could slide the inner-tray in with the disk in it. The inner was a long, rectangular piece of card lined with bubblewrap, which you'd put the disk in and then bend the ends up over the disk and slide it into the outer. People could never work out that if you put the inner in side-on, it was open at the sides and the disk would slide out. You had to put it in the other way so the folded-up ends outwards. They'd go to hugely extravagant lengths to wrap miles of tape around the whole thing to stop the disk falling it. No common sense whatsoever - you'd have though that seeing the disk arrive in the box correctly each month would have let them see how it was supposed to be done, but no....


I have also heard of one who complained that his disk wasn't working and he had cut the 5 1/4 floppy to fit in a 3.5 drive.

The weekly IT magazines of the mid 90's (Computer weekly was one) used to have a Tales from the Helpdesk page there were some classics

Theres a few here http://www.funny2.com/computer.htm
 

Coco

Well-Known Member
Location
Glasgow
5.25 inch? That's just so modern. I remember these
http://oldcomputers.net/floppydisks.html
 

Ste T.

Guru
A manager where I worked a few years back, was in the staff kitchen with a tin of beans in one hand and a tin opener in the other. This was when Heinz first started putting ring pulls on their tins. He looked at the ringpull then the other end of the tin. Back to the ring pull then after thinking about it for a minute turned the tin upside down and used the tin opener.

He's been promoted twice since then.

 

atbman

Veteran
Many years ago, O Best Beloved, I worked on the conversion from coal gas to natural gas programme. I had a phone call from one women, thanking me for the efficient and courteous way our engineer had converted all her gas appliances, which was a first. She then asked me if she still need to use salt in her cooking - pause - because the gas was now coming from the North Sea
 
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