It is my junior year of high school in 2009. More classes have started introducing laptops to their toolkits and we are sitting in a history class that has recently gotten its first set. Our usernames are the initials of the school: MHS, and then our first initial and last name.

While the teacher is speaking to us I take notice of the girl next to me, who has taken to taking the keys off her keyboard and rearranging them; I don’t say anything and turn back to the teacher.

A few minutes later the teacher finally tells us to log in for the first time and set our passwords, which is when this exchange happens.

Girl: *Swears softly.*

Me: “What’s up?”

Girl: “Well, I moved the keys around to make typing easier.”

She shows me that she has lined up the keys MHSLE which match up to our school name and her name.

Girl: “But it’s not typing the correct letters!”

I lean over and hit the ‘M’ key, the computer produces a ‘G’.

Girl: “See!?”

Me: “The keycaps don’t dictate what letter the computer is going to make, [Girl’s Name].”

Girl: “What? Of course they do, what else would they mean?”

Me: “The keys? The little squares you moved? They are just the tops of the buttons so that you know what letter each button is. You can’t change that by moving them.”

Girl: “What!? That’s stupid!”

At this point the teacher walks up, apparently, we’re the only two that haven’t been typing away.

Teacher: “What’s going on here?”

Girl: “He was just telling me that if I move the keys around it doesn’t change the letters!”

Teacher: “You’d better not be moving the keys around!”

Girl: “Oh… I…”

Me: “Just put them all back, look at mine.”

I pushed my laptop over to her so she could look at it and she started popping her keys off again. The teacher, understandably, was at a loss for words, but eventually, her brain gained enough traction to speak again.

Teacher: “I can’t believe you! Would you do this to your computer at home!?”

Girl: “I don’t have a computer at home, I go to the library across the street.”

Teacher: “Have you done this to the library computer!?”

The girl looked offended and gasped.

Girl: “Of course not Mrs. [Teacher]! I would never! Those computers belong to the library!”

Me: “Uh, these computers belong—”

Teacher: “Don’t! Mr. [My Last Name], don’t… don’t… don’t… just don’t.”

The teacher ended up leaving the classroom for about twenty or thirty minutes, when she returned the lesson plan resumed, but, with much less energy.

Where I used to work, we had a spell-checker virus; this was in the early days of spell-checker. This never affected my work, as I typed my own reports, but some of the managers used one of the admin assistants.

They would hand over all their handwritten notes from site visits and the like, and the admin assistant would type them up. Unfortunately, her spelling was atrocious, but she didn’t realise it. Whenever the red squiggle appeared under a word, she was confident that she was right and the computer was wrong, so she always selected “Add To Dictionary”. The red squiggle disappeared — problem solved, right?

Apparently, there were a lot of reports that were full of typos. I wish I could have scene some of them…

Related:
This Spells Trouble, Part 5
This Spells Trouble, Part 4
This Spells Trouble, Part 3
This Spells Trouble, Part 2
This Spells Trouble

Customer: “I have a computer, but the keyboard is just so huge and ungainly. I want to reduce the number of buttons.”

Me: “Well, we do sell a variety of keyboards in different sizes and styles.”

I show him the range.

Customer: “Hmm, some are smaller, but they all have the same useless layout.”

Me: “That is a pretty standard layout for modern keyboards. Unless you have accessibility issues, most customers use one of these.”

Customer: “Well, I’d like to remove some of these useless buttons to shrink it down. Start taking notes for your designer.”

Me: “Sir, we don’t have—”

Customer: “I never understood why all these keyboards have two buttons for ‘O’. Let’s get rid of one of those. And this backspace button, lose it. I don’t make errors…”

This story is from before I really was in IT since I was still in high school, around 2002 to 2004 if I recall correctly. I was the go-to tech support for my maternal grandparents. My grandfather had just bought a new pretty early digital camera and was having fun with it, trying to figure out how the machine worked using the manual.

He got pretty far with it but kept running into an error, so he phoned me. It sounded pretty strange to me. Every time he snapped a picture, his camera would tell him there was an error. But the picture was there and it was good. So, on my bicycle I hopped to pay them a visit.

Once I had the camera in my hands, I was able to take pictures and didn’t notice anything wrong with it. I didn’t even see the error message my grandfather had been having issues with. I handed it back to him, and the first picture he took displayed the error message again, according to him. So, we repeated the steps, now both looking at the display to find out what would go wrong. He snapped a picture.

Grandfather: *Immediately* “There it is!”

Camera Display: “Storing.”

It clicked for me. The camera had been set up to use the Dutch language, not the English language, though somehow this message was still in English. I didn’t register the discrepancy, but there it was.

“Storing” in Dutch means malfunction or failure, not to write a file to memory and store it there.

It was one of my first lessons in rule one: “Users lie” — even though this user really thought he was getting error messages.

Me: “We need this tool to streamline this process and automate it so we save ourselves several hours each shift. It would probably result in about a 20% reduction in our workload.”

Client: “That sounds great!”

Me: “I’ve already got a draft of what it will do, how it will work, and how the user interface will work and look.”

I show it to them.

Client: “I need this to be different. This just won’t cut it for what we need. Can you make these changes?”

Me: “I can, but it might not work.”

Client: “How so?”

Me: “It will definitely affect the performance and overall usefulness of the tool for us, but if you really need it, then we can sacrifice some functionality.”

I then go away to work on the “revised and improved” version as requested, often taking multiple times longer than planned for the “base” version.

Client: “Why is this taking so long to work, and why does it not do what you said it could do?”

Me: “Because you asked me to make it this way.”

Client: “You should have said it would not work.”

Except I did.