I developed both a website and an intranet solution that approximately fifty civil engineers log into in order to submit files, reports, and other internal reports.

One of the engineers called me.

Engineer: “The solution you developed is absolutely worthless! I can’t even log in!”

I had sent a very detailed set of instructions in a PDF file, something I thought was absolutely idiot-proof.

After a step-by-step set of instructions over the phone, he resorted to calling one of the secretaries to see if she could log herself in.

As soon as she sat down in front of his computer, I heard her giggling, followed by bursts of laughter by several people surrounding his station. It was minutes before I could get someone to reply on the phone.

Turns out he was trying to log in on the PDF file’s screenshot.

In the late 1970s, I worked as a lab assistant in the computer department. A sense of humor was required for the job. We had yellow vests with the label “Lab Asst.” on them, and we had a bit of yellow tape covering the T. Collectively, we considered buying a T-shirt for our department secretary that featured images of floppy disks and the banner “mini-floppies.” Fortunately, cooler heads prevailed and that didn’t happen.

This all was years before the first IBM PC and when the only real alternative to big computers was the Apple II. The computer our department depended on was a PDP-11. It was over seven feet tall and roughly the shape of a filing cabinet. It featured a 200-Mb internal hard drive and a 50-Mb removable drive for backing up data. By modern standards, that’s pretty pathetic, but by the standards of the day, it was already light years ahead of using floppy disks for storage. For those too young to remember, the floppy disks of the era held about 180 Kb of data.

The computer could also handle a dozen users connected by terminals. The terminals were just a screen and keyboard. Students had no access to the actual computer itself, which was in a room separate from the computer lab.

As an example of a little knowledge being a dangerous thing, a student came into our offices one day.

Student: “You guys need to listen to me!”

Coworker: “What’s wrong?”

Student: “Your computer memory space. You don’t have enough.”

Coworker: “What do you mean?”

Student: “I was doing some reading about keeping everything in memory.”

Coworker: “And?”

Student: “You guys need to add a floppy disk drive to the computer.”

We all looked at each other in bewilderment.

Coworker: “Okay, we’ll keep that in mind.”

Student: “Great! I just wanted you to know.”

A client told me she couldn’t access the information I had saved to her flash drive. The client insisted I come to her office with a new flash drive and the file. After arriving at her office, I decided to try her flash drive first. I plugged the flash drive into her computer and the file opened right away.

Client: “I tried literally everything.”

Me: “It looks like it works fine when I plug it in.”

Client: “You were supposed to plug it into the computer? I thought it was wireless.”

Literally. Everything.

My boss had several computers sitting around the office that she wanted to get rid of. As the only person in the office who knew how to even run defrag, the task fell to me to yank the hard drives out per my boss’s instructions. 

There was sensitive medical information on them and they needed to be rendered unreadable. Opting for the quick-fix, I bent ALL the SSI connector pins, pulled the power connector pins out with pliers, and snapped off a handful of chips. 

Upon presenting the drives to her, she was still worried someone might read them. I took them outside and bashed them against a concrete wall. She was still not convinced. I returned a third time with a screw-driver driven completely through each drive. Her response:

Boss: “Well…that looks thorough, but I think someone might still be able to read them, let’s keep them, just in case.”

They are, to this day, sitting under her desk.

I work in tech support. Early Tuesday morning, I’m sitting with a few workmates who are in remote in our daily standup before the actual standup meeting. Suddenly, I get bombarded with Teams messages by a user.

Employee: “I need you to come upstairs and check on my computer. It’s acting up again.”

Me: “I’ll be there in fifteen minutes, after my standup.”

Employee: “That won’t do. I have a very important meeting to attend! I need you now!”

I just sigh, excuse myself from my colleagues, drink the remainder of my coffee, and head up.

She’s already standing at the doorway of her office, gesturing for me to hurry up.

Employee: “None of the programs respond. Everything is acting weird. Nothing works!”

Me: “Have you tried restarting the laptop?”

Employee: “No, I can’t do that. It won’t let me!”

I then try to restart the computer and indeed, it is acting weird. Opening the start menu only immediately opens the search query and then shows a constant space being input.

I look down and see that [Employee]’s headset is resting on top of the spacebar of the external keyboard. I remove them.

Me: “Hey, look. Your headset was resting against the spacebar.”

A look of mild panic settles on her face.

Employee: “That can’t be it! I just set those there before you came over!”

Me: “Can you tell me about some of the issues you’ve been having?

Employee: “When I opened Outlook, it kept scrolling through the mails on its own!”

I ask her to open Outlook, and then I hold down the spacebar, and to nobody’s surprise, the “error” she reported replicates.

Employee: “Huh. That’s weird. It does the same now.”

She’s trying her hardest to look surprised.

Me: “Yeah, that’s crazy. Anyway, whatever caused it, it’s gone now. If you’ve got any other problems, let me know.”

As I left, she was opening Teams to join her “extremely important meeting”.

It was her daily standup.