CONTEST ALERT! – The all-knowing and all-listening IT confessional
Haven’t you always wanted to get all of your IT-related questions answered by “highly trained” professionals? How about sharing your PC or IT horror story with the world? Maybe you simply want a great new keyboard or free backup services for your PC? If any of the above are true then you’re in the right place! That Damn PC is holding a contest for some of the greatest IT stories of all time.
We’re looking for the ugliest, saddest, happiest and all-around funniest stories from IT history. Things like my computer exploded while loading Windows to all of my pornography was copied by the local PC-tech are all great places to start while sharing your stories.
We would appreciate it if the stories we both true and awesome and I’m sure that you guys (and gals) can all help us out with that. For your help, we will be giving away a great prize, a Goldtouch keyboard from Key Ovation. This can help you with all of your carpal tunnel and cool keyboard needs. Beyond just the awesome factor, you can also “Wow” your friends by being a winner from That Damn PC! How cool is that?
So go ahead and submit your stories. Post them in the comments below or email jesse dot middleton at b5media.com (please make the subject “That Damn PC IT Confessional”) and you may be a winner. Many of the stories will be used by us to continue to get to the bottom of how the IT mind thinks and why they’re always so cranky before their seventeen cups of coffee.
The nitty gritty Info: This contest will run from June 17th at 8am (ET) to June 24th at 10pm (ET). Your stories must be submitted through the comment section below or via email during this time period. Any stories received before or after will be happily taken but will not be eligible for prizes.
There are no restrictions as to when or where you need to live but keep in mind that shipping the keyboard may take a long time if you live on some remote island somewhere (Here’s looking to you England).
All winners will be determined by a trained group of contest-winner-selectors-extraordinaries and will be notified as fast as humanly possible.
I work in a large company with shared LAN space. When this shared space gets full a global message goes out to clean up old files. One new upper management employee who had global access started deleting all the files and folders. Eeh Gads!
I was helping out a friend’s roommate whose computer wasn’t booting. After he gave me the run-around for an hour, I finally forced out of him what he did last.
“Cleaned up some files.” Which files? “Well, there was this new file on my hard drive called bootini. It was never there before, so I deleted it.”
*sigh*
Our home computer was purchased a few years back (2004)…I was absolutely new to computers and had never really “played” around on one.
Well, my husband set up an email address for me (the one I have now) and was able to show me a few things about how to work it by means of sending, receiving and writing emails. Well, unfortunately he didn’t tell me about the [reply to all] button. He had put a few of his customer’s email on my side in case I had to send a customer an email when he calls me from the shop (since I had the basics down)…he sent me a funny, actually hillarious “adult” humored email one day and I wanted to forward it to a friend of mine. A few days went by before my husband asked me why I had sent this particular email to his customers. He was pretty bothered by it because he had received a few phone calls from people (important customers) that didn’t approve of the joke. They felt it was ill humored and that they’d appreciate it if they were discarded from any future “joke” related email. Needless to say I learned on my own everything I needed to about computers (or at least how to work them). Just so you know…I seldom forward messages anymore.
This is a great contest giveaway!!!!! It was really fun remembering and confessing my stupidity to the world.
In the late 90’s I spent some time as a network technician. A network install at a government office yielded two interesting stories.
Back in the 90’s network installs sometimes meant taking typewriters off peoples desks and replacing them with computers. Not surprisingly some folks really had no interest what so ever in the new machines placed on their desks but everyone tried to make the transition as easy as possible. This was a Novell network and some might recall that the Novell Client replaced the standard NT login prompt with a big picture of the Ctrl-Alt-Delete keys. It was an attempt by the good people at Novell to simplify things but in this case it worked against them. After the install I was showing users how to log in and perform rudimentary tasks. I sat down next to one particular secretary, fired up her new PC, and said “go ahead, hit ctrl-alt-delete and log in.” She stared at the keyboard and monitor in front of her. Slowly she lifted her hand, three fingers shot out with confidence and mashed into the Ctrl-Alt-Delete keys on the monitor screen. The monitor rocked back from the attack then came to rest but nothing else happened. She gave me a quizzical look, too which I responded “Touch screen monitors are to expensive so we will have to use the keyboard.”
The second story came form the same office but not from the secretary, from her boss. A couple days later and I received a call from the higher up demanding to know why her brand new computer was already broken. My requests for more information as to the nature of the brokenness were met with diatribes about the cost of all this stuff that had already stopped working. Getting nowhere on the phone I hoped in my car drove 25 minutes to the location and walked upstairs into her office. She pointed to the non-functioning computer and looked to me for a solution. I summoned all my IT muscle and with the grace of swan leaned forward pressing the power button on the monitor. I never heard from her again.
So far, these stories have been excellent. I’m really excited that you’ve all liked to share them with the world. And a lot of these (and the emails I’ve received) will be used later on this blog. Keep checking back for more great IT stories. :)
i have a great friend who is very computor savy, i call her and she fixes it all up
Back in the days of cassette tape computer programs, I had a tape that practically exploded into a huge tangle. I knew then that computers would never become useful or popular!
My friend was running out of disk space, to she thought she’d look around in the computer, more specifical, the program files and delete things she didn’t(think) she needed. Well, you can guess what happened.
Not really any funny stories like previous posters, but I have managed to spill coffee and completely fry three keyboards at work and one at home. Needless to say, I keep my coffee far away from the keyboard now.
I love new technology – it is our friend – when it works right and you know what your are doing – which is NOT me!
Having been a gamer for years, I typically build out my own hardware. However, it was neccessary to have my company’s IT guy install a proprietary program for remote linkage, sooo…after about three hours (of assorted cursing and swearing) he hunts me down to find out why my (inferior, home-made) machine kept shutting down on him (couldn’t possibly be ANYTHING he was doing, right?) While lecturing me on the evils of ‘homebuilding’,watercooling, and over-clocking dual core chips and video cards…I noticed a large 3-prong plug laying on the floor. “I think that has to go in the surge gaurd” I said…”"What the hell could that have to do with anything?” he said… “Oh, it’s the pond pump that powers the internal cooling…” “and that’s an FX2 chip you just fried….
Last year my sister died, and to make me feel better, my hubby bought me a laptop, something we really shoudn’t have bought (4 kids with many wants & needs come first!) but it was so cool, now I didn’t have to be glued down to the desk to be on the computer. Only a few months after I got it, it just totally went dead. I took it back to the place I got it, (no names but it starts with a B and a B). 2 weeks later, with major computer withdrawl, I went to pick it up and it was still broken. Sent back again, and then again another time. Finally it came back working, but it is not right. I was so sick of a certain crew I won’t name but I will call the “Weak Squad” I just took the computer and deal with it acting up all the time now. It just sucks to get something SO nice and have it be a big fat lemon.
I was helping a dial up customer try and connect to the internet and the customer was getting 691 username/pass error over and over. After 20 minutes or trying to get the customer to type in the right password, I tested their login from our call center office and was able to connect so I knew it should work.
The customers password was something like login07 so I repeated back to the customer “Ok. Let’s try this one more time l-o-g-i-n-ZERO-7.” The customer comes back “is that the big ZERO or the little ZERO?”.
great looking keyboard. would love to win something like that. thanks for offering it.
I once had a wireless keyboard and it got lost in the couch cushions and when i went to go watch TV I sat on it and my buns hurt for days.
Been trying to work with this key board for a while, its bad, sure could use one that would work properly
I had this very important case coming up so I was using my home computer at home to work on it. I had it almost finished and everything was fine. I was going back over it checking when disaster struck. I had Holly my 200 hundred Doberman and Lars my cat in the apartment with me. They startes a dog and cat fight. Holly crashed into my computer. After picking it up off the floor I discovered somehow all my data had been eraded.