In-Depth

May Humor

• 05/01/2000

One day, God was looking down at Earth and saw all of the evil that was going on. He decided to send an angel down to Earth to check it out.

So he called one of His best angels and sent the angel to Earth. When she returned she told God, yes, it is bad on Earth – 95 percent is bad, and 5 percent is good. Well, He thought for a moment and decided to send down a second angel to get another point of view.

When the second angel returned, she went to Him and told him, yes, the Earth was in decline – 95 percent was bad, and 5 percent was good.

He said this was not good. So, He decided to e-mail the 5 percent that were good, and He wanted to encourage them, give them a little something to help keep them going.

Do you know what that e-mail said? Darn! You didn’t get the e-mail either?

Contributed by Katherine Devlin

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So you think you’re computer-illiterate? Check out what some vendors have to deal with:

• One computer maker is considering changing the command "Press any key" to "Press the Enter key" because of the flood of calls asking where the "any" key is.

• Technical support had a caller complain that her mouse was hard to control with the dust cover on. The dust cover turned out to be the plastic bag the mouse was packaged in.

• A technician received a call from a man complaining that the system wouldn’t read word processing files from his old diskettes. After troubleshooting for magnets and heat failed to diagnose the problem, it was found that the customer had labeled the diskettes and then rolled them into the typewriter to type the labels.

• A customer was asked to send a copy of her defective diskettes. A few days later a letter arrived from the customer along with "Xeroxed" copies of the diskettes.

• A technician advised a customer to put his troubled floppy back in the drive and close the door. The customer asked the technician to hold on, and was heard putting the phone down, getting up and crossing the room to close the door to his office.

• Another customer called to say he couldn’t get his computer to fax anything. After 40 minutes of trouble-shooting, the technician discovered that the man was trying to fax a piece of paper by holding it in front of the monitor and pressing the "Send" key.

• Yet another customer called to complain that his keyboard no longer worked. While trying to fix it on his own, he had cleaned it by filling his tub with soap and water and soaking the keyboard for a day, then removing all the keys and washing them individually.

• A technician spoke to a customer who was enraged because his computer had told him he was "bad and an invalid." The technician explained that the computer’s "bad command" and "invalid entry" responses shouldn’t be taken personally.

• A customer called to say her brand new computer wouldn’t work. She said she unpacked the unit, plugged it in and sat there for 20 minutes waiting for something to happen. When asked what happened when she pressed the power switch, she asked "What power switch?"

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An electrical engineer, a chemical engineer and a Microsoft engineer are riding in a car when it suddenly stalls and stops by the side of the road.

The three engineers look at each other with bewilderment, wondering what could be wrong.

The electrical Engineer, not knowing much about mechanics, suggests, "Let’s strip down the electronics of the car and try to trace where a fault might have occurred."

The chemical engineer, not knowing much about electronics, suggests, "Maybe the fuel has become emulsified and is causing a blockage somewhere in the system."

The Microsoft engineer suggests, "Why don’t we close all the windows, get out, get back in, open the windows again, and maybe it will work."