Dumbass #139 - Submitted on 01-21-2003 by FraggleAl
I am a teacher at a high school and have the misfortune of knowing a hell of a lot more about PC's than just about anyone else. We have this Yearbook teacher who was always screwing her computers up royally and she would call us any old time. Not a problem if I was tech support, but I was teaching and had 5 periods of 35 kids each day. She pissed all of us tech people off. After a while we just stopped helping her. Some of her truly great screw-ups:
1. She had just got a pair of new K6-2's (a while ago) from the local OEM computer store. She couldn't get the printer to work and couldn't wait for me to get over there during my conference period. She took it upon herself to pop the case and discovered that the LPT port wasn't plugged into the motherboard. She looked around the case and discovered that a place that it would fit perfectly. On the daughterboard slot on her video card. She plugged it in turned on the system, turned on the printer, and the system went down hard. Took the motherboard, video card and supposedly some memory with it. I almost died laughing when I figured out what she had done. The guys at PC Club replaced the whole thing for her. Morons.
2. My principal calls saying that this lady is having an absolute fit because she can't access Yearbook pages and today is the BIG deadline. He actually sends a substitute teacher to my room so I can attend to her problems immediately. I get over there and her external ZIP drive is not working. I boot up the system run all of the install utilities, nothing works. Check the bios, printer port is fine. Finally in frustration, I check the drive itself. She had wired the ZIP cable from the in from computer to the out to printer creating an excellent handle if you wanted to carry the thing around, not useful if you wanted Yearbook pages. Took me 30 seconds to fix, boot and verify. My students lost learning time for this walking pile of earthworm excrement.
3. The final straw. She desperately needs a computer- TODAY. We are a poor inner city school with no money. We don't have computers lying around for the Yearbook lady's monthly PMS fit. So after another phone call from the principal, I raid the business donation pile. Old computers donated to us by government and business that usually require 5-6 man hours to get a single stable useful machine. I spend the day getting a 486-25 ready for her. End up canibalizing 3 computers. I take it to her during 6th period and she yells at me because the damn thing doesn't have a CD-ROM or sound card. I just spent my day putting this perfectly functional machine together for her and she yells at me. I turned around took the computer dropped it off in my principal's office and told him that I wanted nothing else to do with tech support.
That year we got a digital high school grant to modernize our technology and network infrastructure. As part of the plan we hired a full-time tech. She does the same crap to him. He hates her more than I do.