I was working for a technology giant that shall remain nameless, but their black ties should give you a hint.
One day an older woman decided to call in with an odd problem, demanding to speak to the associate that sold her the computer. “It’s f#$@ing broken” she kept repeating. I finally managed to calm her down a bit, enough to at least explain to me what was going on.
These were her exact words:
“I don’t know what is wrong with it, okay? I had my techie friend come over and look at it and he doesn’t know either. It’s the mouse. It has a virus or something. When I want to move up, I have to go down. When I want to go left, I have to go right. It’s just broken, and YOU PEOPLE need to come out and fix it.”
After going through some more complicated reasoning in my head, I decided to go with the simplest solution and work from there. “Ma’am, which end of the mouse is the cord coming out of?”. “THE BOTTOM!” she replied. I calmly asked her to try turning the mouse around so the cord was coming out of the top.
She quickly apologized and hung up.
Seems contrived – However, I’ve actually seen this myself – Rob
[Picture Source: Ran Yaniv Hartstein (CC)]
That’s going to happen a lot more often with the cordless mice, but I remember running a Mac (512K!) lab in 1988 and seeing students hold the mice upside down in their hands and trying to work them like trackballs.
Haha I’ve never seen that before, and I wouldn’t have ever thought to ask that question. I’m actually surprised I’ve never had that come up in the past.
Im a apple tech, i work at a apple service provider, and i had a call one day, a girl saying that her brand new macbook pro couldnt be opened, she said that the macbook was glued together and that she found hairs in the brand new sealed box. Since this seem serious, I asked the client to come meet me at the store, and then she showed me the macbook, i asked her to try opening it, she did, but she was trying to open the macbook pro fron the hinge, not hte front side. So i picked up the macbook, rotate 180 degree and opened it. she said she feel stupid and apologized.
We had a user a few years back that, honest to whatever you like, used her feet to move the mouse. She put the “pedal” on the floor under her desk and used her feet to move the pointer and click and all that. She actually worked a lot faster than anyone else in her department.
A wonderful woman, who helped the other users in her department about half the time, and in the years I worked there we did work on her computer twice, and both were to upgrade to a better computer. Some people are sincerely missed when they retire. Also, her department were in the ticket posting top three six months after she retired.