Why Women Shouldn't Own Computers

A girl walked into the computer center where I work. She said she was having problems with her Mac. I asked what kind of Mac she had. In an indignant voice, she replied, "Duh, Intosh."

Tech Support: "What operating system are you running? Windows 95?"
Customer: (a little too excited) "95, 97, 98, I've got them all!"
After conferring with her husband, it turned out she owned a Macintosh with System 8.1.

Overheard in a software shop:

Woman #1: "What this Linux thing?"

Woman #2: "It's a program that if you have it on your computer, you can't turn the computer off."

Woman #1: "Oh."

Last year, the temp agency I was working for was arranging a contract for me, and some additional "computer skills" tests were necessary. The branch manager asked what kind of computer I was comfortable with. I said, "Windows PC," although I had used several others. She cut in right then and asked, "Word or Excel?"

Two night forepersons at our company were discussing our new computer network after just having been to a brief orientation session. One of them wanted to know what "windows" were, so I explained. Just as she seemed to be catching on to the concept, the other foreperson piped up. "Well that's great, because we have ninety-five windows on there!"

Back in the early days of Windows 95:

• Customer: "I have Windows Thirty One."
• Tech Support: "Ok, this program requires either Windows 95 or Win32s. Do you have Win32s on your system?"
• Customer: "No, I have Windows Thirty One, not Thirty Two."
• Tech Support: "Windows 3.1 is the operating system. Win32s is a program that makes your computer fast like Windows 95."
• Customer: "What's Windows Ninety Five got to do with it?"
• Tech Supprort: "You need either Windows 95 or Win32s to run this."
• Customer: "I HAVE THIRTY ONE! WHY WON'T IT WORK?"
• Tech Support: (giving up) "Ma'am, your computer is too old. Buy a new one with Windows 95."
• Customer: "I've heard about Windows Three Hundred and Eleven. Wouldn't that be better than Ninety Five?"

A friend of mine had an old system with a small hard drive and not much memory, so she continued to use Windows 3.1 rather than suffer under the strain of Windows 95/98.

She called me one day to help her because her computer will no longer run Windows. Past experience had taught me most of her computer problems were self-inflicted, so I asked her what she had done to the computer recently.

• Her: "Well, I needed more space from the hard drive so I could get more JPGs and WAVs from my friends on mIRC."
• Me: "Ok, so what did you do?"
• Her: "I just deleted all the blank files from my computer."
• Me: "Blank files?"
• Her: "Yes, blank files. I deleted tham all."
• Me: "What exactly is a blank file?"
• Her: "When you run File Manager, every file shows a picture. I just deleted all the ones with the blank page picture."

Say goodbye to every .DLL and unassociated file on her system. She was somewhat indignant when she found out she would have to find some Windows 3.1 install diskettes and reinstall every piece of software she wanted to use.

I saw two older looking ladies trying to figure out the computers at a local store. I knew one of them would say something that I could send to Computer Stupidities, so I tried to listen in.

• Woman 1: "What is that little trash can on the screen?"
• Woman 2: "My son says that is call the 'recycle bin'. He tells me when I don't want a Word document anymore and I delete it, it really goes in there."
• Woman 1: "Why in the recycle thingy? Can't you just erase it?"
• Woman 2: "Oh no, Word wouldn't work for very long if I did that, I would run out of blank pages."
• Woman 1: "Why?"
• Woman 2: "Because it cleans the words off the pages, then sends the blank sheets back to Word so they can be used again. That's why it's called the recycle bin."

We maintain a 24 hour, 800 number call desk for our maintenance contract customers, a very expensive undertaking. Non-contract customers can call as well, but our per-call maintenance charge is $250/hour, with a minimum of three hours. If you only call us occasionally, it's a lot cheaper than a contract, but it's clearly designed to discourage trivial calls.

In 1996 a per-call customer called. "What does MSDOS stand for?" she asked. We told her. Her firm paid the $750 bill without demur.

Had a user that called the other day, complaining that all her files were "garbage" and that I should take her computer back and fix them. It turned out she was looking at system files. She couldn't read the binary code and assumed, therefore, that the files were corrupted.

One user -- a regular caller of ours -- got herself into some serious computer trouble when she set about cleaning up her system. She had been exploring the hard drive in the file manager and discovered hundreds of files in the Windows directory with all different file extensions. Being of an orderly mind, and with several hours of free time, she had created a TXT folder, a COM folder, a DLL folder, and so forth, and moved all the files into these subdirectories.

Two girls walked into the University's Linux cluster one time. They were obviously unfamiliar with computers and chatted with each other trying to figure everything out. I was doing my own work and had tuned out a lot of the conversation, but at one point one of them turned to me and asked how to get into Windows. "Type startx," I replied, for the Linux machines booted to a shell prompt, and you had to type "startx" to get into X-Windows. I never did find out if that worked for them or not, but they spent quite some time trying to correlate the instructions they had on paper (presumably given out in one of their classes) with what they were seeing on the screen. A full hour and a half passed, and finally one of them turned to me again and asked if this was the Microsoft Windows cluster. "No," I replied, "that's downstairs." It was hard to stifle the laughter until they were gone. An hour and a half before they realized they weren't even using the right operating system. Wow.

In what seems more and more like another life, some 15 years ago, I was an assistant in a computer lab belonging to the computer science department of my university. The lab consisted of a bunch of 286 IBM PS/2s with only a 3.5" floppy drive -- they had to boot with an operating system disk and then put in the program disk, and so forth.

One day a student was having problems booting up the computer. I went to see what was happening, because she was becoming increasingly vocal about the quality of the hardware and the incompetence of the people (me) who were supposed to maintain it. I found that she was trying to boot off a floppy with no operating system. So I tried to tell her that she needed a DOS diskette to boot the computer.

• Her: "Why?"
• Me: "Well, because without the operating system the computer just cannot work."
• Her: "But I don't need the operating system."
• Me: "I assure you, you do."
• Her: "No, you don't understand, I've already passed the operating systems exam. I'm preparing the coursework for simulation theory, so I don't need an operating system. I already passed. Really."
• Me: "I'm not talking about the exam. I am talking about the operating system for the computer."
• Her: "Why on earth should I want to put an operating system on the computer when I have already passed the exam? I need to study simulation theory, not operating systems! The arrogance! Now you want to tell me what I should study? You don't think I passed the exam on my merits alone? Huh?"

She stormed out of the lab and filed a formal complaint with the department's secretary. The worst part was that I got reprimanded, because, apparently, the senior management didn't know any better than she did. Yes, she graduated a couple of years later.

http://www.stumbleupon.com/su/612Shr/www.rinkworks.com/stupid/cs_os.shtml