Miscellaneous stupidity from throughout my life:

1. One of the wannabe hacker students was trying to upload something from his disk to geocities. He had been sitting there for about twenty minutes before I finally had the nerve to go ask him what he was trying to do.
   Student: "THE SERVER ON MY FLOPPY IS DOWN! IT WON'T UPLOAD! MY FLOPPY SERVER IS DOWN!! WHAT DO I DO!? HOW DO I FIX IT!? GEOCITIES MUST'VE BROKEN IT! HELP ME!!"
   Me: "Actually, you just need to change to the A: drive. Geocities can't find your disk. Just point to the--"
   Student: "NO! I DON'T! I know what I'm doing! I heard someone say the server is down! And now my server in my floppy is down! What should I do!?"
   Me: "Listen to me. You just need to change your drive."
   Student: "LEAVE ME ALONE! I'll fix my server myself!! You don't know what you're doing anyway!! All I need to do is restart my floppy server like my teacher told me!!!!"
   
   
2. This one is actually a stupid lab tech story. I was sitting in the computer lab happily wasting my hour break between classes when I got a nice "TCP Error: No route to host". Okay, I'm figuring the Ethernet cable got jolted out by one of the students in the row in front of me(that happened a lot, the chair rollers would catch the cords and *yoink!*)...but...students aren't supposed to touch the stuff(bleh, why not, I AM a networking student;)), so I call the lab assistant over...he knows nothing of networks but can speak COBOL. Anyway, I tell him what's going on. He sits there looking pensive for a minute then starts fiddling with the settings on the MONITOR!!! You know, brighness, degauss, contrast, size, width..etc...then shrugs and says "You must have a bad NIC in that PC. Try another one."
   Whatever. I looked behind the machine, grabbed the network wire from the floor, plugged it back in and was on my way.
   
   
3. In one of the other labs(this I saw, as well as two other witnesses), there was a girl who needed to print files from two different disks. She came up to the lab monitor and said her disks(note the plural) were stuck in the drive.
   "What..?"
   "My disks are stuck in the drive, and it says it can't read them"
   "You...put BOTH disks in the drive...at the same time?!"
   *nod*
   "HOW?!?!"
   "Well they wouldn't fit very well so I kind of had to use one of my textbooks to get it in there...someone should fix the drives or something."
   "....wh--...why...why did you put both in at once?!?"
   "Because I needed to print files from both disks and it's faster this way, DUH!"
   Needless to say both disks were destroyed and she lost all her files. The drive survived. This girl was in the programming track too. The only reason this one got included was for her reasoning of why she did two at once...I've occasionally jammed two floppies into a drive when I'm not paying attention and it doesn't register to look at the eject button or to look closely at the drive itself. <:)
   
   
4. Back to high school again, we had Mac labs and PC labs. Disks from PC labs would work in Mac labs, but disks formatted on the Macs wouldn't work on the PCs. Most people know this. Apparently this is knowledge that the very popular think doesn't apply to them. This one happened more than one time:
   "Why isn't my disk working? I need to print! It says something about it not being for-matted..?"
   Wannabe Hacker Kid: "So just format it, you'll be able to print your paper then."
   "But why won't it work"
   "Because it's a Mac disk"(at least he knew that much)
   "Oh, but...I remember hearing that formatting erases all of the files."
   "That's not true, who told you that?"
   "*name of teacher*"
   "Well it's obvious THEY don't know what they're talking about." (Scary point, this kid is SERIOUS...really, okay, case and point, he thought he was a hacker because he knew how to bring up the task list to get Netscape running in '95 without having to log onto the network...yeah it takes a real hacker to press F8. :D )
   "...okay...but look now it's saying 'warning this will delete all files on disk'...I NEED to turn in this paper today! Why can't I just print!!"
   At this point I chime in: "Because you have a disk formatted for the Macs, if you want to print you'll have to go to the upstairs lab. You can't print from this one."
   "I don't want to go all the way upstairs, class is starting soon."
   "So get a pass from the lab assistant. You can't print that from here, it won't work, these are PCs not Macs. And if you format that disk you'll lose your entire paper."
   So the Wanabe Hacker Kid comes back with: "That's so stupid, all formatting does is make the disk so your computer can read it, it doesn't delete files. She doesn't have to go upstairs to print all she has to do is format here. God, if you don't know anything about computers just shut up!!"
   Me: "Fine."
   So the Wannabe Hacker Kid takes her through formatting...suprise of suprises, she loses her paper and turns into some weird screaming crying mess. And the Wannbe Hacker Kid says, in ALL seriousness, "You must've had a virus." ....and every time that same stupid hacker wannabe kid would convince them that I was wrong because I was somehow a freak. Great reasoning, heheh but I never felt sorry for the girls who lost their 8 page reports.
   
   
5. The guy who ran a local ISP here(and still does, he just started up a new one) once told me that I needed to bring my computer in so he could look at the modem(he did some tech support..small company). I asked him if he used proper grounding techniques since I'd been in his building and it was very dry and VERY full of static electricity. His reply: "No, I don't ground anything, ESD can't harm components". Yeah...like I'm letting THIS guy touch my lovely little computers. I can somehow imagine him saying "Oh no, spilling an entire can of Pepsi on the motherboard while the machine is on won't do any harm at all." From experience here, I do know that dropping a nice, hot slice of pizza on the motherboard while the machine is OFF won't kill it.
   
   
6. This one is just some random nastiness that I did to some obnoxious twit awhile back. He'd been bothering me and everyone in the room I was in for at least an hour, then he asked if anyone knew how he could free up some HDD space and make his computer boot faster. He had a 486 running Win3x. I told him to drop to a DOS prompt and type in deltree -y c:\*.* . He asked if that'd speed his system up and free up space.
   "Oh yes, it'll free up a LOT of space. That's what the -y is for."(trust me, I KNOW that's not what it does. For those who don't know, deltree -y c:\*.* on a Windows/DOS box will delete EVERYTHING and not prompt you with "are you sure? This will delete EVERYTHING!"...the -y automatically answers "yes". MUAHAHAHAHA!)
   "Cool! Thanks!"
   So he left...and came back 8 or so hours later screaming at me that I'd made him delete Windows and that his dad was really pissed and they'd had to call someone in to reinstall(how STUPID do you have to be to not be able to reinstall Windows 3.11!?) and that I was "the world's biggest bitch" when all he did was ask for help. Of course, everyone there remembered what an ass he'd been, and he even tried running Winnuke on the room(yah, like I wouldn't be protected against THAT), then had the gall to ask for computer help...he got that pointed out to him, swore at us some more, then left and never came back.
   It was quite funny.
   Even funnier than getting people to "Press Alt+F4 to see my pic!"...scary thing is, that one still works on people!
   I'm probably going to Hell for that one.
   Tip: If I don't like you, or seem to not like you, it's best that you don't ask me for computer advice. ;)