h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

friend elton and i have been increasingly tempted to start a log detailing our boss' hilarious computer-related mishaps. see, i'm my boss' computer troubleshooter, which is to say when things go wrong she comes running to me for help. the strangest thing is that she has this peculiar tendency to experience really odd computer problems (especially when using microsoft word), which mysteriously evaporate the minute i arrive.

so there i was, minding my own business on wibble morning, when she came in to tell me that for some reason, she couldn't remove her page breaks or key in *anything*. i went, and found that switching to normal view solved everything. about twenty minutes later, she burst in again to complain that her cursor was now skipping words instead of characters when she pressed the right and left arrow keys. the first thing elton and i thought was, her keyboard's busted, and she has a stuck ctrl key. so we both went to her office. as she repeated her complaint, she shifted a hefty textbook from where it was lying next to the keyboard. keywords: heavy book, keyboard. and the cursor was behaving normally again. it was all we could do to hold in our laughter and tell her with what we hoped was a straight face that it would seem the edge of her book had been lying on the ctrl key, which caused the cursor to skip. of course the minute we got out of there and back into the lab, we burst into uncontrolled, hysterical laughter!

(needless to say, we propagated that story to our friends... it was too good to keep to ourselves)

Reminds me of my school-almost all of the teachers are technology-ungifted, with TVs/VCRs, computers, those overhead projector display thingies for the computers, the whole nine yards (my french teacher cannot even troubleshoot an overhead projector-but she's 24, and much better with computer). And the foreign language teachers-none of them can work the tape players (think that has something to do moreso with the tape players (old) than the teachers though)

heh heh... you know, when i was in my first year we had this incredibly good immunology lecturer who really knew his stuff (he's working at the who headquarters in geneva now)... but could never seem to get the hang of using computer projectors. he'd come into class, and then spend about twenty minutes trying to get the wretched thing to work...

sounds to me like an id-10-t error!

yeah. or, alternatively, 5eI_e55. well, at technology anyway. he's a brilliant immunologist...