I work at a major retailer, so I see all the 'winners'. Over the years there have been many, but one I always come back to.
I was working at a mail order place doing phone support, and a guy called up, and said we sent him a bad Seagate ST238R drive. This is an old style RLL drive, some of you may remeber them. So, this happes, and is possable, but I asked him if he tried to install it, and how he installed it, etc. When he says 'I heard these things have a hard time spinning up so I oiled the barrings.' I nearly fell out of my chair. I asked 'You oiled the barrings with what?'. He replyed 'I just took the top off and sprayed some WD-40 down there.' Needless to say it did not work at all, and I spent the next half hour explaining how he voided his warranty.
A "computer-savvy" friend of mine was networking 3 business computers for some people in his local church group. He was having problems, and asked me to come out to take a look at his setup. He was using coax cable between the three computers. The middle computer had the "T" connector, and the other two had the coax plugged directly into the NIC.
Edit: This is the same guy who's in his 3rd year of his Computer Engineering B.S. degree
Dumbass #30 - Submitted on 02-01-2002 by NightShift
Years ago when I was a tech, before today's network printing, we were asked to install a printer sharing "dongle" to all the PC's parallel ports in the office. Each PC was then daisy-chained to each other with RJ-11 "phone" wiring. After we were all done with the installation and wiring, we decided to give it a test. Before we could, however, the printer started printing garbage text on a bunch of pages. We didn't know what was going on, but reset the printer and it was fine again. About 10 minutes later, same thing happened. After rechecking the dongles and wiring, I found that one of the guys actually wired in one end of the daisy chain into a telephone jack! Every time someone called that line, the printer would go off instead of the telephone ringing!!! :)
My sister came to me and asked why she couldnt use her keyboard.. So I looked at the backside of the case and discovered that she had put the keyboard contact into the BNC plug on the network card.
back in high school a few friends and i told a kid that if you shuffle your feet around for a while (to build up static energy) and touch a metal piece on your computer that it will shock it and make it go faster. Funny thing is that he tried this on a computer in the library first and ended up in OSS for a week. I would feel sorry for him, but WHAT A DUMBASS!
When I was working at company X, we had Unisys replace bad parts with new ones for my techs to then put in users systems.....Well once one of their techs was suppossed to replace a hard drive, but the idiot decide to do it himself instead of giving it to the tech. This guy just unplugged the power supply cable(not from the wall), but the motherboard. Needless to say the whole dang system got fried. When asked why he unplugged it from the motherboard, hue replied "it is not safe to work on a computer that is turned on, so he just turned it off".......What an idiot.
Dumbass #128 - Submitted on 07-09-2002 by Ex_Dial_Up_Warrior
this one is about myself..i was buildiong my computer,and i got the whole thing together and i would get the blank screen with a blinking cursor..i checked it out and came to the conclusion that nothing was wrong..i disassembled the entire thing and double checked everything..turned it on,same thing..i then started replacing parts...when i got to the point where i was replacing my RAM i noticed that there was no ram in the comp and there hadny been the whole time...i felt stupid
friend of mine has more money than sense, he got him self a nice dual athalon system (tyan board) - spent a lot on it, few weeks ago, was cleaning out his case, took the heat sinks off, air dusted em, wanted to change something in the bios - figured the heat sinks didnt need to be on given that he was just going into the bios... from what i understand, the thermal paste on both chips actually set on fire (dont know if this is him exagerating!!) - two dead procs later..... dumbass!!
So im in a+ cert. And my teacher is talking about video cameras for some reason, and hes all like, youd think with these digital cameras it would just go right into the camera, not onto a tape or anything, just like how a Computer downloads and stores everything on the processor...
Obvisouly, hes an idiot.
Then another time in A+, we had a computer that when you'd boot up, it would just beep, screen wouldnt display anyting either. Stupid teacher was like, " I think its the hard drive, lets take it out" and me and my friend just bust out laughing and were like. you numskull its the bios, popped battery out, popped it back in. worked fine.
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