I used to love reading all of these Computer Stupidities, but not until I started working at a job where everyone started looking to me to solve their computer problems, did I find myself actually experiencing these stories.

One for the board:

After a nice thunderstorm the night before, I came in to work to find a message on my voicemail. It was from one of the ladies in Loans (I work in a small-town credit union). Her computer was not working. First thing I thought to myself was that lightning must have fried it. It's no secret around here that people just don't have enough sense to plug electronics up to a surge protector.

So I meander down to her office and look at her monitor, which had the amber light on it (monitor has power and is on, but not connected). That meant that the monitor was fine. I looked down at the tower for the computer and tried the power button. It came on instantly. Seems that the power had merely flickered off and on quickly, causing her computer to "not work" (i.e. turn off). I asked her if she had tried the power button, and she confessed that she didn't. Her reply, however, made this a classic. "But when I left work yesterday, I left my computer on!"

Are there many middle-aged people who aren't familiar with the concept of a power outage?


Same person, a few months later. We have wireless mouse/keyboard setups on the Loan department computers. She calls me up to let me know her mouse doesn't work anymore. I ask if it was that the batteries died, but she replied that she just replaced them not a week before. Halfway convinced she might actually be right, I went down there to check out the situation. The keyboard worked, but the mouse didn't. Since the two devices go through the same sensor, I knew that it would have to be a problem with the mouse itself. So I told her I would take a look at it, and in the meantime replaced it with a new set from storage that we kept on hand.

I took the set back to my office to think of what could cause the mouse to not work. After all, the optical light was on, so it couldn't be that it was broken. I thought, perhaps, the lens was scratched, so I started to clean it with one of those electronic device wipes. When I looked at the wipe, it was pure blue. Evidently, she had been poking at the lens with her blue ink pen in attempts, from what I can assume, to "reset the mouse". There is a reset button on these mouses that, when you change out the batteries, you have to push to resync up with the sensor. I cleaned off the lens, but decided to keep the set back where I could make sure no one else would doodle on the lens.