Mice!

Last week, someone stopped me in the hall and asked me to get a mouse for someone else's computer. I asked if the computer was missing a mouse. He told me that he wasn't sure, but whenever someone uses that computer they ask him for a mouse.

I walk down and take a look. There is a mouse, but it isn't plugged in. If the mouse doesn't work, why wouldn't someone check to see if the cable is actually plugged in? I am surrounded by many brilliant, brilliant people.

Red Stuff!

On Friday, I received a frantic call at 5:30pm requesting I restore a file from backup. I asked what was wrong with the file and I was told that it crashed. When Word recovered it, there was "a bunch of red stuff" in it.

I requested that the user forward me the document. When I opened it up, it was obvious that track changes was on and that the changes were highlighted in red. WTF? Red stuff? It says the name of the person and what the change was.

Yes, I turned off track changes and forwarded it back...suggesting that they look up track changes in the Word help files. I'm glad I asked before going to restore from back up tape.

Real Email Subject

Someone in my departmet received an email yesterday with the subject "My laptop took a shower".

Though I could write more, I think that is enough said.

3 Steps...

Today, I was trying to help someone in a remote site. They needed to install a program and didn't have enough rights to do so.

Easy enough, I gave him the local administrator login information and explained that he needed to do three things to login.

1. Type the username: administrator
2. Type the password: loozer (just an example)
3. Change the domain from companyx to his computer name

Guess what? He screwed it up and called me back because it didn't work. So I sit there on the phone while I wait for him to do this step by step. Do you know what the problem was? He didn't change the username to administrator. He left his name in the field.

"Wha Happened"

Did you ever see the movie, A Mighty Wind? This character in it always says, "Wha happened?". For some reason that came to mind today when trying to help out with a problem.

Today one of my more special users managed to lose 130 scans they had done on our large format scanner. Basically she scanned in 130 drawings and saved the files somewhere, but has no idea where. How on earth can you say 130 files, 1 at a time, and not know where you put them?

After much searching, we found 1/3 of them in her temporary internet files, but we still have no idea where the rest are. During the search, I wanted to check a temporary and hidden system folder that Outlook uses because she kept mentioning the OKL folder. What she meant was OLK and it is where Outlook stores temporary copies of attachments you may have opened.

The easiest way to get to the OLK folder is to open a Word or Excel file from an email and then do a save as. That allows you to view what is in the folder. Warning: Geek speak, skip to next paragraph if you are easily bored. Later if you need to get to it, you could type the full path. Unfortunately, you can't browse to it, because windows tries to protect the folder.

I asked her to open an Excel or Word file from her email, so we could view what was in the OLK folder. She proceeded to scroll through messages and look at the ones that didn't have attachments. I actually had to point out that the ones with attachments have a paper clip next to them.

WTF?

She also asked me to delete a copier which was not networked from our network today. Hmmmm.