One of my early jobs, when I was a lowly student, was as a computer site monitor for the University library. My duties were fairly simple: When people came in, they needed to fill out a short form and leave their ID card. I’d give them a number corresponding to a computer and file their ID under that number. When they left, they’d give me back the number card, I’d give them back their ID and I’d put the form in a box for a supervisor to do the site statistics with later.
It wasn’t too complicated, but somehow people would still manage to screw things up.
Some of the worst offenders were the football players. They’d want to sit next to their friends, so they’d trade number cards with other people or they’d ignore the ‘Out Of Order’ signs on some of the machines. One night was particularly bad, with a couple of people coming back after discovering that they had the wrong ID cards. After I’d gotten that mess straightened out, one of the footballers hurried up to the desk with a worried look on his face.
“My computer screen went black!”
“Where are you sitting?”
“At that one!”
“The one with the smoke coming out of it?”
“Yeah! What do I do?”
“TURN IT OFF!”
After that, people were a lot better about paying attention to Out Of Order notices…
The reason I’m dredging up this ancient history is that I found a wonderful site collecting some of the greatest tales of tech support horror and administrative bungling that I’ve ever read. It’s called the Shark Tank, and it’s a regular back-page column over at Computerworld. Be warned that the archives are huge, so don’t go there if you’ve got a lot of work to do today…