[John Corn]

IDIOTS IN SERVICE:
This week, all our office phones went dead and I had to contact the telephone repair people. They promised to> be out between 8:00 a.m. and 7:00 p.m. When I asked if they could give me a smaller time window, the pleasant gentleman asked, "Would you like us to call you before we come?" I replied that I didn't see how he would be able to do that, since our phones weren't working. He also requested that we report future outages by email (Does YOUR e-mail work without a telephone line?).

IDIOTS AT WORK:
I was signing the receipt for my credit card purchase when the clerk noticed I had never signed my name on the back of the credit card. She informed me that she could not complete the transaction unless the card was signed. When I asked why, she explained that it was necessary to compare the signature. I had just signed on the receipt. So I signed the credit card in front of her. She carefully compared that signature to the one I had just signed on the receipt. As luck would have it, they matched.

IDIOTS IN THE NEIGHBORHOOD:
I live in a semi-rural area. We recently had a new neighbor call
the local township administrative office to request the removal of the Deer Crossing sign on our road. The reason: too many deer were being hit by cars and he didn't want them to cross there anymore.

IDIOTS IN FOOD SERVICE:
My daughter went to a local Taco Bell and ordered a taco. She asked the person behind the counter for "minimal lettuce." He said he was sorry, but they only had iceberg.

IDIOT SIGHTING #1:
I was at the airport, checking in at the gate when an airport
employee asked " Has anyone put anything in your baggage without your knowledge?" To which replied, "If it was without my knowledge, how would I know?" He smiled knowingly and nodded, "That's why we ask."

IDIOT SIGHTING #2:
The stoplight on the corner buzzes when it's safe to cross the
street. I was crossing with an intellectually-challenged coworker
of mine when she asked if I knew what the buzzer was for. I
explained that it signals blind people when the light is red. Appalled, she responded, "What on earth are blind people doing
driving?" (I love this one!)

IDIOT SIGHTING #3:
At a good-bye luncheon for an old and dear coworker who is leaving the company due to "down sizing", our manager commented cheerfully,
"This is fun. We should do this more often." Not a word was spoken. We all just looked at each other with that deer-in-the-headlights stare.

IDIOT SIGHTING #4:
I work with an individual who plugged her power strip back into
itself and for the life of her couldn't understand why her system would not turn on.

IDIOT SIGHTING #5:
When my husband and I arrived at an automobile dealership to pick Up our car we were told the keys had been locked in it. We went to the service department and found a mechanic working feverishly to unlock the driver's side door. As I watched from the passenger side, instinctively tried the door handle and discovered that it was unlocked. "Hey," I announced to the technician, "it's open!" To which he replied, "I know -I already got that side."

 

[Richard King]

(Does YOUR e-mail work without a telephone line?).

Yep.

Good ones though. :lol:

 

[The Old Wizard]

Those were great John. I have one for you. The bank in my neighborhood has a drive up ATM machine that you do not have to get out of the car to access. In fact it is not safe to do so. Now some idiot in the bank has put braille dots on all of the buttons, & instructions below the screen. Makes you wonder how all those blind drivers are going to find that drive up ATM machine. :shrug:

 

[RichW]

O.W.

I actually asked my bank why they did the same. It turns out that they interpret it as complying with the Americans with Disabilities Act. It allows a blind passenger in the backseat to use the ATM, or to walkup, ans do their own banking without assistance.

 

[Dmitriy]

Here is good one. I took a computer class back in 1994. Remember those old thin 5" disks? Well in my computer class all computers had only 3.5" disk drives. One student brought his old 5" disk, folded it in half and tried to insert it in the 3.5" drive. No one said a word or laughed until he asked why it doesn't work.

 

[Richard King]

Gee, flashbacks. When I took a computer class in college programs were stored on stacks of punched cards and big mag tape reels. Part of taking the programming class (Fortran IV) was learning how to operate the punch card machine. But then, the Burroughs computer and associated tape drives, punch card machines, etc. that my programs were run on took up a space about the size of my house so I guess things were a bit different. I never did try to run one of those mag tape reels on my reel to reel stereo machine, but if I did I would have had to fold it in half also, lengthwise.

 

[Neil Derryberry]

OT, but I used to operate a couple of Burroughs (unisys) mainframes.... series v's, I believe.

Ever seen one of those GCR tape drives "run away"? What a mess.... mag tape everywhere.

 

[Richard King]

More OT.
Ah, but these Burroughs machines were before the Sperry/Burroughs merger. This would have been circa 1969/70 or so. I have lost control of an occasional reel of tape in the recording studio I used to have. I would buy my tape in 10 1/2" bulk "pancakes" which had the plastic center, but no aluminum reel flanges nor individual boxes. They were shipped 12 to a box with Styrofoam sheets between them. Once in a rare while when transferring the pancake to a reel it would get away from me and I would have 2500 feet of tape in a pile on the floor. I never did this with recorded tape thank goodness, just a couple of times while transferring blank tape. The real test was to run the tape pancakes on the machine with no flanges. A good vertical mounted transport could do this all day and never spill any tape. A horizontal transport would work fine with no upper flange.

 

[RJS1111111]

At college, 1974 and later, there was a Burroughs B6700 mainframe in the basement (later upgraded to a B6800).

There was an Hazeltine terminal sitting at a Remote Job
Entry station elsewhere on campus. Almost nobody else
ever used it when I first tried it out. I found out that you
could edit and submit your batch jobs from the terminal,
and get a priority boost over those who waited in line to
submit their card decks, then often waited a long time
for the jobs to run, and for the print-outs to arrive at the
RJE printer, or at the front desk in the basement. Man,
did I ever feel like I was living on the high-tech edge!
19.2 Kbaud was dizzyingly fast!

You had to turn in a deck of cards for most assignments,
so I found out how to output my batch job to punched
cards, then run the deck through a keypunch interpreter
to print the characters at the top of the cards. Having
to do this only once per assignment really cut down on
the amount of time spent at a noisy keypunch in a
cramped, stagnant basement.