This section is from the document '/fun/Humor/Types of Users'. From rec.humor.funny Mon Mar 16 10:38:56 1992 From: samjones@leo.unm.edu (Sam Jones) Newsgroups: rec.humor.funny Subject: Nine Types of Users Keywords: original, original, funny, computer Date: 14 Mar 92 00:30:05 GMT This is my own, though the style is a blatant copy of Matt Groening. Scon is short for Student Consultant. Scons are people hired to help users learn and work with the university's machinery. A pod is a UNM term for a place where such machinery is made available.
El Explicito - "I tried the thing, ya know, and it worked, ya know, but now it doesn't, ya know?"
Advantages: Provides interesting communication challenges.
Disadvantages: So do chimps.
Symptoms: Complete inability to use proper nouns
Real Case: One user walked up to a certain Armenian pod manager and said,
"I can't get what I want!" The pod manager leaned back, put
his hands on his belt-buckle, and said, "Well, ma'am, you've
come to the right place."
Mad Bomber - "Well, I hit ALT-f6, shift-f8, CNTRL-f10, f4, and f9, and now it looks all weird."
Advantages: Will try to find own solution to problems.
Disadvantages: User might have translated document to Navajo without
meaning to.
Symptoms: More than six stopped jobs in UNIX, a 2:1 code-to-letter
ratio in WordPerfect
Real Case: One user came in complaining that his WordPerfect document
was underlined. When I used reveal codes on it, I found
that he'd set and unset underline more than fifty times in
his document.
Frying Pan/Fire Tactician - "It didn't work with the data set we had, so I fed in my aunt's recipe for key lime pie."
Advantages: Will usually fix error.
Disadvantages: 'Fix' is defined VERY loosely here.
Symptoms: A tendancy to delete lines that get errors instead of
fixing them.
Real Case: One user complained that their program executed, but
didn't do anything. The scon looked at it for twenty
minutes before realizing that they'd commented out
EVERY LINE. The user said, "Well, that was the only
way I could get it to compile."
Shaman - "Last week, when the moon was full, the clouds were thick, and formahaut was above the horizon, I typed f77, and lo, it did compile."
Advantages: Gives insight into primative mythology.
Disadvantages: Few scons are anthropology majors.
Symptoms: Frequent questions about irrelavent objects.
Real Case: One user complained that all information on one of their
disks got erased (as Norton Utilities showed nothing but
empty sectors, I suspect nothing had ever been on it).
Reasoning that the deleted information went *somewhere*,
they wouldn't shut up until the scon checked four different
disks for the missing information.
X-user - "Will you look at those. . .um, that resolution, quite impressive, really."
Advantages: Using the cutting-edge in graphics technology.
Disadvantages: Has little or no idea how to use the cutting-edge in
graphics technology.
Symptoms: Fuzzy hands, blindness
Real Case: When I was off duty, two users sat down in front of me
at DEC station 5000/200s that systems was reconfiguring.
I suppressed my laughter while, for twenty minutes, they
sat down and did their best to act like they were doing
exectly what they wanted to do, even though they couldn't
log in.
Miracle Worker - "But it read a file from it yesterday!" 'Sir, at a guess, this disk has been swallowed and regurgitated.' "But I did that a month ago, and it read a file from it yesterday!"
Advantages: Apparently has remarkable luck when you aren't around.
Disadvantages: People complain when scons actually use the word
'horse-puckey'.
Symptoms: Loses all ability to do impossible when you're around.
Must be the kryptonite in your pocket.
Real Case: At least three users have claimed that they've loaded
IBM WordPerfect from Macintosh disks.
Taskmaster - "Well, this is a file in MacWrite. Do you know how I can upload it to MUSIC, transfer it over to UNIX from there, download it onto an IBM, convert it to WordPerfect, and put it in three-column format?"
Advantages: Bold new challanges.
Disadvantages: Makes one wish to be a garbage collector.
Symptoms: An inability to keep quiet. Strong tendancies to make
machines do things they don't want to do.
Real Case: One user tried to get a scon to find out what another
person's E-mail address was even though the user didn't
know his target's home system, account name, or real name.
Maestro - "Well, first I sat down, like this. Then I logged on, like this, and after that, I typed in my password, like this, and after that I edited my file, like this, and after that I went to this line here, like this, and after that I picked my nose, like this. . ."
Advantages: Willing to show you exactly what they did to get an error.
Disadvantages: For as long as five or six hours.
Symptoms: Selective deafness to the phrases, "Right, right, okay,
but what was the ERROR?", and a strong fondness for
the phrase, "Well, I'm getting to that."
Real Case: I once had to spend half an hour looking over a user's
shoulder while they continuously retrieved a document
into itself and denied that they did it (the user was
complaining that their document was 87 copies of the
same thing).
Princess - (unfair, perhaps, as these tend, overwhelmingly, to be males) - "I need a Mac, and someone's got the one I like reserved, would you please garrote him and put him in the paper recycling bin?"
Advantages: Flatters you with their high standards for your service.
Disadvantages: Impresses you with their obliviousness to other people
on this planet.
Symptoms: Inability to communicate except by complaining.
Real Case: One asked a scon to remove the message of the day because
he (the user) didn't like it.
Selected by Brad Templeton. MAIL your joke (jokes ONLY) to funny@clarinet.com. Attribute the joke's source if at all possible. A Daemon will auto-reply.
Please don't send me requests of the form, "could you please send me the joke about XXX?" Yes, I have it, but if I were willing to let myself be a joke server I would spend all day doing it. I reject all such requests.