Exchanges with People that Make Your Brain Hurt

[Twik]

Back in the late 70s, I worked for a large electronics manufacturer in Silicon Valley.  I was not even a tech; Just a "rework girl."  My supervisor assigned me to entering failure data into a program he wrote.  His program writing abilities were only slightly more advanced than my data entry skills.  I made a typographic error while entering data, so I hit "delete."  The delete button didn't do anything, so I typed in "delete."

How was I supposed to know that would delete the program itself and all the data.  My supervisor yelled at me.  A lot.  I was computer-phobic for several years because I didn't know how everything could go *poof* in the blink of an eye.  Elvis-has-left-the-room gone.  No warning message.  Nothing.  Probably because my supervisor thought warning messages were unnecessary and he didn't think about the possibility of the data entry clerk hitting the wrong key.

Back in the Palaeolithic Era, when I was in high school, we got computer classes in our last year. We didn't have PCs - we got terminals, with a certain amount of computing time leased from the mainframe at the local university.

Logging in and out of the terminal took a lot of arcane commands. Sometimes, you could think you were logged out, but you hadn't hit the final button to achieve that state.

In the first month, one student, Friday afternoon, was working on computing, I think, the value of "e" for logarithms. It's an irrational number, with no end. He THOUGHT he had closed the program, and logged out.

On Monday, the school discovered it had no computing time left for the year.

[Midge]

C:\Dos

C:\Dos Run

Run, Dos. Run


Sorry.  Couldn't resist

LOL!! Love it! : )

I played around one day with my cell phone's speaker feature (as in it allows you to dictate what you want it to do. Not an iPhone so it's not Siri but similar.

I tried to have it call DH.   

"Call DH'sname"
"Calling Karen."
"Cancel.  Call Dhsname"
"I do not see an entry for candle. Who do you want me to call?"
"Call Dhsname"
"Do you want me to open Kindle?"

I gave up.

I tried that with my phone:
Me: Call Pat's Cell [which is what hubby's phone is called in my phone].
Phone: Call Hansel?
Me: Call PAT'S    CELL
Phone: Call HANSEL?
Me: *sigh* Yes, and get Gretel on the line while you're at it.

[Morticia]

^ I think your phone may have a crush on Jeremy Renner.

[Virg]

jedikaiti wrote:

"What about Major Malfunction?"

He was ordered into the field by Kernel Panic and hasn't been seen since.

I just encountered a brain-breaker due to misreading a post in another thread.  It was this, by Redneck Gravy:

"My oldest DD just had a fit about Valentine's Day this year.  She has two children 3 & 9 months and could not get a babysitter and wanted me to keep the kids for her.  I had plans I was not willing to change."

I actually spent a minute trying to figure out how her DD had two children six months apart before I got what she meant.

Virg

[Diane AKA Traska]

^ I think your phone may have a crush on Jeremy Renner.

I think you and I remember Siri very differently.

[Christabeldreams]

Just a few months ago, I had a conversation that made my brain hurt. Reading this thread brought it back to mind.
B/g: I belong to a costume/anime club and for people's birthdays we usually all go in on a relatively inexpensive item like a dvd box set or cheap cosplay.
Names and details have been changed.
It was a few weeks to my friend Primrose's birthday, and I got a call from the club president that went like this:
James: So, I found a wedding costume for Primrose we could order. And of course, I’ll contribute.
Me: (knowing Primrose is currently making her own costume) I think Primrose is already working on a wedding costume, but we could get her some accessories.
James: I can pay for some of it.
Me: Yeah, but I think she’s working on a wedding costume
James: I can get some others to chip in as well
James: I’ll send you the link to it over facebook.
Me: *getting annoyed*
I don’t remember the rest of the conversation, but he did end up sending me the link, reiterating he would contribute money.  The money wasn’t really the issue. It was more me wondering if Primrose would even want the costume what with her making her own. I eventually convinced James to help me buy her some accessories, something I knew she would want. She did finish her costume and it was much nicer than the cheap one we would have bought her.

[laud_shy_girl]

jedikaiti wrote:

"What about Major Malfunction?"

He was ordered into the field by Kernel Panic and hasn't been seen since.

I just encountered a brain-breaker due to misreading a post in another thread.  It was this, by Redneck Gravy:

"My oldest DD just had a fit about Valentine's Day this year.  She has two children 3 & 9 months and could not get a babysitter and wanted me to keep the kids for her.  I had plans I was not willing to change."

I actually spent a minute trying to figure out how her DD had two children six months apart before I got what she meant.

Virg

you are not alone. I did the same thing.

[ClaireC79]

Or she could be Sadie Budden http://www.thedailystar.net/newDesign/latest_news.php?nid=44802

[Free Range Hippy Chick]

How was I supposed to know that would delete the program itself and all the data.  My supervisor yelled at me.  A lot.  I was computer-phobic for several years because I didn't know how everything could go *poof* in the blink of an eye.  Elvis-has-left-the-room gone.  No warning message.  Nothing.  Probably because my supervisor thought warning messages were unnecessary and he didn't think about the possibility of the data entry clerk hitting the wrong key.

When I was a Very Young Hippy Chick, my employer was just beginning to think about the possibility of there being computers in the office for the staff - so they got one. I knew enough to create a basic baby spreadsheet to add things up, which made me the office expert. Now this probably won't mean anything to non-UK readers, and won't mean much to half the UK readers, but what I did know, I had learned on a Sinclair QL - which meant that at a very early stage, I had learned the Three Absolute Rules of the Computer:

1. Back it up.
2. No, honestly, back it up.
3. SERIOUSLY, I'M NOT KIDDING HERE, BACK IT UP!

So when the man from the computer company came to call, I asked him about backing it up. He assured me there was no need: he had, he said, never heard of a hard drive failing. (Even then I knew this to be a brain-hurty moment.) I insisted, and he rolled his eyes and humoured me, taught me how to back it up (onto floppies but that's another story), and every Friday night I ran the backup twice, put one set of floppies in my desk and took the other set home for safety.

I had a panicky phone call one evening: everything was gone. Everything. But I had backup disks, hadn't I?

I did. Left hand top drawer.

So what should Co-worker do with them?

I had no idea. I knew I had been told, and I knew I had written it down, but I had never needed to do it and off-hand I didn't remember where I had filed the notes. I would find them for her in the morning, or she could call Computer Guy and get him to talk her through it.

CW fell about laughing. I had a backup but I didn't know how to restore it? Just how pointless was that?

'Co-worker, which of us has taken the backup that is going to save your bacon tomorrow? Who knows that the How To notes exist because she wrote them? That would be me. And which of us was the idiot who did Control-Alt-Delete *.* and then read the warning that says 'this will wipe everything, confirm Y/N' and did it anyway? Oh yes, that would be you.'

She brought me cake the next day.

[jedikaiti]

By contrast I've made my best friend feel old when she's shown me pictures of some items she grew up with and I wasn't quite sure what they were.  Such as the washing machines that had the rollers you'd feed your clothes through to dry them.

I have a number of friends who are a good decade and change younger than I am, and I am sure I make their brains hurt. I'll start to make some pop culture reference that predates them, then catch myself. "Oh, wait, that was before you were born." Of course I look really young (apparently), so they tend to forget I'm that much older until I have one of those brain farts - but I come in very handy on trivia night. <G>

[Outdoor Girl]

By contrast I've made my best friend feel old when she's shown me pictures of some items she grew up with and I wasn't quite sure what they were.  Such as the washing machines that had the rollers you'd feed your clothes through to dry them.

I have a number of friends who are a good decade and change younger than I am, and I am sure I make their brains hurt. I'll start to make some pop culture reference that predates them, then catch myself. "Oh, wait, that was before you were born." Of course I look really young (apparently), so they tend to forget I'm that much older until I have one of those brain farts - but I come in very handy on trivia night. <G>

When I started my current job, we had several weeks of training that forced a group of about 25 of us together for an extended period.  One of the girls in our group was quite young but not only that, she was a diplomat's kid and had lived all over the world.  She missed a lot of pop culture references.  At one of our conferences, there was going to be a 'fun' event that was an afternoon boat cruise.  We had to sign up for it.  One of my coworkers let our supervisor know that he and I were interested as long as it wasn't a 'three hour tour'.  She didn't get the reference; even after we explained it, she was totally lost.

[Piratelvr1121]

By contrast I've made my best friend feel old when she's shown me pictures of some items she grew up with and I wasn't quite sure what they were.  Such as the washing machines that had the rollers you'd feed your clothes through to dry them.

I have a number of friends who are a good decade and change younger than I am, and I am sure I make their brains hurt. I'll start to make some pop culture reference that predates them, then catch myself. "Oh, wait, that was before you were born." Of course I look really young (apparently), so they tend to forget I'm that much older until I have one of those brain farts - but I come in very handy on trivia night. <G>

That's rather how it is with friend and I.  For the first few years we were friends (it's been about 5 years now, I think), whenever she'd joke "I'm old enough to be your mama!" I'd think "No you're not, no way!"  She definitely looked younger than my mother, and dressed younger.  Not too young, just not in the way I was used to women of my mother's age dressing in our area.   Chico's, Talbot's, that sort of store.  Friend dresses more like I do in boho style shirts and broomstick skirts.

Course it dawned on me "Oh yeah, the age difference between us is the same as the age difference between myself and my oldest."

Friend usually explains references to me if I didn't see whatever it was she's talking about, like Dark Shadows.

[jpcher]

Back in the late 70s, I worked for a large electronics manufacturer in Silicon Valley.  I was not even a tech; Just a "rework girl."  My supervisor assigned me to entering failure data into a program he wrote.  His program writing abilities were only slightly more advanced than my data entry skills.  I made a typographic error while entering data, so I hit "delete."  The delete button didn't do anything, so I typed in "delete."

How was I supposed to know that would delete the program itself and all the data.  My supervisor yelled at me.  A lot.  I was computer-phobic for several years because I didn't know how everything could go *poof* in the blink of an eye.  Elvis-has-left-the-room gone.  No warning message.  Nothing.  Probably because my supervisor thought warning messages were unnecessary and he didn't think about the possibility of the data entry clerk hitting the wrong key.

Back in the Palaeolithic Era, when I was in high school, we got computer classes in our last year. We didn't have PCs - we got terminals, with a certain amount of computing time leased from the mainframe at the local university.

Logging in and out of the terminal took a lot of arcane commands. Sometimes, you could think you were logged out, but you hadn't hit the final button to achieve that state.

In the first month, one student, Friday afternoon, was working on computing, I think, the value of "e" for logarithms. It's an irrational number, with no end. He THOUGHT he had closed the program, and logged out.

On Monday, the school discovered it had no computing time left for the year.

(I can't believe I'm trying to do a one-upmanship on an age related topic. )


In my first computer programming class Sr. year in HS we had to completely fill in little tiny squares with a No.2 pencil on index card type things. Each card was a line of computer code, with if/then statements, questions, answers, etc. telling the computer what to do. Depending on the complexity of your program, you could easily have a stack of cards 3 inches tall.

Then you took your stack of cards and fed it into this monstrosity computer thing. There was a monitor and keyboard attached to the computer where your program was played . . . asking your questions. If you answered the question correctly it would do this, if you answered wrong it would do that. How cool is that?

Troubleshooting the program was oh, so tediously brain-hurty! Maybe somewhere on one of those hundreds of cards you didn't fill in a little square correctly (went out of the lines, wasn't dark enough) AND! Heaven forbid, if your cards somehow were out of order? (Someone dropped their stack of cards once. That was a major tragedy!)



The real brain-hurty part? Is that I just realized what a geek I was back in HS! I passed that class with an 'A+' and was actually a bit sad that I wasn't able to take more classes like that.

[LauraW]

By contrast I've made my best friend feel old when she's shown me pictures of some items she grew up with and I wasn't quite sure what they were.  Such as the washing machines that had the rollers you'd feed your clothes through to dry them.
[When I was a child, my mom had this type of washer. The "rollers" were called the wringer, because they wrung the water out of the clothes. This is the origin of the expression "put me through the wringer". The word is frequently written as ringer-which makes no sense. Sort of like the phrase "give her free rein". It refers to riding a horse- not reign/quote]

[Reika]

Tonight I had a caller that is the same age as my mom (58) tell me she didn't know that you could void a check.