The Daily Funny - 7th May 2010 (3)

Magic Email?

This happened several years ago while I was working as a graphic production artist and de facto help desk/tech at a small graphic design firm in Greenwich Village. The owner of the company ("Bill") is a complete technology idiot. This is exemplified by this example.

He was going on a trip to China to pick up his newly adopted son and wanted to take his PowerBook with him so that he could stay in touch with us in the office. So I diligently investigated the telephone and electrical specifications of the area he'd be staying in, purchased the appropriate adapters, set up a simple AppleScript which would switch some software settings for him while he was out there (all he'd have to do is double-click the script and it would take care of the rest), and wrote him extremely simple instructions on how to plug things in. (This is a guy who would regularly print a document ten or eleven times before calling me for help, at which point I'd discover he had again disconnected his ethernet cable...) I walked him through the whole process, twice, to make sure he had it. Reasonably convinced he was set, off he went.

It should be pointed out that at the time our office was running on a QuickMail system, and I had our mail server configured to accept a remote access dialup for just such a contingency. And for those who don't know about QuickMail (be thankful), it's a proprietary system which is EXTREMELY sensitive about its connectivity and gets very cranky if it can't find a server.

A couple of weeks later he returned, mildly disgruntled, and angrily curious as to why we (the office) didn't return any of his emails. I immediately checked the server log but couldn't find any emails from Bill, nor could I find any record of his PowerBook dialing into our system.

After a little Q&A I discovered what had happened. Bill got on board the plane on the way to China -- with his PowerBook. Once he was in flight he turned it on (getting two error messages, one about network connectivity being lost and the other about not being able to find the QuickMail server, which he simply dismissed without a second -- or first -- thought), launched QuickMail (again receiving an error message, which he dismissed), composed some new messages, attempted to send them (again receiving an error message, which he dismissed), closed QuickMail (AGAIN receiving an error message, which he dismissed), and shut down his PowerBook.

Not enough?

When he got to China he never bothered to hook up the PowerBook, making all of my preparatory work useless. Though he did (again) on the plane ride home try to send us more email...

Thanks to: Steve "Mac Guy" G.

 

From www.TechTales.com November 1998