Details, details

Control Freak 

Remote user calls about a Windows problem, and this help desk pilot fish begins by telling him to press Control-Escape. User: "I don't have a Control key." Fish: Sure you do, at the lower corners of your keyboard. User: "No, I don't have Control keys because I pried them off. They kept getting in the way while I was typing Word documents and messing everything up. What do you use Control keys for anyway?" Says fish, "I told him, 'Just for Word, how about saving, copying, pasting, top-of-page, end-of-page, bold, italicize, find and print, for starters?' Our standing joke now is, 'Hey, if you need a couple extra Control keys, I know somebody who can help you out.'" 

Oh, That One!

Support pilot fish at this community college gets a call: Teacher for the computer security class can't get a CD to open on his instructor workstation. "I go to the room and try the drive with a CD I had handy," says fish. "Works just fine — even autoplay works. After I eject the CD, the user comes back and asks, 'Is it working?' Working just fine, I say. 'The CD is in there,' he says. No, it isn't, I say. With that, he opens the drawer to the DVD player also located in the podium near the PC. I take the CD out of the player, put it in the computer, and it runs. Problem solved." 

Unforgiving Syntax

Pilot fish sets up an on-site C++ class for a small team of C developers. But one PL/I programmer gets wind of the opportunity and argues to be included in the class. His rationale: "I have had extensive classroom training in C and just a smidgen of C Plus." Reports fish, "I explained to the programmer's manager the meaning of the increment operator '++' in the C language and its very obvious relationship to the name C++. Request denied; prerequisite for C++ class clearly not met as evidenced by the requester's own argument." 

Oops!

Junior IT staffer is trying to troubleshoot a problem with a remote PC, and he's not having much luck, so he asks a senior IT manager to have a look. "The manager decided it just needed to refresh the IP address," says a pilot fish in the know. "He connected to the workstation with Remote Desktop, opened a command window and typed 'ipconfig /release.' He then stared at the pop-up message saying that the session was disconnected when the remote PC released its address. The junior IT guy probably laughed the entire drive out to the remote site to restart the workstation."

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