At work we have our usual inside joke remarks like BMW, BDU, ID10T (spoken as ID ten T), PEBKAC, and "did you keep the boxes". The latter refers to the urban legend recounted at http://www.snopes.com/humor/business/wordperfect.asp which tends to dismiss many other tales as also urban myths.
I have personally experienced a few of those purported myths, the "any" key, the mouse in hand like a TV remote, the photocopied (and stapled) disks.
I also witnessed a coworker on a couple of support calls.
Caller: "what does it mean when the computer says I have an invalid pair-a-meters?" (to make a long story short) turns out it was "invalid parameters".
Same user having trouble executing from the commandline.
Caller: "doesn't work"
Helpdesk: "what does it say"?
Caller: "bad command or filename"
Helpdesk: "you typed it wrong"
Caller: "I typed it *exactly* as you told me"
Helpdesk: "OK, try again and this time read the line back to me before you hit [enter]"
The line read back was not only missing the spaces but also missing the last letter of the command and some of the parms. Turned out the caller could not find the [space] key so he used the [backspace] key instead.
A user bought a WordPerfect upgrade on 5 1/4" floppies. He offered to go to her office and install it for no addition charge but she told him she was "quite competent" to install it. Later she called to complain that the second disk was bad. To make a long story short, when she got to the place in the instructions to insert disk 2, she failed to first remove disk 1. She was vehement in her own defense that "it didn't say to remove disk 1"!
To this day, we still cannot trust users to tell us the truth. When I get a call, I always check their uptime before I ask if they tried rebooting before they called. Either they lie like a rug, or they don't know what "reboot" means. We got so fed up with it that we now task schedule a reboot every weekend.
Take this board for instance... we had problems confusing the shout box with the search box so we moved search all the way up to the top. You'd think that would have been the end of search terms shouted. Supposedly, this board is frequented by sysadmins, not BDUs. What do you think of a sysadmin that cannot even navigate a search box? Would you hire one to manage your network?
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Give a man a fish and he will be back for more. Slap him with a fish and he will go away forever.
