Stupid Drivers

I used to vacation with a few friends at a cottage in northern Ontario. The morning of this particular tale we set off at about 8 a.m.; four of us traveling in our own cars, loaded up with the necessary baggage and food for our stay. Three of us arrive at the cottage at about the same time, having made the trip in just over an hour and a half, but our friend Gus is conspicuously missing. Just after noon he rolls up in his shiny new point-of-pride, a CRX.

He casually gets out of his car to a round of questions, everyone wanting to know what’d taken him so long.

He replies “What do you expect, guys, this is a brand new car,” which we’re apparently supposed to take as sufficient explanation. Of course we ask him to elaborate; so he obliges….

“No, I didn’t stop for anything, I just drove slower.” Why? “Well, you know that if you drive slower you’ll put less mileage on your car, don’t you?”

Yes, folks, he *was* serious, and was even offended at our doubting his radical speed/distance theory. He went on to explain, exasperated at our stupidity in the face of reason, “When you’re driving, just look at your odometer, first when you’re driving around town, and then look at it again when you’re on the highway. You’ve gotta notice that the odometer rolls a hell of a lot faster when you’re go’n’ 60 or 70 m.p.h.”

It took us hours to convince him that he was not saving any mileage driving slower. We needed maps, rulers, calculators — it took every resource we could pool, even a demonstration, to make him believe us. But I still think Gus is out there, somewhere, driving around at half the speed limit….

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Stupid Roommates

My very first roommate forgot to buy a trash container when we first moved in. He decided to use his clothes hamper, since he was never planning on putting clothes in there in the first place, probably because they were easier to find on the floor. He liked the idea of a hamper trash container, because it was very big and would hold a lot of trash. He would only have to take trash out every couple of weeks (so he thought). One day he asked me why all of these fruit flies were flying around his desk (where he kept his trash container), but not around my stuff. It just reinforced the fact that he is terminally stupid.

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Stupid Tech Support

When in college, I had to make a fake advertisement for a class. I had a GIF that I downloaded that I wanted to put into it, so I sat down at the only Mac that was connected to the scanner in the school’s computer lab. For some reason, it couldn’t open the file, and the program crashed repeatedly. I got a lab technician to come over, and I explained the problem. She asked what I did to it and got angry with me. So I went to the Mac next to the one I was on and opened the picture in the same program. She told me in no uncertain terms that I was responsible for ruining the computer.

Me: “I scanned these pictures in, then tried to open this GIF I downloaded.”

Her: “What? You can’t do that! That type of a file is for Windows machines only! It isn’t supported on Macs.”

Me: “No, it is a standard graphic file. It can be opened on either machine.”

Her: “No it can’t! You might have to pay to fix this.”

Me: “If it can’t open on a Mac, how did I get it to open on this Mac right here? See?”

Her: “Don’t do that! You’re gonna break that one also.”

To protect her computer from evil me, she leaned over and flipped the power switch off.

Stupid Tech Support

My boyfriend and I were sitting in my dorm room, when there was a power surge, causing my computer to reboot. Unfortunately, it never got very far and popped up an error message about a missing file. Panicking, I reboot again, and the same thing happened. Foolishly, I decided to call my computer’s tech support line, and after struggling with their automated system, I finally got through to someone.

Tech Support: “Thank you for calling tech support. How may I help you?”

Me: “Yeah, um, I just had a power surge in my dorm room, and my computer won’t reboot. It’s giving me the error message: [error message]”

Tech Support: “Have you tried rebooting?”

Me: “Yeah. Want me to try again?”

Tech Support: “Yes, go ahead. Tell me when Windows comes up.”

Me: “Ok…it’s giving me the same error message. It’s not even getting into Windows.”

Tech Support: “Ok, let’s try rebooting again, but this time, hold the button down for longer.”

Me: “Er…how much longer?”

Tech Support: “About five seconds.”

Me: “All right. Holding it down now…ok, it’s rebooting.”

Tech Support: “Good. Tell me when Windows comes up.”

Me: “Same error.”

Tech Support: “Ok. Let’s try a hard reboot. Turn your computer all the way off, then unplug the power cable.”

Me: (??) “All right, it’s out.”

Tech Support: “Ok, now hold down your power button and plug it back in. But don’t let go of the power button yet.”

Me: “Er. Ok. Tell me when to let go.”

Tech Support: “Ok, let go. Tell me when Windows comes up.”

Me: “Same error message. Windows isn’t coming up.”

Tech Support: “Ok, let’s try looking at your BIOS.”

Me: “All right.”

Tech Support: “Reboot your computer, and when it’s coming up, hit F1 as many times as you can.”

Me: “Can’t I just hit it once?”

Tech Support: “No, your computer should start beeping. I want to make sure it beeps.”

Me: “All right, it beeped. BIOS came up a while ago.”

Tech Support: “Ok, let’s walk through some things….”

He proceeded to do nothing more than confirm there was nothing wrong with my BIOS. He had me reboot again, and, of course, I got the same error message.

Tech Support: “Ok, let’s try bios one more time.”

Me: “All right.”

Tech Support: “Now, when it’s rebooting, I want you to hit the F1 key as many times as you can. It has to beep for this to work.”

Me: “I really don’t think my computer ‘beeping’ has anything to do with the problem.”

Tech Support: “I think I know a little more about computers than you do, ma’am.”

Me: “All right, fine, I’m hitting it. My computer is beeping.”

Tech Support: “I don’t believe you.”

Me: “…Excuse me?”

Tech Support: “I think you’re lying. I need you to hit it as many times as you can. This is very important.”

Finally, I gave up on the guy and made my boyfriend finish the call. About half a minute into the call, my boyfriend gets a really funny look on his face and ejects the floppy disk that was in the drive. He rebooted it, and it worked fine.

I suppose this doubles as a stupid user story too, but you’d think a tech support person would have checked for that early on, instead all the other dumb things he had me do.