The nine types of Windows 95
users The nine types of Windows 95
users Typical Quote: "I tried the clicker thing, ya
know, and the picture fuzzled around, but worked, ya know, but
now it doesn't, ya know?"
Advantages: Provides interesting communication challenges.
Disadvantages: So do chimps.
Symptoms: Complete inability to use proper nouns,
adjectives, and 96% or the English vocabulary.
Real Case: One user insisted that the hard drive she just
received as an upgrade belonged to someone else. After prying for
ten minutes, I discovered that she believed this because her
recent "documents list" was empty, whereas her previous
hard drive had some common documents there.
Best Handled: Avoid asking the user questions. Immediately
show up at his desk, sit down, and attempt to figure out what is
wrong with his computer. If nothing is found within five minutes,
then ask simple, monosyllabic questions, such as "was the
problem bigger than a bread box?"
Typical Quote: "Well, I hit ALT-f6, shift-f8,
CNTRL-f10, f4, and f9, double clicked properties, and now it
looks all weird."
Advantages: Will try to find own solution to problems.
Disadvantages: User might have translated document to
Navajo without meaning to.
Symptoms: Logged into the network as four different users,
8 documents stuck in the queue, and a warning on the screen that
the registry has been corrupted.
Real Case: One user called in to complain that every time
he created a new document in Word, an old email pops onto the
screen and he must first erase the text to compose a new letter.
He had somehow saved an old email as his normal.dot.
Best Handled: Either (A)- Open a command prompt and type
in attrib +r *.* /s [making everything on the hard drive read
only], or (B)- Remove the user's network card in fear that he may
cause a network crash.
Typical Quote: "It didn't work with the Excel
Spreadsheet data set we had, so I fed in my aunt's recipe for key
lime pie."
Advantages: Will usually fix error.
Disadvantages: 'Fix' is defined VERY loosely here.
Symptoms: A tendency to delete cells and formulas that get
errors instead of fixing them.
Real Case: One user complained that their spreadsheet was
not importing data from a secondary source correctly. After
looking at the sheet for about 30 minutes, it was realized that
the entire sheet was formatted text, with no formulas at all.
When asked about it, the user explained that the totals were
performed on a hand held calculator.
Best Handled: Replace computer system with printer paper
and a box of crayons.
Typical Quote: "Last week, when the moon was full,
the clouds were thick, and Microsoft was up 4 points on NASDAQ, I
typed f77, and lo, it did convert to HTML.
Advantages: Gives insight into primitive mythology.
Disadvantages: Few Help Desk Technicians are anthropology
majors.
Symptoms: Swears upon his abilities to achieve miracles
under the right conditions.
Real Case: One user complained that he had not received
email for a couple of days. After watching the user cancel
through four login prompts and fail to get email delivered, the
user was asked why hitting cancel at a login prompt was a
substitute for a username and password. The response:
"That's what I've always done, but I swear I got email
yesterday."
Best Handled: Sprinkle user with Holy Water and jab him in
the back of the neck with a crucifix. It won't solve his
problems, but it will make you feel better.
Typical Quote: "I've got the latest beta of Hotdog
for Windows NT. Uhh... what does html mean?"
Advantages: Using the cutting-edge in internet technology.
Disadvantages: Has little or no idea how to use the
cutting-edge in internet technology.
Symptoms: Full hard drive, multiple .dll version
conflicts.
Real Case: A user complained that his Pentium 166 with a 2
GB hard drive was running very slowly. Once I finally got it to
boot, I realized that he was out of hard drive space, hence no
virtual memory. He had downloaded hundreds of .zip files and was
also extracting them to his root directory.
Best Handled: Post inane messages to every news group
under the user's name and email address, making sure that racial
slurs are used frequently. He will be too busy answering spam and
flame email to download anything for the foreseeable future.
Typical Quote: "But it read a file from it
yesterday!" 'Sir, at a guess, this disk has been swallowed
and regurgitated.' "But I did that a month ago, and it read
a file from it yesterday!"
Advantages: Apparently has remarkable luck when you aren't
around.
Disadvantages: People complain when Help Desk Technicians
actually use the word "Bullshit".
Symptoms: Fascinating claims of computing ingenuity. Loses
all ability to do impossible when you're around. Must be the
kryptonite in your pocket.
Real Case: A user claimed that his monitor was broken. He
swore that he checked the cables and had rebooted several dozen
times to no avail. I walked over and hit the power button. It
fixed the problem.
Best Handled: Presume everything the user claims is a lie.
Try not to laugh, snort or scoff at the user's outlandish claims.
Tell him that his files were lost in the "ethernet," as
if it were some mystical binary dimension.
Typical Quote: "Well, this is a file in Microsoft
Works. Do you know how I can upload it to HTML, transfer it over
to UNIX from there, download it onto an IBM, convert it to
WordPerfect 6.1, and put it in three-column format?"
Advantages: Bold new challenges.
Disadvantages: Makes one wish to be a garbage collector.
Symptoms: An inability to keep quiet. Strong tendencies to
make machines do things they don't want to do.
Real Case: One user was recompiling a Microsoft Access
database that was over 400 MB in size. The problem was, it was on
the Application server and he was locking everyone out of the
network.
Best Handled: Drop the user's computer down to 4 MB of
RAM. With so little, it will take him a very long time to work
these computational abuses. Hopefully it will discourage his
inventiveness.
Typical Quote: "Well, first I sat down, like this.
Then I logged on, like this, and after that, I typed in my
password, like this, and after that I edited my file, like this,
and after that I went to this line here, like this, and after
that I picked my nose, like this. . ."
Advantages: Willing to show you exactly what they did to
get an error.
Disadvantages: For as long as five or six hours.
Symptoms: Selective deafness to the phrases, "Right,
right, okay, but what was the ERROR?", and a strong fondness
for the phrase, "Well, I'm getting to that."
Real Case: I watched for thirty minutes while a user
demonstrated his process for cutting and pasting Excel cells into
a Word document and his futile attempts to format it to a
specified numbers of columns.
Best Handled: Bring coffee and a magazine. When the user
finally produces an error, tell him to reboot. Repeat. Do this
until lunchtime or until it is time to go home. Then act baffled
and blame it on Microsoft.
Typical Quote: "I hate the way my icons are
arranged on the desktop, and the colors are too bright, and my
hard drive makes this clicking sound all the time. Will you stop
by and take a look at it?"
Advantages: Flatters you with their high standards for
your service.
Disadvantages: Impresses you with their obliviousness to
other people on this planet.
Symptoms: Inability to communicate except by complaining.
Real Case: A supervisor in one department asked if I could
replace his blue twisted pair network cable with a white one like
the one his colleagues had.
Best Handled: Use the new white network cable and garrote
the user and dump his body in the paper recycling bin.
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