On Sat, 13 Jul 1996 11:15:58 -0400 Jon Diercks said:
>The user called and reported "The PC ate my disk!".  I asked "Do you mean
>the floppy is jammed in the drive?"  "No, I mean it's GONE!  The PC ate it.
>I put the disk in the drive and now it's gone."
 
That reminds me of one of my clueless moments.  When we started rolling out
Reflection on PCs replacing terminals, I of course got the dubious honor of
doing the installs from our site license master disks.  The university was
a mix of Macs and PCs with Macs being more common (at the time) so I
inherited an old clunky Mac (and no documentation nor experience).  It sat
on my desk for a good day or two because I couldn't figure out how to turn
the damn thing on and wasn't about to ask :-)  I finally swallowed my pride
and asked our Mac-wiz and got the answer (exercise for the non-Mac reader).
The next "bone-headed" experience was with the 3.5" diskette.  OK, it went
in just fine.  Now how in the heck to you get it out?  No eject button.
Back to the Mac-wiz who had a good laugh (more exercise for non-Mac reader).
Plugging things in is a trip too.  On a PC, almost every connector is unique
and you can't screw up.  On the Mac, they're all the same!
 
This isn't a Mac slam (I hesitate to bring up the subject!) but more of a
philosophical point that anyone can get lost in unexplored territory.  To
make point in a timely fashion, after installing 5.0 we had a rash of calls
of users reporting along the lines of "I don't know what I did, but my screen
cleared and I have this shell thing prompt."  It was easy enough to get them
out (exit) but I couldn't figure out how/why they were invoking the shell.
To make a long story short, we have a commonly used program that maintains
student "holds" (parking tickets, outstanding phone bills, etc) that many
programs check.  The command (inside the program) is "SH" for Show Holds.
They were doing that at the MPE prompt, and I had set HPPXUDC system-wide,
so the rest is obvious :-)
 
>I also really appreciated Jeff's bit about "Can I get a report of all
>students who are thinking about changing their major?"... Sorry, but we
>didn't order the clairvoyance coprocessor option on this machine!  ;>
 
On a more general note, there are often requests for "recently added" or
"recently changed" or even worse "recently deleted" things.  You can do
this of course if you design your application to record such things, but
these are ad-hoc requests on arbitrary data.  Can't even do a 'diff' without
the original copy :-)
 
Jeff Kell <[log in to unmask]>