Maineiac

HelpLine: "General Motors HelpLine, how can I help you?"

Customer: "I got in my car and closed the door and nothing happened!"

HelpLine: "Did you put the key in the ignition slot and turn it?"

Customer: "What's an ignition?"

HelpLine: "It's a starter motor that draws current from your battery and turns over the engine."

Customer: "Ignition? Motor? Battery? Engine? How come I have to know all these technical terms just to use my car?"

HelpLine: "General Motors HelpLine, how can I help you?"

Customer: "Hi, I just bought my first car, and I chose your car because it has automatic transmission, cruise control, power steering, power brakes, and power door locks."

HelpLine: "Thanks for buying our car. How can I help you?"

HelpLine: "General Motors HelpLine, how can I help you?"

Customer: "My car ran fine for a week and now it won't go anywhere!"

HelpLine: "Is the gas tank empty?"

Customer: "Huh? How do I know?"

General Motors doesn't have a help line for people who don't know how to drive, because people don't buy cars like they buy computers, but imagine if they did....

HELPLINE: "General Motors Helpline, how can I help you?"

CUSTOMER: "Your cars stink!"

HELPLINE: "What's wrong?"

Programmer to Team Leader: "We CAN NOT do this proposed project. It will involve a major design change and no one in our team knows the design of this system. And above that, nobody in our company knows the language in which this application has been written. If you ask my personal opinion, the company should never take these type of projects."

In ancient Israel, it came to pass that a trader by the name of Abraham Com did take unto himself a young wife by the name of Dot. And Dot Com was a comely woman, broad of shoulder and long of leg. Indeed, she had been called Amazon Dot Com.

She said unto Abraham, her husband, "Why doth thou travel far from town to town with thy goods when thou can trade without ever leaving thy tent?"

There was once a young man who, in his youth, professed his desire to become a great writer.

When asked to define "great" he said: "I want to write stuff that the whole world will read, stuff that people will react to on a truly emotional level, stuff that will make them scream, cry, howl in pain and anger!"

He now works for Microsoft as an error technician, he who writes error messages.

So God brings Clinton, Yeltsin and Bill Gates to his office and says, "Men, I've decided to bring an end to the world this Thursday -- I want you to go back and tell your people."

Upon his return, Clinton holds a press conference and says, "People of America, I have good news and bad news. The good news is that all these years we've been saying 'one nation under God' we've been right -- there is a God. The bad news is he is destroying the world on Thursday."

My neighbor works in the operations department in the central office of a large bank.

Employees in the field call him when they have problems with their computers.

One night he got a call from a woman in one of the branch banks who had this question: "I've got smoke coming from the back of my terminal. Do you guys have a fire downtown?"

Ten Signs You Should Join E-Mailers Anonymous

• You wake up at 3 a.m. to go to the bathroom and check your e-mail on the way back to bed.
• Your firstborn is named dot-com.
• You turn off your modem and are suddenly filled with a feeling of emptiness, as if you just pulled the plug on a loved one.

What if Dr. Seuss was a technical writer? Here are several examples of what he may write to help you resolve your computer problems.

If a packet hits a pocket
on a socket on a port,
And the bus is interrupted
as a very last resort,
And the address of the memory
makes your floppy disk abort,
Then the socket packet pocket
has an error to report!

July 18
I just tried to connect to America Online. I've heard it is the best online service you can get. They even included a free disk! I'd better hold onto it in case they don't ever send me anther one! I can't connect. I don't know what is wrong.

July 19
Some guy at the tech support center says my computer needs a modem. I don't see why. He's just trying to cheat me. How dumb does he think I am?

Dear Tech Support:

Last year I upgraded from Boyfriend 5.0 to Husband 1.0 and noticed a slowdown in overall performance, particularly in the flower and jewelry applications that had operated flawlessly under Boyfriend 5.0.

In addition, Husband 1.0 uninstalled many other valuable programs, such as Romance 9.5 and Personal Attention 6.5, but installed undesirable programs such as NFL 5.0 and NBA 3.0. and now Conversation 8.0 no longer runs and Housecleaning 2.6 simply crashes the system.

486 - The average IQ needed to understand a PC.

State-of-the-art - Any computer you can't afford.

Obsolete - Any computer you own.

Microsecond - The time it takes for your state-of-the-art computer to become obsolete.

G3 - Apple's new Macs that make you say "Gee, three times faster than the computer I bought for the same price a Microsecond ago."

A tourist walked into a pet shop and was looking at the animals on display. While he was there, another customer walked in and went over to a cage at the side of the shop and took out a monkey.

He fit a collar and leash, handed it to the customer, saying, "That'll be $5000." The customer paid and walked out with his monkey.

Startled, the tourist went over to the shopkeeper and said, "That was a very expensive monkey. Most of them are only a few hundred dollars. Why did it cost so much?"

A secretary was having trouble with her computer, so she called the computer technician to her desk.

The tech clicked a couple buttons and solved the problem. As he was walking away, the secretary called after him, "So what was wrong?" and he replied, "It was an ID ten T error."

A puzzled expression ran over the secretary's face. "An ID ten T error? What's that, in case I need to fix it again?"

In March 1992, a man living in Newton near Boston, Massachusetts received a bill for his as yet unused credit card stating that he owed $0.00. He ignored it and threw it away.

In April he received another and threw that one away too.

The following month the credit card company sent him a very nasty note stating they were going to cancel his card if he didn't send them $0.00 by return of post.