I was googling around to find an answer for a question in Linux General
when I came across this site

http://www.gopherit.org/Helpdesk/CD%20Roms.htm

heres just a sample

I work as an unpaid tech aid at the Macintosh cluster at a school. One day I stepped out to do some repairs on a teacher’s computer. When I came back, I discovered some kid had got his tongue stuck in a CD drive.


I work as a computer consultant at a certain university computing site...so naturally, I was approached by a user on my day off at a site where I don’t work.
Student: “I can’t write to my disk!”
Tech Support: “Let me take a look.”
Student: “See! It won’t let me write to the E: drive!”
Tech Support: “Um, that’s a CD-ROM drive. You can’t—“
Student: “But I went out and bought these disks!”
Tech Support: “Um, you need a CD-R drive to use those, and—“
Student: “But this is a CD drive!”
I explained that CD-ROM and CD-R drives use different types of lasers and optics, that CD-Rs cost a lot more than CD-ROMs, and that very few computers at this university have CD-Rs.
Student: “So what if I plugged this into the 220-volt line over there and jumped up the laser’s power and....”



Customer: (kindly old grandmother type) “I can’t install your software. I tried to follow the instructions, but it just isn’t working. Can you please help me, young man?”
Tech Support: “Sure! Are you using the diskette or the cdrom version of our software?”
Customer: “The cdrom version.”
Tech Support: “Are you using Windows 95 or Windows 3.1?”
Customer: “Windows 95.”
I walked her through the basic steps of inserting the cdrom disk and getting to the ‘Run’ window.
Tech Support: “Now type ‘d:\setup’ and then press the enter key.”
Customer: “It just gives me an error message, saying it can’t find it.”
I tried several things. I tried different drive letters. I made sure the colon was actually a colon and the backslash was really a backslash.
Tech Support: “Let’s remove the CD from the drive, and then I would like you to inspect the shiny side for visible scratches or smudges. If we clean them, you might be able to get the computer to read the setup file.”
Customer: “I’ve taken it out. Do I have to slide this little metal shutter out of the way to see which side is shiny?”
AAAAAAAAAAHHHH!!!!! (bang head, thump, thump, thump)
Tech Support: “No, let’s just insert it back into the computer and try
typing ‘a:\setup’.”



I suppose its a reminder to be patient with our newbies
floppy

Pretty funny stuff, thanks for the links -- J.W.

I've had plenty of people do plenty of dumb things. Like the guy who only ran games from floppies because the computer couldn't get a virus that way. Or people that store their documents on floppies because they knew a person once who had a hard disk fail (I got the last laugh when I took their box of floppies and pulled out a handful from the back and told them to try reading them and they found out that about 1/2 had errors). had a guy keep brining his pc into the shop because his hard disk was bad, we kept testing it and found no problems, replaced it anyway after he made multiple trips and copied all his data over and he came back again, turned out he was calling his 3.5" floppy a hard disk.
Or the people that try to print on a transparancy in a laser printer. Or she college lab supervisor who put the transparancy in the laser printer which had a sign above it reading "do not put transparancies in the laser printers, see lab supervisor for questions"
people who insist on buying zip drives (or anything else iomega) even though you recommend against them then get mad at you when they loat all their data.