Jonathan (ジョナサン)

Working with Computer Illiterates

    First, I'll answer a question in my comments about the spelling of a particular word, theatre. Yes, Nick, it did show up on Firefox that it was "misspelled". However, having the limited education that I do, I happened to be aware that theatre is spelled both "theater" and "theatre". Most dictionaries will reflect this. Theatre is the older version. I used to, at one point in time, associate one version with the "older" type of theatrical performances, such as plays or musicals, etc, and the other version with a place you watch movies at. I can't recall which I used to do, I just know that now-a-days I tend to type "movie theatre".

    Today was interesting. I went in to work because there was a problem with the computers at the "home office". I had briefly checked it last night before going home, but didn't spend much time on it, as I didn't leave the actual theatre until 2AM. The problem as it was told to me originally was that the computers in the office could not print.

    So I got there, and discovered that the computer that the printers were hooked up to was having trouble getting on the network. It was particularly puzzling because it showed it was actually sending a few bytes and receiving a few bytes of information. After awhile, I determined the network card must be going glitchy, so I would just buy one in the morning and put the new one in.

    When I got there today, it was able to actually get on the network... kinda. It was just very very slow for some reason. So, I messed with it some more. I got it to work, but it was so sluggish, I decided I'd just go ahead and put the new one in. I turned off the computer, got down, pulled out the tower and....... there was a magnet on the side of the tower holding a paper to it. Does anyone reading this know what a magnet can do to a computer? I pulled it off, and it was a rather week magnet, so I thought, surly this couldn't be affecting it. Well, it was. After starting it back up without the magnet, it worked 100%. The side of the case the magnet was on happened to be the side the motherboard is screwed to. The place the magnet was happened to be directly over where the LAN port was. Now, the magnet had been there a long time, so it was just slowly affecting it, I guess.

    After finding this out, I walked to the theatre, and told Red, "Do you know what magnets do to computers?", to which she was like "oooooo" realizing that she had placed a magnet there... yeah... sometimes I just want to slap people.

    TUMEO.