How dumb are you?
 

And I don't mean that at all unkindly. Let me explain:
I've just spent ten minutes twiddling all my network settings in Prefs after plugging my PowerBook into my LAN. Couldn't understand it - I just couldn't get online at all. Then - only then - do I notice the ethernet plug is sitting on my desk, not plugged in to anywhere. I feel SUCH a fool.

Then I remembered that there was a really cool thread here a while back, can't remember the title, but there were loads of really funny stories about idiots, sorry, USERS and their Macs. So I thought I'd start this one, take a deep breath & confess how dumb I've been. Anyone else man enough to admit their shortcomings to all? It may make us lesser mortals feel slightly less foolish.....

My biggest problem and stuff up i seem to get caught out with alot is docking my iPod, and watching for the battery icon to start charging, and nothing happens, move it around in the dock and make sure its in properly and then realise i havent pluged in the power...Or the other good one is going to use my mouse and keyboard on my desk at home at not actually docking my iBook..

lights.and.design

well i spend 2 hours fixing one guys's computer, i phoned up all the network providers and tried to find the username and password. then after 2 hours i found his account, but they wouldnt give out usernames.

At the same time i also tried to download a 20MB driver for his internet.

So at the end of the 2 hours of trying to download a driver and getting his username/password. He comes in with a sheet of paper (with u/p) and a CD with the drivers.

I WAS SOO ANNOYED.!!!

at one point i had 4 computers on a single desk and keeping track of the keyboards and mice for the computer i wanted was real fun. i would try to move a mouse and it was not moving so i would think it was locked up ( OS 9 days ) so i gave it the three finger solute to restart it and the wrong machine chimmed! DOH! did that several times.

Don't feel so bad. I've done that! :eek:

Thanks, all. I'm starting to feel a little better!

Talk about DUMB!
 

Happened just the other day... I had been complaining and posting Apple several times that I did not have a way of seeing the link I was to go to in Safari (I was so use to having at the bottom bar in Netscape). Since Safari first came out I have complained about this. Then someone posted, "Why not just turn on the Status Bar" in View? There it was... UGH! Now is THAT dumb or WHAT?! With not having your ethernet plug in, you have lost, what, an hour of productivity? Try a year or two!

A while back I was on the road, tired, and spent an hour fighting with a modem to get an internet connection in my hotel room. Nothing would work--and I support this stuff for a living. I was going insane from both tiredness and panic since I needed to be ready for the clients in the morning.

As I was chugging a beer from the mini bar figuring it was the only way to rescue the evening, I looked over and noticed my phone line was plugged into the ethernet port...

Always make sure your UPS is turned on before you start your computer. Don't freak out and try to troubleshoot for 30 minutes before you realize you forgot to press the little UPS button to ON! D'OH!

After installing 1.5 gb of ram into my g5, I quickly plugged
in the power supply cable, and booted the machine.

As I admired the newly occupied ram slots, I noticed
something was different but it didn't know what until
I saw the dual fans I removed when installing ram
resting beside the keyboard!

I can't believe that I missed something as big and obvious as that. :p

This year, I bought a G3 iMac 233Mhz and expected OSX to run smoothy...

A couple months ago, I bought an eMac a week before the new cheaper iBooks came out...

Constantly trying to print only to find that it is not connected to my USB...

and many more :D

Thanks BigDave for this thread!

I will tell you something I never told to anyone before. A few time ago - or let's say a long time ago - when I got my new 20" G4 iMac, I realized that it was broken. Not a big thing, just a little defect on the front side. So I called the store, where I bought it (I had to wait half an hour till I got through) and told the guy at the phone that there was a hole in my computer, on the front side, at the left, below...
Yes, he said, that's the microphone.
I never called that store again.

DING DING DING!!! i think we have a winner, just based on the amount of time involved.

note: no had feelings, just giving you a hardtime.
:D :D :D

We can call it the Safarweenie Award. sigh....

I recently purchased an Airport card for my new G5, happily installed the little bugger, then spent hours trying everything to get it to connect to my SBC supplied 2WIRE modem/router.... Gave up for a day, came back and opened the G5 manual in desperation... There it was a case of "RTFM" ----- I didn't plug in the antenna wire!

After that, It connected immediately... to one of my neighbor's unencrypted networks! (OH, I connected to mine... eventually... )

We had one of our contractors coming in to discuss an upcoming project, and one of my colleagues had suggested that a wiki might be a good solution to some of the requirements. The contractor hadn't heard of wikis before, so I was tasked with lobbing a quick wiki on to the iMac we use as a local dev server.

Five minutes later, I had ssh'd into the server from my laptop, grabbed some source and had installed it into ~/Sites of the server's admin user. Set up the database, checked everything was there using ls, then fired up Safari and had a look at the site... no wiki.

Checked the directory... yup, there was a dir named ~/Sites/wikidemo, had an index.php file in it. I knew that PHP had been set up properly - had been developing against it all morning - but I still spent another five minutes going through httpd.conf and php.ini to make sure there was nothing obviously amiss. All clear. No site.

Restarted apache... still nothing. Finally decided to reboot. Checked that nobody in the office was doing anything with the server, and commanded it to reboot. Got kicked off when SSH went down, then my laptop shut off and started to reboot!

I'd managed to ssh into MY OWN LAPTOP and had installed the wiki under its admin account...

That's 20 minutes of my life I'll never get back.

25 if you include the time it took to type this ;)

damn PDF...
 

ok, how about this one...I was making a document for someone on how to move their iTunes Library to and external drive. He is not overly savvy, so I made a bunch of screen shots, including one of the iTunes preferences. I opened them in Acrobat to copy and paste just the portions I wanted and send off the e-mail. In cleaning up, I could not close my iTunes preferences. No amount of clicking would work. I waited, calmly, while it 'finished' its business. Waited, and still it wouldn't work. It was about this time, I realized I was trying to click on the 'OK' button of the screen shot...

:rolleyes:

Got home from the trip, plugged in the Pismo for recharging, next day start using it, it runs for hours, then it dies. I restart, the display flickers on and then dies. Restart,dies, restart, dies. Each time the display runs for less and less time.

So now its time to take the ailing Mac to the shop. I go to collect the power yo-yo and discover that it was only plugged into the Powerbook, but not into the outlet. Although I was overjoyed to have it working again, I did kill one of the batteries. After totally running the battery into the ground, it never gave more than 10-20 minutes of life after that.

I've pulled some good ones, but my worse offense stands in a category unto itself.

I had a Performa version of a 6100 (6116, 6115, something like that) to which I'd attached several external devices, including a modem, a SyQuest 200 drive, a CDROM drive, and two external SCSI drives. One of those drives was a then-massive Micropolis 4 gig drive, huge and fast, dwarfing the Quantum 500 and the pair of 200s I had inside the case.

So one day the damn powercord falls out the back of the SyQuest and so I lift each piece of the stack and flip it over onto its back, working my way down.

Including the beautiful-fast Micropolis. Which was fully spun up at the time. Ow.

World shrinks. A pair of 200s and a 500. Shorter tower of external crap.

Oh, how I hate when that...wait a minute....oh, how I hate HOW I FEEL when that happens...

OK, please note that this is a very embarrassing story, but it is all true.

A couple months ago I was iChatting with my brother who lives in Morocco. He was concerned about a virus going around. I told him that unless you had root access, it was very difficult to make changes to the OS. As an example, I told him to put his System folder into the trash (expecting the "you do not have root access to do that"). His IM stopped cold. I screamed "OH, NO!" I tried to call him on the phone, but could not get through. I felt HORRIBLE. I knew if I could get through to him, I could help reverse my stupidity. I could not. He had to reinstall his system, applications, reset his preferences, passwords and more.

"How dumb am I?" I think this one wins the award because this crippled a family member half a world away.

Wow, mate. That truly IS horrendous. Is your brother speaking to you again now?

Yes... [blush] He realized that I have saved him countless times regarding other hardware/software issues and advice. I am his main tech guy and every time he and my other family members did not listen to me, they suffered (like buying cheap PCs). Every time they DID listen to me, they benefited. This was the only bugaboo because I tried to do this pre-Jaguar and it told me I could not do it. I did not know that this had changed. He is back up and doing fine. I also helped him extract all his files from a dying LaCie drive onto a replacement when he was home from Morocco during Christmas. He is back up to speed--All is well.