Boneheaded users are a fact of life in the high tech world. Unfortunately, us technobabblers are often the ones left to clean up after them. As with many of the other things that can go wrong, these can be very funny if you're not the scapegoat of the whole thing.
Technical support people are a rich source of boneheaded user stories. An active traffic of "power luser" war stories can be found on the net. These range from the old classics, such as users unable to find the "any" key and the ones who mistake the mouse for a foot pedal, to the true boneheads who insist that when their systems are on the fritz, it can't possibly be their fault.
My uncle, who does technical support for Adobe, tells a story that was passed down to him from one of his co-workers. Fielding a hardware support call, the user told the techie that the cup holder on his system was broken. The techie, being puzzled, asked if the user had received the cup holder at a trade show. The user said no. The techie then asked if there was anything written on the cup holder. The user replied, "all it says on it is 4X." The techie had no choice but to mute the call and double over with laughter. This boneheaded user thought that the loading tray on his CD-ROM drive was a cup holder, and broke it with a cup of coffee.
There are several types of "lusers" that can be found out there, waiting to torment us with their stupidity. The first category, which are the users who couldn't get a clue with an unlimited shopping spree at the clue shop, has already been discussed. Another example of this type of luser is a (thankfully) ficticious story called Diary of an AOL user.
The second type of luser is the type that knows just enough to totally and irreversibly trash the system (or, a luser with enough rope to hang him/herself.) These are the type of users who think that just because their system is "plug and play" means that they can hot-swap their video card or add RAM without turning their system off. The users who it into this category often like to blame someone else for their stupidity too. One example of this type of user is the one who thought just because his hard disk type was "user defined" he could change his recently-purchased 120MB disk to a 2GB disk. He had some angry words for the manufacturer when, after many attempts, the disk refused to work.
Another type is the luser who severely overestimates his computer's abilities. Back when I had my precarious Win95 setup on my 386, my brother expected me to be able to get a game working that required a 486/33 with 8MB of RAM. I told him that I could... once he forked over the dough for an upgrade.
Then there is the luser who uses the excuse "I'm really not a computer person" for everything. For those of us forced to deal with this type of luser, they often have to have the same thing explained to them several times before there's any chance of them getting it. Even then, they are very likely to get something wrong. Some of these people consider the "dummies" books by IDG to be too technical for them.
There are several other types of lusers out there, each of which is capable of screwing up a system in his/her own unique way. If you know any of these lusers, please send somw of your war stories for possible inclusion into a future column. Until then, remember so specak slowly and clearly to reduce the risk of having to repeat your instructions more than 15 times.