Oh how you must have missed the mis-use of asterisks on this forum!!!
We have a fantastic Memorex 80gb 2.5inch USB HD to give away to you lucky Vadimites.
This competiton requires careful wording, and most importantly, honesty.
We want you to submit your worst IT/Hardware/PC Building story story i.e 'I mistook superglue for thermal paste.' or 'it turns out my mouse was a hamster'
The winner based on the funniest, bizarre, blondest story, but it must be true otherwise it's not as fun...anyone can make up a funny story!
The deadline is two weeks from this post (which will be the 9th of July at 10:00pm)
The 3 best stories will be chosen by the Moderating team and then subject to a poll which will be open for 3 days and will close on the 12th.
The winner will then be announced and the prize on your way!!!
(we could have been boring and left the poll bit out, but where's the fun and suspence? )
Get cracking gentleman! Special attention will be given to those stories with twists and turns and a sense of 'oh...I've been there'
The delivery man arrived at last, a lumbering box-shaped shadow approached; he threw it to the ground, very troubling, this courier was clumsier than most. Nonetheless with eagerness I tore, to reach the PC within; the warning sticker warned me, it said, "do not put in the bin."
Proceding undaunted, but in vain, I cried in doubt; the case, no aluminium here, nor any one-twenty mil fans; it would do the job, I hoped, and I'd be wearing cans. Lifting the case forth, I stopped -- something loud within, it popped -- and with a frown I set it down. "This new PC seems bound for troubles, but now I can proceed," I thought, as I eyed the water cooling's bubbles.
The wires were arrayed like a nest of snakes, but keen to boot up and in my haste, I didn't check the exact makes; nor if they'd applied any thermal paste. The cooling whirred to life, and with the noise rose my hopes; but the fans like a knife, ground against wires like ropes. No sign of Windows was there to see, and worry began to nag at me; what kind of useless lemon was this, new shabbily built PC? The wires I untangled, none of them yet quite mangled, and with a sigh, replaced the panel, to give those fans another try.
I booted up, and at last, some small recall; Microsoft's logo beckoned. It loaded slow, and what's all this? Manufacturer's junk software, I reckoned; it slowed this new rig to a crawl. "Even so," I thought, "this fast new hardware has it all," and started up a game. A sudden error, a flickering screen -- no real surprise, as the rig was built, by a company I won't name. A dozen more attempts I tried, the hours came and went; many times I wished to scream, in my need to vent. A hundred things I tried, no use, no game would start, no way -- at times I almost cried, and thought grimly of Ebay. But at last I thought to look inside, to see what this ugly case might hide; and to my shock, the case dissected; the reason for the errors I found; the graphics card was disconnected. No Vadim was this PC, I knew; the builder's skills were few -- but if your first PC won't start, check the internals too.
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Probably not really funny, and exaggerated -- but mostly true! The rhyming follows no set pattern, and I'm almost embarassed to post this (I usually take my writing much more seriously). Most of us can probably remember setting up a PC before we had a clue what we were doing (or simply a PC that was... well, not a Vadim), and this is my humble ode to that. Good luck everyone!
Once upon a time I worked for a large well known Insurance Company. I was the manager of the team that looked after their three main Customer databases. As well as maintaining and cleaning the data, our job was to provide the marketing department with 'clean' and legal data for use in their marketing campaigns.
On one occaision I was asked to give an estimate as to how long it would take to provide a certain set of data (which was focused on a fairly tight demographic) - given workloads at the time I estimated a couple of weeks. The marketing guy looked horrified and said 'we are running the campaign on Friday, I will get the data from somewhere else in the company'. I warned him, that not only was this against company (and data protection) rules, but we were the only ones who could guarantee clean data.
Anyway, the next week, I was on my way to work when I saw a copy of the Sun newspaper - with the headline '*** sends mail to 25,000 dead people'. Bad enough, but the marketing campaing was entitled 'THIS IS YOUR LIFE ASSURANCE WAKE UP CALL'. Whoops.
i think it might be that people have funny stories but are not really sure how to put them into words.
Well I think working with PC's in general is funny..they always do F**ked up things to keep you on your toes...and crash just when you least expect it.
Only time will tell how funny this is as a story, but it was funny at the time.
I used to work for a major highstreet communications company and in November last year we were 'delighted' by the release of the eagerly awaited iPhone. In the infinate wisdom of o2 to new age marketing shenanigans they decided the best time for this handset to be launched in the UK market would be 6:02pm (genius that, lose an entire days sales!) So throughout the official launch day around the country the many thousands of people who had travelled to purcase their shiny new phones were told to go away and come back when most normal people are starting to think about their tea!
Anyway the precise minute of launch rolled around with many many now annoyed and bored people ready to buy! So around the country in the 800 odd stores of this particular retailer each and every employee attempted to process an identical transaction at more or less the exact same time upwards easily of 4000 transactions. Well apparently this is sufficient to crash every single Chip and Pin machine in an entire company! Combined with the fact that on launch C&P was the only accepted payment method this posed quite a stumbling block to some already pretty annoyed customers getting to take home their shiny overpriced gadgets!
At this point (well after about 20 minutes of useless flapping by the higher-ups) 2 apparently reasonable steps were taken to allow sales to proceed: 1. Telephone card authorisation and 2. Cash payments were accepted.
In practice this meant that ********** card services call centre was overloaded and therefore provided automated authorisation for all transactions upto £1000 so no iPhone card payment was actually verified! And also that with the acceptance of cash no 'secure' ID was really necessary for these spanky new contract phones.
Suffice it to say that the scenes at the UK launch were somewhat removed for the Hi-fiving antics the Americans posted all over the internet!
)
...You don't evan sell it 
... 
... you got me there... I shall try and find a nice way to tell it...
