FARK.com: Your best/worst Help Desk or IT Support nightmare story

I'm enjoying a help desk thread over on Fark.com and I see that user "Uncle Eazy" posts this gem:

"My dad was complaining that the emails he sent out could not print correctly - the formatting was all messed up.

As we went through how he typed up the email, I said, 'So you type want you want, At the end of the line hit Enter to go to the next line.'

He looked up at me, confused. 'Enter?'

'Yeah,' I said. 'At the end of the line, when you want to start a new one, hit the Enter key.'

'Really. All this time, I've just been holding the space bar down till I get to the next line.'"

I'm not laughing because when I was ten, I had this exact same problem with my mother.

It was the very first computer I ever, ever owned, a behemoth of a Tandy 1000 SL with a shiny, candy-like reset button that was, I swear to God, about three times bigger than the power button. I bought it because it had the power switch in the front and that rocked.

Tandy PCs in 1988 all included a DOS-based GUI called DeskMate. DeskMate actually had a decent suite of applications: something that vaguely resembled MS Word, something that vaguely resembled MS Excel, MS Access, and so forth. Plus it had Hangman, a drawing program, and musical composition software that only worked correctly the very first time I ran it.

No matter that. The word processor was like DOS's EDIT.COM program merged with a bastard WordPerfect 5.1 beta from Hell. It was the nastiest most brutish editor I'd ever seen.

I fell in love with it immediately.

Imagine this: a huge, honking blue background with a sickly yellow mustard color for text, cursor, and menus. It had one font: system default. MS Word has a feature where you can turn on spacing and indentation visuals and every space and new paragraph get special symbols.

The DeskMate word processor had that feature. Only problem was you couldn't turn it off.

So there I was. Ten years old and poking my new most prized possession with the proverbial stick, and my mother got the bright idea that she wanted to write a letter to her father on it because it was his idea to get me a computer in the first place.

Together we opened the editor (for the first time), and she start typing. Great! Except we were seeing newline characters appear as three parallel bars. Every single one. My mother looks a little confused. "What are those?" she asks. "It's putting them on the screen every time you hit the Enter key," I note. "Will they come out on the paper when we print this letter?" she asked.

And for the very first time, I said something about a computer question that I've said a thousand times since. I said "I don't know."

Aside:

Some people are born to jump out of airplanes. They have the psychological makeup necessary to take a pistol, a knife, a canteen, and a big backpack filled with a parachute that should prevent any injuries that tend to occur as you plummet inexorably to the ground as you prepare to kill some Germans. I'm pretty sure that not only do I not have what it takes to be a paratrooper, but that Sarge would have a hard time even getting me onto the plane in the first place. It's just not in me to do that sort of thing.

I like to think that I have a pretty good bead on what I'm capable of, and on what my lifestyle is. I'm a problem solver. It's who I am, it's what I do, it's how I define the world around me. Some people (most of whom apparently work in the same building that I do and call me incessantly) just don't have the quizzical nature and internal motivation to try to find answers to their own problems. I have one woman upstairs who has asked me today to both look at a mail message she received because she wasn't sure if it might be spam and to tell her if Adobe PageMaker had support for clip art. At no point did this woman stop to consider that perhaps her own judgment was satisfactory in solving these issues or that my professional guidance was perhaps unnecessary in finding a resolution.

Back to the story:

I'm ten years old and looking at a big blue word processor that's plaguing my mother's letter with little groups of lines. I just don't know enough to say what the lines are, where they came from, or what nefarious intent they bear. So my mother says "I don't mind them. I'll just space over until I get to the next line. It's OK."

So that's what she does. We print the letter and everything is hunky-dorey. But something about that nags at me. It tasks me, a dagger of the mind, compelling me to wonder why the newline marks exist. I am fueled at this age by one overriding thought. A mere hypothesis grown from common sense: "It should not be necessary to avoid all use of the Enter key in a typing program." So I sat down with the editor and I hacked on it, going back and forth between the user manual (which, back then, was a big, chunky manual the size of a phonebook supplement and not some rinky-dink QuickStart guide like you find today). I tried highlighting the newlines. I tried deleting them in increasingly clever ways. I tried moving them, cutting them, and tabbing them to oblivion. I looked at that word processor head-on and I figured out how it behaved because I refused to believe that anyone would make a word processor that couldn't correctly grok '\n'.

Today, I couldn't even tell you what it was called. But I remember that it had a really great feature that allowed you to keep two separate clipboards, which made quick copying and pasting of multiple blocks of text an amazingly easy operation, even when alternating between the two clipboards. You could put "hello " in one and "world!" in another and just paste each back and forth all the live long day.

So I really can't fault Uncle Eazy's father for avoiding the Enter key. My mom and I did the same thing 16 years ago. And in a way she gave me my second big PC problem to solve, which put me on the path of a lifetime of dealing with miserable users and head-bashingly stupid PC maintenance and repair stories.

Thanks, Mom.

In all, I should have realized even at that tender age that there are people who are driven to find answers and there are people who are content to ask the same questions over and over until someone finds an answer for them. I was part of the former, and I should probably have done something about it back when I still had youthful exuberance. And vitality. And hair.