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What was the funniest thing, a non-tech ever said to you?

Andreas on November 21, 2019

Let's share some humorous moments with clients from completely different branches.

Please, this is not meant to make fun of other people's lack of knowledge. Nobody knows everything, but that's why we can nevertheless laugh about each other, right?

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Andreas • Edited

Last week one of my clients looked over my shoulder and asked me if I was on the Darknet. I was just taking notes in Sublime Text.

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Manoj Kumar

A guy I used to work with told me to put the cap over the USB drive else it would catch a virus.

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Andreas

πŸ˜‚πŸ€£ That's awesome πŸ˜‚

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Uduma chidiebere

My teacher actually told me something similar in high school.

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Andreas

Wow, that's sad πŸ™ˆ

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William Dicks

Many years ago when I still programmed in Assembler, we developed anti-virus software. One of the jobs I had to do was to debug viruses to see how they hooked into memory or files, find that address and then eliminate the threat. I tried to explain this to my mom. She stood there listening as if she knew exactly what I meant. About 2 weeks later when my wife and I visited my parents again, my mother, after having thought about this thing during the previous 2 weeks, asked me where I found the virus. "Was it in Johannesburg?" She had one reference for "address" and I had a totally different one!

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Kartika Prasad

Haha, I wonder what she thought "eliminate the threat" meant

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Andreas

... or "viruses" that "hooked into memory" 🦠🧠

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πŸ¦„N BπŸ›‘

PURGE.

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Terri Fricker

So sweet of her to really think it through rather than not keeping any of it in memory because it was over her head. She loves you.

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Manda Putra

When I code in sunday / night, my girlfriend always once ask me,

"is it job? Do they pay you for late hours working?"

"No nobody pays me, I'm just learning, this just Open Source, I build something just to be share with others"

"So you're working for free?, What a waste of time"

I'm just smiling πŸ˜‚ Open Source technologies are still blackhole for most people outside technology.

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Jean-Michel πŸ•΅πŸ»β€β™‚οΈ Fayard

Your girlfriend is not wrong.
It's better to get work on open-source and getting paid for it while you are at work.
Smart companies understand that making time for learning is essential

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Andreas

I know that kind of conversations too. Most of these people understand if you explain that it's a great way to support other people while gaining experience and projects for your portfolio. πŸ’ͺ🏻

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Manda Putra

Yeah, I always explain to others to use the platform for good. Literalry we all on top of Open Source and Free Software. And we all need that constant on learning something, because tech are always changing.

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Alexandr K

"You are Software Developer, please fix my TV, it's having dark screen and remote is not working"

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Uduma chidiebere

yeah, that really happens.

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Casey Brooks • Edited

My wife once looked over at me coding and saw class ComponentHolderOptionExtractor. As programmers, this makes perfect sense, a longer but more descriptive name, but she thought the name was just ridiculous and hilarious. To this day, anytime she wants to pretend she understands coding, she'll throw out that word with a look of "I bet you don't understand it, but I do!"

A few months after that, I refactored my app and generalized that class and renamed it to ModularListOptionExtractor. She'll never forgive me for killing off her beloved ComponentHolderOptionExtractor 🀣

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Andreas

Awesome story, thanks for sharing!

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Michiel Hendriks

"I have a simple question."

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Rogier Zeebregts

"You know computers, right?!" and then all kinds of questions about fixing all kinds of things.

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REKYYY

LMAO πŸ˜‚

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Rikke K. Petersen

Once someone asked me, if I was hacking. I was writing an assignment with LaTeX.

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Andreas

πŸ˜‚ nice! Most people think you are a hacker if you have a text editor with a dark theme... And if you open a terminal and type sudo apt update, their eyes become like πŸ‘€

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Rikke K. Petersen

I didn't even use dark theme πŸ˜‚ But that is so true! Terminal with green font and 20% opacity, if you really want to show of πŸ˜‚

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Fulton Browne

and then they'll ask "whats wrong with your keyboard? I saw no text when you where entering your password"

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Dendi Handian

"Hey, could you make a website for me? It's easy, right?"

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techie_digit

when the system admin was trying interchanging her pc monitor with another one, then she yelled at him by saying there was a lot of data on my desktop and she needs it!

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Clint • Edited

Someone I used to work with said "they should send a message over the network to tell everyone it was down"

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Andreas • Edited

Haha cool! But honestly, this happens to techies too! A friend and colleague once created a VPN user for me and told me, I can read the documentation how to set up my VPN in the Wiki. Well, the Wiki was only reachable via VPN. πŸ˜…

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Trev

My wife:

Oh, you wanna talk about gits? I have ALL the gits. I'm a git expert. I have at least 5000.

She loves to be included even though I'm speaking in tongues to her most of the time.

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Paresh

What do you actually do by sitting all day in front of computer?

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Nathan Grass

My wife asks me how I know so many things when "I thought you just sat in front of a computer all day."

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Paresh

;-)

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Angel Macias

"I have an idea for an app. It should be easy for someone smart like you."

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Tirtha Guha

"It's so frustrating talking to technology" One of the customers, after a meeting.

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πŸ¦„N BπŸ›‘

"It's so frustrating talking to technology"

That is a sentiment I can co-sign.

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Reinhart Previano K.

Can you hack my ex's Instagram profile?

Seriously, this question has been asked to all Indonesians who worked in IT (including those who aren't working in cybersecurity), colloquially called as "Anak IT" (literally IT person)

Just search for "Anak IT hack" on Twitter and you'll see those lost young Indonesian singles clients asking for true help.

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Paresh • Edited

What is the unit conversion for MBs to KGs? It looks like my phone is getting heavier when I don't clear WhatsApp chat and media files.

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Paresh

You build software products for investment banking, can you help me invest in equities?

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Paresh

You have done computers engineering, right? Can you fix my DVD Reader?

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Nathan Grass

I've seen this one a few times:

By the way, what does btw mean?

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Julien Calixte

"Can we save 4g data to use them when we are offline? Like an external charger" I found this question cute 😌

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πŸ¦„N BπŸ›‘

Technically, though, the answer is "yes."