That's hard work for an electrician.

[Dave Liquorice]

Not your type then?

[ARW]

I know someone who called out a TV repair man out when the sound failed. She had hit the mute button on the TV when dusting it,

This place used to have a brilliant guy that would have found this problem in minutes- unfortunately he is seriously ill.

[ARW]

We have Gremlin

[Mr Pounder]

Rubbish! It only took me 3 years to work out how to set the clock. The microwave clock is still under review.

[Bill]

You should see the fun and games we have with our works telephone system. Every so often we all get given sterilising wet wipes and are told to clean the handset and buttons. Those that do not unplug their phones while they clean the buttons change all sorts of interesting parameters, some of which don't even seem to appear in the manual!!

[Vir Campestris]

I don't think I've told you lot this story.

We were selling our house, and I'd had to go out to the US on a support call. An offer duly came in. The estate agent asked if we'd accept it. SWMBO says she'll check with me, but I'm in Washington. "What US?" says the agent.

We discuss it over the 'phone, then SWMBO calls the agent back the next day. The agent asks when I'll be back, because there's some paperwork to sign. "I don't know", says SWMBO, "He's gone to Sydney."

"WHAT AUSTRALIA???" says the agent.

When I did arrive in Sydney they'd worked out the problem while I was over the Pacific, so I hung around for a few days then came home. The only time I've gone the whole way around in one trip. And it was just to say "Yes, that looks like it".

Andy

[News]

In message , Mr Pounder writes

We've been in this house nearly twelve years. I still haven't worked out the cooker clock ...

[spuorgelgoog]

I've been in this flat one year and still haven't worked out where the previous occupant plugged his fridge in.

There's a fridge-shaped space (2 mm too small to fit my fridge into) but no socket anywhere near.

Owain

[Dave Plowman (News)]

Obvious you don't do any serious cooking. ;-)

My Neff is quite clever. All you do is enter the cooking time and the finish time and it does the rest.

[Toby]

We had the same sort of issue with a past system, in that some people kept managing to put the phone on auto answer to speakerphone, which surprised them when the next person called, especially if they didn't want to answer it!

[The Natural Philosopher]

One bastard I employed actually read the manual and discovered how to divert his phone while on holiday.

So instead of the usual ring rung ring then ring the hunt group it went to someone else's instead.

WE couldn't understand how a DDI number attached to his phone kept ending up in someone elses.

He was also the turd that insisted in using EMACS to edit Unix configuration files.

Now Emacs takes the original file adds a tilde to it an creates a new one of the original name. Vi takes the old file and alters it.

Result is, if a process has the file open emacs doesn't actually change the working file contents.

You haver to restart the whole daemon. Which he failed to do of course.

Irish plonker.

[John Rumm]

I spent ten minutes trying to diagnose a lack of audio from the kitchen speakers... amp was on, volume was up, the source comes from a PC - so checking its settings, trying to work out if its a connection problem or a sound card issue, or something up with the amp...

Someone had nudged the speaker select switch walking past it, and deselected all speakers! ;-)

[Bill Wright]

About twenty years ago I suffered a lot of righteous indignation coming down the phone from a TV shop in Pentland, Edinburgh. The TV distribution system we had installed JUST DIDN'T WORK! NONE of the TV sets on one of the gondolas would work! NONE of them! It was disgraceful!

240 miles later I found that all the sets on that stand were Thompson ones, and the default autotune was to find nothing but French signals. No-one had bothered to set the country to UK.

They did pay up, finally.

Bill

[harryagain]

These were the old mechanical clocks. I don't know anyone ever used them. Dunno why they are still fitted. Must be some sort of tradition.

[Chris J Dixon]

Quite so.

I once knew someone who felt that the oven should be isolated when not in use. I was unable to stop myself setting the clock whenever I noticed it flashing, pointless though this was.

Chris

[News]

In message , "Dave Plowman (News)" writes

The problem is, we always turn it off at the wall, when cooking has finished, which means there is no incentive to set the clock properly.

Why, I hear you ask? Because when we moved in, our son was a year old, and the controls are front panel mounted, ideal for an inquisitive child. He is 13 now, but the habit has stuck.

There is a built in deep fat fryer which we have never used. Son did manage to turn that on once, soon after we moved in - clouds of blue smoke from the residue fat or oil left by the previous occupants.

[Tim Streater]

Don't you have to do that anyway, however you edit it? The daemon will have read its config file in at startup. So if you change it you have to restart it so it does that again. Or was this one which re-read it from time to time?

[mogga]

Have you made it a label to identify it as such?

[Tim Watts]

Some "standard" daemons do that now - either by a polling stat() on the file or using one of the *notify() interfaces (in linux at least).

Personally I don't like that behaviour - if I am part way through editing a file, I want to save it run a "configtest" if available (eg apache2) before committing to a restart.

But anyone who edits a config and does not think to restart it is a complete plonker anyway.

[damduck-egg]

It's that Auld Alliance thing between the Haggis and Snail eaters kicking in again. I expect they are looking foward to restarting it soon.

G.Harman