Sigh… This is going to be a short post, because something just died inside of me and I need to go bang my head against the brick wall to relieve the pain. It’s also vaguely related to my post from Tuesday. Related in topic matter, but not circumstances.
Here is the story… Or rather, the short version. I really don’t have the heart for it right now. I could probably turn this into a 5 page epic, but I just… Well, you will understand once I finish this. The gist is that a guy at work caught a virus of some sort. The standard operating procedure in these circumstances is apparently to:
- Ignore it
- Hope it will go away
- Talk to the supervisor and tell them that your computer is slow that you need a new one
- Never, ever, under any circumstances attempt to contact the IT department and tell them about this problem
I was pleasantly surprised when this dude violated this long standing tradition, and actually called me with the problem. The infection turned out to be relatively minor, considering that his Norton AV Suite was able to clean it out on the first scan. To be on the safe side, I had him run a scan with malwarebytes. If you have ever used this tool (it’s great BTW – I highly recommend it) you know that at the end of the scan it generates a log file and automatically opens it in notepad so you can review it. Sometimes it contains useful information – for example, files that were not possible to be cleaned and/or deleted during the scan.
I asked the guy to save this log file, and email it to me. This is what I got in my inbox:
You can click on that image to enlarge it. And yes, he took a screenshot of his whole desktop, pasted it into word and sent it to me. My reaction:
facepalm.jpg on flickrApparently, God hates me. It could be worse though… At least he managed to skip the wooden table step. I guess I should consider myself lucky…
Moral of this story is: regular users do not understand plain text. I should keep it in mind when I teach my class and talk about ASCII code. When I say “plain text” some students probably think “word doc with no formatting”. Lesson learned.
Also, if you didn’t get this, I am not going to explain it.
Your pain is felt by all of us.
It’s not always text either. I have an employee here who didn’t know how to right click and image on her browser to save it, so she would just take a screen shot and send that to me.
seen this too many times…but for some reason when I read this, i just starting laughing my ass off! Musta been the way you phrased it! :) Thanks for the laugh! :)
Give the guy some credit – I’ve had people who couldn’t even take a screen shot – let alone email it me after.
Not as bad as that, but still irritating, I find a lot of users just attach everything. I ask for the fstab and I get it as an attachment. Or I ask for the dmesg tail, and they send it in a word file. When did copy/paste become so hard?
I’ve had minor success with the people who use gigantic bitmaps (paraphrased):
“use .png for your screenshots, it doesn’t take so much space. Important when you’re doing hundreds of these”
-blank stare-
“it makes it easier for the IT guys to manage your email if you help them out a bit”
-blank stare with a hint of sneer-
“you know how sometimes your emails are blocked because your attachments are too big? If you use .png instead of .bmp you’ll never have that happen again”
-instant convert-
I’m surprised he knew how to take a screen shot. Made me laugh anyhow, thanks!
Wahahahahahaahahaaa!!!!
How is a person savvy enough to take a screenshot and paste it in word, not know that text is also copy-paste-able?
Anyway, thanks for malwarebytes. Will check that out.
Facepalm.
But I think I’ve seen it worse. Well, not really worse, exactly the same, but in a lab asignment delivery… from a third year student of an IT career.
He was supposed to deliver me the output of several commands issued on a terminal window (I won’t tell you how hard it was to get some of the students to grab the concept of a ssh session). At first I was surprised on the size of the attachment… how can a few text files make a compressed file this big?? Then I unpacked it to find a collection of screenshots. At least he didn’t use .bmp.
“You can click on that image to enlarge it.”
Actually, you can’t :P
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Also, WordPress would let me post this comment (hopefully it’ll work when I add this though). I briefly considered taking a screenshot of the error, but I’ll just paste it here instead:
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Ok, it still wouldn’t work. Let’s try updating the page, hopefully that’ll fix it.
Same problem here.
@mcai8sh4: I think that is part of the irony here.
@jambarama: Back when I was an undergrad, I was working on some class project with a guy who sent me his java code as a Word document. Naturally it did not compile. I asked him if he even tried compiling it, and he said “no, I don’t have java on my computer”.
This was in an advanced 400 level programming course.
@vacri: Good one! I shall try it next time. :)
@Hector: Classic! This used to happen all the time back in school. Before every assignment and/or exercise our instructors had to remind people how to use the script command on unix.
Half the people still did not get it.
@freelancer: Ooops! I fixed it.
I feel your pain
I experienced my first paste-screenshot-into-word email recently at work. In a software company. By an engineer no less.
Facepalm indeed… :P
Oh it seems to be normal. Once i faced the situation where the student took the pic from his cellphone camera(didn’t know how to take screenshot, or i don’t know what was the reason) and mailed it to me. Anyways, such incidents are normal.