At work, we used to have a cordless rechargeable mouse on the conference room computer. Just before a presentation was scheduled to start, we noticed that the previous user had forgotten to put the mouse back on its charger, and was dead. OH NOES! What to do? So I proceeded to show everyone that yes, Virginia, one can use Windows without a mouse, and it’s even faster that way for most things.

It’s amazing how one can use Windows for ten years and not know about Alt-tab.

Hello from consoleland! I am bit curious why didn’t you just use shell oneliner? Those are very nice when doing such things. You can just leave it running and make it so it exits when it is ready.

So Luke, did you answer the question? ARE you a Wizard? You sure sound like one to me, with all those magical terminal incantations and ‘midnight commandments’ and whatnot. Are you also an alchemist?!

@ sapientidiot:

If I know my users, LMGTFY would probably result in a panicked call call to the help desk along the lines “OMG, MY COMPUTER HAS BEEN HACKED! THE MOUSE IS MOVING BY ITSELF AND IT IS GOOGLING!” followed by a broadcast email to the entire company saying “I’ve been hacked, and if I ever emailed you then you are probably hacked too!” followed by “OMG, WHAT HAVE I DONE, DO NOT OPEN MY LAST EMAIL! OR THIS ONE! OMG, OMG!”

Then this happens.

IceBrain wrote:

Working at a Linux based SW shop, there are no real lusers here

Man, must be nice. :)

And yeah, gotta love the “obsolete” tools that are still in active development after 20+ years in service. :)

Working at a Linux based SW shop, there are no real lusers here; even the HR/PR/Sales person (we’re a really small company) is just not familiarized, but she isn’t stupid or lazy, she would’ve been able to unzip a 7z file by herself.

That said, the less technically capable of my bosses often remarked something about not understanding why I used “obsolete tools” when I was in VIM. He stopped when I made a GET request for an XML doc, changed some stuff with a regex and then made a PUT to store it, all without leaving VIM, thanks to ‘:read !curl …’ and ‘:write !curl -d@- …’

Other than that, some people were mildly curious about Pentadactyl, but that’s all.

I once stepped through some code to answer a tester’s question while they were watching my monitor.

They were glad that I was dropping everything to help them out, but they grew bored and impatient after 5 minutes :P

I suppose sending back a link for http://lmgtfy.com/?q=how+to+open+a+7z+file would have gotten you in trouble, but that’s been my solution to such problems.

How people can have a job without knowing how to use computers is one reason I’m so glad to be self employed these days. Working as tech support again would probably drive me mad, especially if it wasn’t actually part of my job.

iwre0 wrote:

The next time that luser gets the same problem with the same type of file, sure he’s not going to resolve by himself. He will call you again !

I’m aware of that. In fact, sending me the file, and then coming over to my desk was kinda an explicit statement of “I don’t want to learn anything, I just want you to do it for me”.

I know from experience that there are users who will call the help desk so that someone can remote-in and double-click an installer for them. I once spent 20 fruitless minutes trying to get a lady to click on the “Team Viewer” icon on the desktop, only so that I could remote-in to un-check the offline setting in her outlook. Eventually I decided that it will be faster for me to just run two flights of stairs up and fix it in person. Some lusers can’t be reached.

@ Milos:

Atool is awesome! Thanks for the tip!

Recently I came across atool a script for managing file archives.
Beside others it provides also the utility arepack which repacks archives to a different format. So you can simply do the task by running:
arepack archive.7z archive.zip
Yes, and last time someone was watching me working, he asked “Are you using DOS or what?” :)

Oh, yes ! thats cool! I like the way you do those things but i think that perhaps you made a mistake.
The next time that luser gets the same problem with the same type of file, sure he’s not going to resolve by himself. He will call you again !

Thats why i prefer to teach them the “easy way” (click, then click and finally click…) to all my lusers…otherwise the evil get into me and i would convert in BOFH