I worked with an administrative assistant who wanted the labels on her 5 1/4 floppies “pretty” so she used the typewriter. Only instead of typing the labels first, then putting them on the floppies, she would put the labels on the floppies, then roll the disks into the typewriter and type on them. Then complain her floppies didn’t work. Gee, I wonder why.
She’s also the one who called me in a panic because there “was a red line across the middle of my screen.” Nothing else, just a red line. Swore she hadn’t touched anything or opened any programs or files. It just showed up. Before I walked all the way over to her office, I had her put one of the other AAs on the phone. Turned out she was in WordPerfect with no file open and had accidentally turned on “Reveal Codes.”
And she’s the one who “didn’t want to lose my floppies,” so she got a couple of magnets and stuck them to the filing cabinet by her desk. This was after we’d had the discussion about not mutilating the disks by running them through the typewriter. She didn’t want to put them in a drawer, they “might get damaged.”
We once had a IT-ignorant HR Director. When she first started, she requested a box of 3.5” floppies.
A month later, she asked for another box.
Some time after that, she called me in to “troubleshoot an application issue.” Apparently she had some dumb virtual pet program, featuring an animated cat that would walk across the screen, chase the cursor, etc...
As I started to remove the software and explain that installing the program violated our IT policy, etc, she went nuts. It was “necessary for her mental well-being and helped her perform her job better.” I removed it anyway.
As I left, she asked for another box of disks. I asked her why she used so many floppies. She said she created allot of files. Thinking she was concerned about HR-related confidentiality, I asked why she couldn’t save her files to the network share. “The what?”
She had been saving all her files to floppy. This was 2004.