Date Received: 08 Nov 1995
Since I learn almost everything by making mistakes, I thought some
of you might avoid a little grief if I listed a few of them:
- When you spill coffee on a floppy disk, the drive does notserve as a
"spin-dry" cycle.
- After hooking a monochrome monitor into a rgb output video card,
the firemen make rude comments about not thinking.
- You get flamed on an echo if your post to someone started with
"Hey look, bonehead".
- Liquid spilled into a keyboard never does "dry up" as quickly as you
think it should.
- The only files you will ever want of an out-of-state bulletin
board are files all over 2 megabytes long, in 6 parts.
- Locking the keyboard out then losing the key on a Saturday night
means no computer until Monday morning.
- Setting a password in your CMOS then forgetting it will cause many
hours of panicky misery when you reboot.
- Most hard disks don't survive falls off of the tabletop.
- Printers don't work too well if you forget to plug them into the
computer - spent 4 hours learning this maxim.
- When you tell a client that a particular piece of equipment doesn't
do something, the revised version that does always hits the streets 2 weeks
before you say it.
- Actually reading the manual only leads to confusion.
- While computers now have viruses, floppy disks don't actually get
cold sores, that's a cigarette burn on the media.
- While you don't want to forget an important diskette for a client,
putting it on the refrigerator with a magnet is not a good place.
- Never schedule a backup to coincide with a major power failure.
- When the lights in the house go very dim, it's because your computer
is about to burn up - the same firemen get rude again.
- Frequently re-used floppies can get a waxy label build-up.
- The larger your hard disk, the more software you will buy.
- No matter how fast your modem is, it's slow.
- There is no such thing as screen colors that are "easy on the eyes".
- Installation is easy, setup is moderately difficult, but tweaking to
highest performance takes a lifetime.
- The warranty always DOES run out the day before.
- When you unpack a new piece of equipment to test it before delivery
to a customer, it NEVER fits back into the box like it came out.
- If we all spoke Taiwanese, Chinese and Korean, schematics and docs
would be easier to understand.
- Always, always write down which pins the red and black wires came off
of when you took it apart.
- Always save all the parts left over after putting computer back
together.