iPod Touch Contest Submissions

As we discussed earlier this week, I am giving away an iPod Touch to one of the Moderators from our live chat room. Below, you will find their submissions. The idea is, each Mod who wanted to enter the contest had to write up a short story, detailing a funny or embarrassing moment they have experienced in their lives on a computer. I am going to close comments on this post, so none will be allowed. Once these are posted, I will create a poll for you to vote for your favorite. No one’s name is attached to these, to make it much more fair. Please vote based on hilarity, creativity and just plain fun-ness.

Entry #1

I was working for a contractor at a big software company in Redmond installing their CardKey system. Since I was a n00b at this, it didn’t occur to me to question the orders from above, so I did whatever I was asked. One Friday, my partner asked me to run an “expired cards” report. So I did. I quickly glanced at the print out and nothing seemed out of the ordinary. We were working the next day, Saturday, so I’m at the terminal doing some programming when the Facilities Manager comes in. He was not a happy camper.

Apparently the “expired cards” report also voids the expired CardKeys at the same time. And sure enough, one of them belonged to none other than Bill Gates. He was locked out of everything, the front door, his office, everything. He had to have Security let him in. Why he was carrying such a card was beyond me, the print out didn’t indicate anything, other than there was no name associated with the card number. So there you have it, Bill Gates, pwned by yours truly.

Entry #2

The year was 1990. The World Wide Web didn’t even exist yet. I was in High School, and my school was on the cutting edge. They just installed Tandy computers in every classroom, and every student was going to be given an email address that they were to check daily for emails from their teachers and classmates. Since I helped out in the computer lab and happened to be in there just as the setup was finished, I was given credentials, encouraged to login and send emails to my friends who would be receiving their credentials later that day. In my excitement I quickly typed out the subject, “FIRST EMAIL!!!!!” and wrote a short paragraph boasting how I was sending the first email in the school. The next paragraph is where things started to go wrong.
I wrote about a teacher that had just walked in to the lab, and how she was yet again wearing too much makeup and a “very baggy dress only a nun would approve of.” I was explicit and offensive about how HOT she would be if she’d stop “caking on foundation like a circus clown” and “put on a tight sweater for once.” Just as I finished writing this, the Computer Admin told her that I was sending the first email. She approached me with excitement, “Oh I want to watch!” I quickly rushed to hit the send button before she could get in sight of the monitor. Whew, she didn’t see it and I didn’t get caught… or so I thought. But not even a second passed, and the Admin said, “Hey, did you hit Send All?” Yep, I hit the dreaded Send All button by mistake and the email went to EVERY email address in the school: ALL the students, ALL the teachers, and ALL of the facility! The Computer Admin opened the email and I stood there in horror as his face sank more and more with every word he read. I spent the rest of the day in the Headmaster’s Office, and I never heard the end of it from all my friends. Worse of all, that teacher never smiled at me again!

Entry #3

I was working on a computer and the owner called to ask if it was ready yet. I had been procrastinating on getting it done, so I told him that it wasn’t quite finished. We made arrangements for him to pick it up the next day.
It turns out, this machine needed a new hard drive, as the old one was dying. I grabbed a new drive and connected it to another machine with the original old one. I was going to Ghost the old to the new, which is something I’ve done hundreds of times. This would have kept all of the owner’s data intact for him.
Being in a hurry, I didn’t stop to backup the old drive. I proceeded with the Ghosting. Unfortunately, I figured out too late that I had hooked the drives up backwards. I Ghosted the new one onto the old one… wiping out all of the owner’s data. I was left with two blank drives, and the task of figuring out how to tell the owner his data had been lost.

Entry #4

It happened my during my last year in high school, on a day when the whole high school had no internet. This really made me mad, because my friend and I always used the ‘net during class. Instead, we decided that we should create a video of us doing funny stuff to pass the time. I decided to do a little dance and act silly at the beginning of it. When I tried to do one particular dance move, I tripped over my feet and the leg of a chair. I fell head first to the ground. Of course, the entire thing was recorded for posterity. Everyone in the room was laughing their heads off, including my friend. I was red with embarassment… and laughter.
I had hoped everyone would forget the incident. Instead, it was used as bleeper footage during my high school Senior video. Everyone saw me dance and fall, and everyone was laughing.

Entry #5

It was a hot 90 degree day. I had just taken a shower, and slipped into a pair of shorts. I had recently set up my first Ustream account, and decided I would stream for a bit. I get the stream up, and then started to watch the chat room. All of a sudden, my wife began laughing hysterically in the other room, as she was watching my stream.
She yelled out “For the love of god, go put a shirt on! You look like you’re sitting there naked!”. She continued to crack up as I looked at my video feed. Sure enough, I wasn’t sitting at the computer in shorts. I appeared to be a middle-aged man sitting at my computer naked. There were like five viewers at that point. I scrambled to turn off the camera and shut off the stream.
Instead of simply and calmly saying “wow, this looks bad, let me go get a shirt on” then standing up so they could see I was actually wearing shorts… I ended up looking like some pervy guy who accidentally caught himself on his webcam sitting there naked.

Entry #6

I was in a position of needing to print out speeches. There were six people, at three speeches per person… to be printed on 8×10 card stock. I wasn’t sure if there wsa enough card stock to print them, so a friend went out to buy more. All the school kids had raided the store, and there was none left to buy! Luckily, we had exactly enough, even though we were panicking as the last pages came off the printer.
Fast forward to the day of the speeches. We’re all on stage, reading them. In our hurry to make changes and get them printed, we had named the files “New version” or “newnewversion”, things like that. By the time we had gotten around to printing them, we weren’t exactly sure what we were printing. It turns out that instead of three different speeches, we had printed one speech THREE times. Needless to say, we were mighty embarassed when we were asked why we all had the same exact work.

Entry #7 has been Disqualified

Entry #8

Anyone who has ever had to install Windows 95 from floppies will appreciate this. You must, of course, install them in order from 1 - 5. One day when I was attempting to install Win 95 from floppies for a friend of mine, I could not figure out why the entire install was refusing to work. I checked everything I could think of, and nothing came to mind. I was about to the point of telling my friend he needed a new computer when it finally struck me what was wrong.
I was attempting to install the floppies in backwards order, beginning with #5 instead of #1.

Entry #9

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