If you have to wonder about the title of this article, write down all of the elements of the title before the word "Errors." Write the letters that "Eye", "Dee" and "Tee" sound like. Write out the number "Ten" as a numeral. Don't leave any spaces between them.
Got it? If you haven't, stop reading now, because this article is about you.
(This issue is also known, in the tech industry, as PEBKAC (Problem Exists Between Keyboard And Chair).
My friend sends me this email (I swear I am not making this up) from his help desk buddies:
"The guy who works in the Data Center over the weekend also answers calls for the Service Desk. This guy called in from one of the plants asking how he could log into his email over the internet. The Operator started walking the guy through how to log in. When he explained to the guy that he should type in his first name, then a period, then his last name and then hit SHIFT-2 to add the "@" sign, the plant guy paused a minute and then said "If I hit SHIFT-2, won't I get a CAPITAL "2"?
So what's your favorite "ID10T" moment?
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Comments: 4
I remember one making the rounds a few years ago about someone who couldn't get his computer to boot up and didn't have it plugged in.
"OK, well, what have you done that's unusual?"
"Nothing, except that we had a user leave and I needed to delete her directory."
"That's fine. So what did you do?"
"Well, I logged in and ran the rm -r * command. And about five minutes after that the whole system stopped."
"And were you logged in as, or in the directory of the user you wanted to delete, when you did this?"
"No, I was logged in like I usually was - as root."
"OK, I think I've found your problem..."
(If you've never worked on UNIX systems - which most people haven't, these days- the "rm -r *" command recursively removes a directory structure; that is, it removes the current folder and any folders underneath it. It's state-dependent; it'll only remove the directory structure you're in. However, the "root" user is the UNIX system admin - it's the user that can do anything to anything, any time. And if you log in as root, you log in at the highest level of the directory structure, at the top of the tree.
So if you execute an rm -r * from there...
After a while your machine just sits there and hums at you, because it erases the command directory and forgets how to erase things.