The Daily WTF recently posted an entry named “The Mostest Wrong Datatype” which seems — pure coincidence, surely — to refer to a local programmer of your acquaintance.

The WTF site highlights examples of confused, inexplicable, or just plain awful programming code. (If you’re not of the technical persuasion, you may still enjoy the Error’d portion of the site, which features amusing shots of bewildering computer screens.)

By the way, if you happen to be one of the contractors named in the piece: a pox on your house!

What He Said has a little-used PEBKAC category. The acronym stands for “Problem Exists Between Keyboard and Chair” and is a favourite of the beleaguered computer support technician, universally known as the “help desk guy,” or simply, Nick Burns.

But pinheaded PEBKAC-ery is not restricted to the casual neophyte computer user: far from it. The more contact one endures with one of these infernal transistorized contraptions, the more likely one will have “comma” and “moron” appended to one’s name.

The prosecution wishes to submit into evidence…today. A user called down, claiming that her reports were not printing. Now, the reason could be any one of a thousand gremlins, and all fingers initially point outward: bollixed report settings, printer mis-configuration, network hiccups, cockeyed account permissions, jerked cables, or nine-hundred and ninety-five other varieties of pickle.

Then we discovered that the reports were being printed, but on a printer at the far end of the College. So at least there was a “workaround” solution should the problem persist: “walkaround.”

Of course the printer routing file asserted that reports for this user should be printed to the printer in her area rather than the one along the hall, around the corner, down the stairs, and through reception.

It was at approximately the time of this discovery that a sharp crack could be heard emanating from my brain, or at least from the bone that frequently occupies that same space.

A few weeks before, I had “fixed” the report in question so that it would print in entirety, instead of just the first row. As part of that “fix,” I hard-coded (a programming term that describes the act of driving nails through a bearing to affix a wheel to its axle) the printer for that report. And not just any printer, but the one along the hall, around the corner, down the stairs, and through reception.

Today I am the PEBKING of PEBKAC.

For a short time in the early ’90s, I administered a small SCO UNIX system (from the Santa Cruz Operation, not the litigious SCO Group) while working for Nesbitt Thomson, a Toronto-based investment house, later reconstituted as Nesbitt Burns.

The system was reliably flaky, particularly when executing the overnight batch process. I was living an hour’s distance from the city at the time (two hours, should a drop of rain fall anywhere along the length of the Don Valley Parkway) and had to correct the inevitable 3:00am glitches over the phone, relaying commands to the server operations staff (the guys that print the reports, swap the backup tapes, and surf the porn).

As would any UNIX admin, I had set up a number of aliases for common commands: px as a shortcut for ps -aux and even l for the ls list files command (why type two characters when one will do?).

One early, early morning, the system again zigged when it should have zagged, and before long an operator was on the horn. I started walking him through a diagnosis of what might be the problem. The first thing to check was a set of log files produced by the batch process: the more that appeared in a given directory, the further along was the process before the crash.

He navigated to the log directory with aplomb and then I issued the fateful instruction:

“Let’s look at the files in that directory. Type ‘L’.”

Came the response, “It says ‘command not found’.”

“Try it again. Maybe you hit the wrong key. Type ‘L’,”

“Nope. It says ‘command not found’ again.”

Over the phone it sounded like he was hitting too many keys. It should have only taken two keypresses: one for the “L” and one for the return key. “Are you just typing ‘L’?”

“‘L’, ya that’s it.”

“Just the one letter? It sounded like you were typing more. You didn’t hit the shift key, did you?”

“Which letter?”

“The letter ‘L’. Just type the letter ‘L’ and then hit return.”

“What letter ‘L’ are you talking about?”

It is 3:00am after all, so at least one of us is pretty punchy. I must’ve been or I would’ve just told him to type the ls command rather than my custom alias. But I was on the rails now and not to be diverted. Before this was over, one of us was going straight to “L”.

“The letter ‘L’ on the keyboard,” I patiently explained. “Just type that one letter and hit return.”

Click, click, click, click, click. “It says ‘command not found’. Same as before, man.”

“I heard you typing a bunch of keys that time. You should only type ‘L’ and return. That’s just two keys.”

“How do you type ‘L’ with just two keys?”

“Well, one key for ‘L’ and one for the return key.”

“Oh. How do you spell ‘L’?”

Long silence.

“It’s the letter ‘L’. As in the letters ‘I’, ‘J’, ‘K’, ‘L’. It’s one of the letters of the alphabet. It’s somewhere on the right side of the keyboard.” At this point I’m stumbling about the house in the dark looking for a QWERTY keyboard so that I can precisely describe the key’s coordinates. I find one. “It’s the key just to the right of ‘K’ and to the left of the semi-colon.”

“What’s a semi-colon?”

“‘L’ is the key to the right of the ‘K’. The letter ‘L’. It’s shaped like a vertical line with a smaller line at the bottom pointing to the right. Just press it once. Just once and then hit return.”

“Let me go get Chris.”

…

Chris and I worked out the problem fairly quickly, and even fixed the original problem with the batch process. In the morning I checked the command history for the operator’s account. In quick succession, it read “elle”, “elle”, “ell”, “el”, and finally “elle” again.

I shudder to think what might have happened had I abbreviated the command to the single letter “aitch.”

God bless the computer support technicians, every one.

I’ve never worked in tech support, but I have filled in for vacationing/ill/hiding supportfolk and, as a “computer person”, I’ve helped my share of friends, family, and coworkers out of their simple problems and into giant, bottomless ones.

In one such instance back in 2000 or so, I was briefly manning a Whitehorse ISP’s support desk. A woman called in needing assistance setting up her network connection. I first asked if she was using Windows. She was. I began walking her through the procedure, from the Start menu, to the Control Panel, and then on to the TCP/IP configuration under the Network Connections doohickey.

All seemed to be going well until I asked her what she had displayed in one of the configuration screens. Her answer was completely perplexing; she didn’t seem to be looking at anything like the same screen that I had before me.

Since I had Windows 2000 on my desktop, and most customers had Windows 95 at the time, I expected a little bit of difference, but nothing she described sounded like anything I knew from 95, 98, or even 3.1.

I asked her again if her computer was running Windows, Microsoft Windows to be precise. “Oh, yes” she replied, quite certain.

We started from scratch, but the next time through, things got even more confusing. Nothing she described on her screen sounded the least bit familiar.

Then it hit me.

“Is your computer a pretty blue colour?”

“Yes, white and blue. Why?”

“Is the word ‘iMac’ printed on the front.”

“Oh, yes. My computer is a Macintosh.”

Silent scream.

“Oh, then I’ve been giving you all the wrong instructions because I thought you were using Microsoft Windows.”

“I am using windows. The windows are all over my screen.”

“Yes, I understand. I just thought you were using Microsoft Windows. Windows with a capital W.”

“Should I be pressing the shift key when I type?”

I must have some support technician blood in me, because I managed not to lose it at that point. I calmly guided her through the Macintosh setup procedure (with one of the graphic designer’s help because I don’t know jack ’bout Mac).

The real support guys probably know how to pronounce capital letters over the phone. God bless ‘em.

In my early teens, a few of us proto-geeks would hang out in a downtown Ottawa computer shop, playing with the Osbornes and Apple ][s until an hours-older salesgeek would throw us kerbside.

One afternoon, while surreptitiously copying the store's software to our own floppies, we watched a businessman stride in and face one of the displayed Apple ][ computers systems. He then pulled from his pocket a standard 5-1/4 inch floppy diskette that someone must've given him and stared at the Apple's disk drive.

Now, if you’ve never seen one of these drives, here’s an example (click for larger view, image courtesy of the Greater Pittsburgh Vintage Computer Museum). The drives had a center latch that, when closed, split the disk slot into two halves. The drive that the fellow was facing was similarly closed.

The poor fellow clearly wanted to insert the disk he held, but seemed baffled by the slots on the front of the drive. He looked at the drive, looked at his disk, looked at the drive again, folded his disk in half, and began jamming it into one side of the drive. Our delighted guffaws brought the salesman running. He was more worried about damage to the drive or the disk that was already inserted, but later admitted that he’d found it hard to keep a straight face when the business fellow complained that he needed to look at some memo that a coworker had stored on his precious disk, and couldn’t he just flatten it out under a book or something and try again.