Collage 042               H u m o u r N e t                    1995

For those of you who saw fit to inform me :-) that the last
Collage was number 41--not 40, as I stated in the opener (hey, at
least I had it correct on the "Subject" line)--this one is now
correctly numbered at 42. (This "higher math" stuff still confuses
me every now and then. To a skydiver, "higher math" means figuring
out how much more freefall time you'll get if the pilot flies
jump run at 15,000 feet instead of the usual 13,500.)

Okay, so welcome to Collage 42. Thanks go to Nancy for the entire
contents of this one EXCEPT for the piece about the U.S. Navy
Captain and the four black officers--Nancy asked that she not be
associated with that one, and, of course, I must respect her
desire for anonymity. :-)

And--oh, boy!--Collage 43 is already in the works, so stay close
to your monitors ...

- Vince Sabio
  HumourNet Moderator
  HumourNet@telephonet.com
____________________________________________________________________
          Opener (above) Copyright 1995 by Vincent Sabio
  Permission is hereby granted to forward or post this "Collage";
  please observe the guidelines stated at the end of the message.
____________________________________________________________________

Heard this on the radio this morning:  a major Christian radio
network is alerting its member stations to check their latest
shipments of religious compact discs before airing them. It seems
that some other CDs were mislabelled at the factory and shipped
along with the religious ones. Unfortunately the itinerant CDs were
by the Dead Kennedys. A spokesman for the radio network said, "This
is what happens whenever people get around machines." The CBS
newsreader, with masterful understatement, said, "The Dead Kennedys
CDs included songs such as, `I Kill Children,' which some Christian
listeners might not find inspirational."

========================[ H U M O U R N E T ]=======================

In the middle 1800s, a Sylvester Graham led one of the first
health-food crusades in this country. He thought that bad health
was related to sexual excesses such as intercourse more than once a
month, masturbation, and erotic dreams, all of which were caused by
eating rich and spicy foods. These foods "increase the concupiscent
excitability and sensibility of the genital organs." The antidote he
prescribed was a vegetarian diet of plain and boring foods, one key
element of which was coarse, whole-wheat flour. Although you have
probably never heard of Mr. Graham, you have undoubtedly tasted a
processed and sweetened version of his attempt to reduce sexual
excess--the graham cracker.

Graham wasn't the only nut rolling around in nineteenth-century
America;  many others were also concerned about curbing sexuality.
John Harvey Kellogg gained a reputation both as a nutritionist and a
sexual adviser. He thought sex the ultimate abomination and
remained chaste even in marriage. Masturbation was the worst sin of
all, "the vilest, the basest, and the most degrading act that a
human being can commit." In his view, it led not only to the usual
stuff like tuberculosis, heart disease, epilepsy, dimness of vision,
insanity, idiocy, and death, but also to bashfulness in some people,
unnatural boldness in others, a fondness for spicy foods, round
shoulders, and "acne, or pimples on the face." Kellogg introduced a
number of foods designed to promote health and decrease interest in
sex, one of which he called Corn Flakes. The rest, as they say, is
history.

 -- Bernie Zilbergeld, Ph.D., "The New Male Sexuality"

========================[ H U M O U R N E T ]=======================

Sworn to be true, but probably apocryphal:

In the mid 80's a cruiser of the U.S. Navy put in to port in
Catahegna, Spain, for a week's shore leave. (Well, leave for the
crew, not the cruiser.) The first evening, the captain was more than
a little surprised to receive the following letter from an
upper-class Spanish lady:

        Dear Captain,

        On Thursday, it will be my daughter's coming-of-age party.
        I would like you to send four well-mannered, rich, unmarried
        officers. They should arrive at 8 p.m.

        One last point: No Jews--we don't like Jews.

Sure enough, at 8 on Thursday, the lady heard a rap at the door,
which she opened to find, in dress uniform, four exquisitely-
mannered, wealthy, single, BLACK officers. Her lower jaw hit the
floor, but pulling herself together she got out "There must be some
mistake."

"Madam," said the first officer, "Captain Cohen doesn't make mistakes."

========================[ H U M O U R N E T ]=======================

 From the Wall Street Journal, Tuesday, March 1, 1994.
 Reprinted without permission

BEFUDDLED PC USERS FLOOD HELP LINES,
AND NO QUESTION SEEMS TO BE TOO BASIC

AUSTIN, Texas -- The exasperated help-line caller said she couldn't
get her new Dell computer to turn on. Jay Ablinger, a Dell Computer
Corp. technician, made sure the computer was plugged in and then
asked the woman what happened when she pushed the power button.

"I've pushed and pushed on this foot pedal and nothing happens," the
woman replied. "Foot pedal?" the technician asked. "Yes," the
woman said, "this little white foot pedal with the 'ON' switch." The
"foot pedal," it turned out, was the computer's mouse, a
hand-operated device that helps to control the computer's
operations.

::boring stuff about computer newbies and "comfort levels" deleted::

The questions are often so basic that they could have been answered
by opening the manual that comes with every machine. One woman
called Dell's toll-free line to ask how to install batteries in her
laptop. When told that the directions were on the first page of the
manual, says Steve Smith, Dell director of technical support, the
woman replied angrily, "I just paid $2,000 for this damn thing, and
I'm not going to read a book."

Indeed, it seems that these buyers rarely refer to a manual when a
phone is at hand. "If there is a book and a phone and they're side
by side, the phone wins time after time," says Craig McQuilkin,
manager of service marketing for AST Research, Inc. in Irvine,
Calif. "It's a phenomenon of people wanting to talk to people."

And do they eve. Compaq's help center in Houston, Texas, is
inundated by some 8,000 consumer calls a day, with inquiries like
this one related by technician John Wolf:  "A frustrated customer
called, who said her brand new Contura would not work. She said she
had unpacked the unit, plugged it in, opened it up and sat there for
20 minutes waiting for something to happen. When asked what
happened when she pressed the power switch, she asked, 'What power
switch?'"

Seemingly simple computer features baffle some users. So many
people have called to ask where the "Any" key is when "Press Any
Key" flashes on the screen that Compaq is considering changing the
command to "Press Return Key."

Some people can't figure out the mouse. Tamra Eagle, an AST
technical support supervisor, says one customer complained that her
mouse was hard to control with the "dust cover" on. The cover
turned out to be the plastic bag the mouse was packaged in. Dell
technician Wayne Zieschang says one of his customers held the mouse
and pointed it at the screen, all the while clicking madly. The
customer got no response because the mouse works only if it's moved
over a flat surface.

Disk drives are another bugaboo. Compaq technician Brent Sullivan
says a customer was having trouble reading word-processing files
from his old diskettes. After troubleshooting for magnets and heat
failed to diagnose the problem, Mr. Sullivan asked what else was
being done with the diskette. The customer's response:  "I put a
label on the diskette, roll it into the typewriter..."

At AST, another customer dutifully complied with a technician's
request that she send in a copy of a defective floppy disk. A
letter from the customer arrived a few days later, along with a
Xerox copy of the floppy. And at Dell, a technician advised his
customer to put his troubled floppy back in the drive and "close the
door." Asking the technician to "hold on," the customer put the
phone down and was heard walking over to shut the door to his room.
The technician meant the door to his floppy drive.

The software inside the computer can be equally befuddling. A Dell
customer called to say he couldn't get his computer to fax anything.
After 40 minutes of troubleshooting, the technician discovered the
man was trying to fax a piece of paper by holding it in front of the
monitor screen and hitting the "send" key.

Another Dell customer needed help setting up a new program, so Dell
technician Gary Rock referred him to the local Egghead. "Yeah, I
got me a couple of friends," the customer replied. When told
Egghead was a software store, the man said, "Oh!  I thought you
meant for me to find a couple of geeks."

Not realizing how fragile computers can be, some people end up
damaging parts beyond repair. A Dell customer called to complain
that his keyboard no longer worked. He had cleaned it, he said,
filling up his tub with soap and water and soaking his keyboard for
a day, and then removing all the keys and washing them individually.

Computers make some people paranoid. A Dell technician, Morgan
Vergara, says he once calmed a man who became enraged because "his
computer had told him he was bad and an invalid." Mr. Vergara
patiently explained that the computer's "bad command" and "invalid"
responses shouldn't be taken personally.

These days PC-help technicians increasingly find themselves taking
on the role of amateur psychologists. Mr. Shuler, the Dell
technician, who once worked as a psychiatric nurse, says he defused
a potential domestic fight by soothingly talking a man through a
computer problem after the man had screamed threats at his wife and
children in the background.

There are also the lonely hearts who seek out human contact, even if
it happens to be a computer techie. One man from New Hampshire
calls Dell every time he experiences a life crisis. He gets a
technician to walk him through some contrived problem with his
computer, apparently feeling uplifted by the process.

********************************************************************
 Anyone Without a Sense of Humor Is At The Mercy of The Rest of Us.
********************************************************************

"HumourNet" is brought to you by Lyris -- an innovative new e-mail
list server from The Walter Shelby Group, Ltd. For more information
on Lyris, see <http://www.lyris.com/>.

To subscribe to the "HumourNet" mailing list, send the following
command to <lyris@lyris.net>:

subscribe HumourNet your_name, your_city, your_state or country

where "your_name" is your real name, etc. If you run into problems,
then either (1) send any message to <HumourNet-info@lyris.net> for
a more detailed set of instructions, (2) subscribe via Lyris's Web
interface at <http://www.lyris.net/>, or (3) send a *detailed*
description of the problem to <Listmom@telephonet.com>.

To unsubscribe, visit our Web interface at <http://www.lyris.net/>
or refer to your Welcome message for detailed instructions.

For instructions on contributing to HumourNet, send any message to
<contribution-guidelines@lyris.net>.

>>> Note: Attributions in Collage openers are to the contributors,
not necessarily the authors. Authors' credits are included in the
text wherever possible. <<<

The HumourNet archives can be accessed via the Web and FTP:

    Web: <http://www.humournet.com/HumourNet/>
    FTP: <ftp://ftp.humournet.com/pub/HumourNet/Collage.Archives/>

Permission is granted to forward or post this Collage, provided that
1) the message is forwarded/posted in its ENTIRETY, from the line
containing the Collage number and date to the end of this trailer,
and 2) no fee is charged.

There are "relaxed" forwarding/posting guidelines available; for a
copy of them, send any message to <posting-guidelines@lyris.net>, or
refer to your Welcome message.

********************************************************************
    "HumourNet" is a trademark of HumourNet Communications, Ltd.
********************************************************************
</collage042>