A friend had a brilliant idea for saving disk space. He thought if he put all his Microsoft Word documents into a tiny font they’d take up less room. When he told me I was with another friend. She thought it was a good idea too.

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The situation: A new computer lab. 40 Brand new computers, installation of software is going fine, so OP leaves. Janitor passes (ooops). Looks into new room, and sees lots of new machines, whirring, grinding (disk accesses). The janitor knows what to do with noisy machines - you oil them. OP returns to find janitor pouring oil in back/floppy drives. The janitor explains that he fixed the machines - they don’t grind any more. Well he was right - they didn’t grind anymore- they didn’t do a lot of things anymore…

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This one happened a few years back when I worked on mainframe computers. At that time we used reel tapes. In order to save some dollars, the company switched to tapes whose casings were made of recycled plastic. They were much cheaper and lighter than the old heavy duty ones. We had a number of the programmers comment on how light the new ones were. We just kept telling them that it was because no data had been written on them yet. The scary part is that a number of people really believed this. All of the operators were having a real laugh about this one until the night the data center manager did a surprise visit on a night shift. He pulled a couple of the tapes off of the drives. They happened to be the new ones. He then accused all of us of not working as hard as we should be. If we were the tapes would be full… he could tell by the weight of them that we had been slacking off…..

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At a computer peripheral manufacturing company I used to work at, I was appalled one day to hear one of our salesmen telling customers that RISC meant “reduced instruction set” which meant to him that there wouldn’t be so many confusing commands to remember, thereby making computing even easier!

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A friend had to go over to a bank and set everyone’s software up. Since all the internet software his company supports runs under MS Windows, he asked the manager “Do you have Windows?” The manager stared at him blankly and said, “No, but we’ve got air conditioning.”