This happened some time in 1997, right around when PCs were transitioning from 5.25 inch floppy disk drives to the new 3.5” drives. Yes it’s a true story.
A new secretary was hired for a director in my company. Barely a week into her coming on board, we received a call from her. She was upset and said she had very important data for the director on some disks, but the PC always error out whenever she tried to read any of the disks.
We tried to walk her through the common troubleshooting things such as cleaning drives and so on. Nothing worked. Eventually we resigned ourselves to the fact that we had to make a trip down to her desk.
When we got there, one of my colleagues couldn’t help but burst out in laughter.
There was a nicely folded 5.25 inch floppy disk sticking a ways out of a 3.5 inch drive slot.
Her PC was a brand-spanking new one that came only with a 3.5 inch floppy drive. The older PC (which the previous secretary had used) had a 5.25 inch floppy drive, and it was already transferred to some other user.
“Why did you fold it?” we asked.
“Previous secretary passed these to me, told me to just stick them into the slot. The slot so small and the disk so big, I fold lor!” was her answer.
Needless to say, her “important data” was all gone.
Note: if you google for a story similar to this one, you can find a few of them scattered among various sites. This is not a “replicated” story. This really happened to me. What Google proved, is that there is more than one clueless user in this world :)
foxtwo
