Fax me a floppy

[hitchface]

Dug this up a while ago. More of that to be found here. Not all of them are funny, but you'll find a few good ones.

"In the early days of PC's most everything was stored on floppy disks. It was fairly common for these disks to eventually go bad. I was able to retrieve most information off of floppies using some bit level utilities. Word of my skills were talked about around the company and I was well known. One day I received a call from a sales rep on the west coast. He had a floppy that had a sales quote he spent a lot of time working on and the client needed it soon. He asked of I could recover the data off of it and I told him to send me the disk and I'd look at it. About 30 minutes later the receptionist in our area walked to my desk and had a perplexed look on her face. She held up a fax of a floppy from the sales person."

[TwoRails]

Some good ones in there, hitchface

[David M]

Very entertaining!

Sort of related, I recently had a discussion with a Cummings diesel mechanic who told me that I had, about 10 years ago, installed some shunts on the wrong side of the battery...near the positive poles. I asked him how do you figure they are wrong, the shunts are working just fine for measuring the current through the wire. He told me that electrons flow from the negative poll of the battery to the positive side (for DC)...of which he was correct. I said, by convention though, we imagine the electricity flowing from positive to negative....which is also correct. I asked him then, so what is the problem then? He then told me that if the electrons flow from negative to positive and you do not put the shunt before the load then you will not measure all the electrons flowing out the negative terminal.

I was floored! He thought electrons got partially used up...like how diesels have a fuel feed line and a fuel return line!

(To explain, a shunt is a type of resistor. An ammeter measures the potential difference across the shunts terminals. The potential difference, voltage, is directly proportional to the current flowing through the wire measured in Amps).