2. Boris the Kitten Found and Hey, That's Not a Sewing Machine

Boris the Kitten Found!

In the previous collection of funny tech support stories I asked if anyone had access to the Boris the Kitty screensaver. Andrew Gray sent a funny and poignant story about a woman who called tech support at Berkeley Systems, makers of the screensaver, because she was having trouble running the Boris screensaver. She was crying and quite distraught that, while her friend was able to run Boris, she couldn't. Andrew had to break the bad news to the woman that Boris didn't run on IBM's PS2 Model 50z.

While I was able to find Berkeley Systems' Flying Toasters I couldn't find Boris anywhere. So I asked if anyone had it. Peter Lowden came to the rescue. Within a few hours of publication of the story with the upset lady, Peter sent a note that he had Boris and could send a screenshot. But, here's the interesting part in Peter's own words.

From: Peter Lowden

"I have Boris on an old Macintosh image in a [Mac] simulator on my PC! Won't run in Windows but I can screenshot it :)"

I asked Peter to send the screenshot. In the email with Boris attached, Peter noted:

"Here you go! Ah the wonder of emulators :) This one was running on Basilisk II."

For info on Basilisk II, check out http://basilisk.cebix.net/.

Also thanks to Pieter, Rod and Patrick for sending offers of the Boris screensaver or discussing the results of their own efforts to find it.

Woops! I almost forgot. Here's Boris.

Hey, That's Not A Sewing Machine

From: Dice Yamazaki

This happened when I worked for AOL and was in the tech support department. I received a call from a lady who was having problems with the AOL browser. I asked the lady to take the mouse cursor to the AOL icon and double click on it.

She told me that she could not move her toes fast enough to double click on the icon.

After a few seconds I suggested that she might want to move the mouse from the floor to the top of her desk so that she could use her hands to operate the mouse instead of her feet. OMG.

[Editor's note: The lady might have been a sewing machine user who thought the mouse was some sort of foot pedal. The sewing machine below has more computing power than some laptops, but it still has that old electro-mechanical mouse, er I mean foot pedal to start, stop and set the speed of the machine.]