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This article is more than 1 year old

Non-techies: The cute things they say

'OK, smartass, the firewall is blocking the proxy server.'

Reader's corner

Cthulhu jumping out of a printer

Vociferous Time Waster recounts some conversations with non-techie colleagues he has had in the last year over at El Reg Forums.

The server is down

"The server is down."

"Which one, we have hundreds."

"I don't know, I'm not in IT."

"Yet you feel qualified to conclude that one of the servers is down."

OK, smartass

"The firewall is blocking some JavaScript."

"Are you sure the words you are looking for aren't perhaps 'proxy server'."

"OK, smartass, the firewall is blocking the proxy server."

This damned firewall

"The firewall between my PC and the server is blocking my traffic."

"There isn't a firewall between your PC and the server."

"The network must be down then."

"Unlikely."

User had locked their account by typing their password wrong.

I don't have the actual error number

"Service is down, everything is running slow."

"Surely it can only be one or the other."

"It's a network problem, the user is getting a 404 error."

"So they are receiving an error back from the server to say that the server cannot find the page in the URI? Doesn't that imply that the network connection to the server is working perfectly?"

"I don't have the actual error number."

"Right, so we're just making things up now?"

Bootnote

Readers, fire up those synapses and get this thread juiced up. ®

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