• ray10k (unregistered)

    lUsers are lUsers, no matter where they work.

  • Derp (unregistered)

    "Do you think I'm stupid?" Well, you're a police officer, so yes. It's a prerequisite of the job.

  • George (unregistered)

    LOL. This must be one of the funniest support stories ever.

  • A_L (unregistered)

    OK this one had me cracking.

  • Hannes (unregistered)

    Am I frist? I mean it doesn't LOOK like I'm frist, but you can never tell these days...

  • Quite (unregistered) in reply to Hannes

    Hmm ... you do look a little limp-fristed, so, yeah, figgers ...

  • Pierre Lebeaupin (unregistered)

    I think the call to stand with first responders should extend to also standing with the first-level support of first responders.

    Full disclosure: as part of my job I am support level N (not first, e.g. I don't have night shifts) of first reponders' radio systems.

  • Martin (unregistered)

    Hey you liar! I was looking forward to enjoy some best gay pornography, but there is only one small fucking smiley!

    www.hotmale.com is fake!

    Give me GAY POOOORN!

  • (nodebb)

    Way back when Gmail first came out, it was by invite only and hardly anyone outside of IT had even heard of it. On more than one occasion I had to correct people's assumption that I was saying gmale.com.

  • Thaumatechnician (unregistered)

    “Officer Bishop reports her email is broke”.

    That's easy to fix - give it money.

  • Brian Boorman (google) in reply to Thaumatechnician

    I think that's called "bribing a law enforcement server".

  • (nodebb)

    In this case, Support Guy shares some of the blame. "I know what it sounded like, but there are two ways of spelling 'mail', and he meant the other one. Please check it for me." Or "He meant the other way of spelling 'mail'."

    And of course, I had a different problem with GMail... When it opened in the UK, gmail as a name belonged to a different company, and Google created "googlemail.com" as the domain name for UK GMail addresses. Later, of course, the other company succumbed and Google created new UK addresses as "gmail.com" by default. A while after that, I had to do battle with people assuming that when I said "@googlemail.com" I really meant "@gmail.com"...

  • PeterK (unregistered) in reply to Steve_The_Cynic

    Yeah I do that, too. Not on purpose usually. My poor wife.

  • ray10k (unregistered)

    obvious spambot is obvious.

  • NULL (unregistered)

    @Steve_The_cynic both addresses work and map to the same account. (can be useful since quite a few sites don't know that and you can use same mail twice that way)

  • Anonymous Coward (unregistered)

    The real WTF is that these are the people who are supposed to carry guns as part of their job.

  • Russell Judge (google) in reply to George

    On par with asking for a copy of a disk, and getting a photocopy.

  • Llarry (unregistered) in reply to Russell Judge

    Back in 1990, I was doing some freelance tech writing for the company a friend of mine worked for as a developer, and walked into the office just as a customer had in fact, faxed in a copy of a floppy disk (5-1/4). BUT, he was smart enough to realize it was a double-sided disk, so he sent both sides...

  • CrazyEyes (unregistered) in reply to Steve_The_Cynic

    Seemed to me like he got the point across fairly clearly, and reiterated himself. The cop just had no English education. Which makes me wonder how the hell he even records testimonies.

    "Suspect was a tall, white mail... how did an envelope commit this crime?! Must be those Chinese gene experiments..."

  • epsalon (unregistered) in reply to Steve_The_Cynic

    googlemail.com and gmail.com addresses are equivalent, your gmail account works the same with both domains.

  • VonSkippy (unregistered)

    “Officer Bishop reports her email is broke”.

    Why did she shoot it?

  • Herby (unregistered)

    One wonders what would happen if the actual address at "gmale.com" was directed to a real person? A picture of a firing range could scare someone.

    That would be a REAL WTF!!

  • Robert Hanson (unregistered)

    I haven't laughed at a WTF this much in a long time. Thank you so much.

  • I dunno LOL ¯\(°_o)/¯ (unregistered)

    >napoleon dot wilson

    A high school student? And not naming him Napoleon Dynamite in the anonymization? Tsk, tsk.

    Yeah, I've never heard of Precinct 13 before, so I don't really have any idea about the intended reference.

  • Don (unregistered)

    I worked for a police department for nine years. One thing that I did every day at noon was run an upload that took a file from the minicomputers that ran dispatch and reformats it and uploads all calls for traffic accidents in to a temporary table for the traffic accidents database. The dispatch is a stub record, but it contains lots of info that helps to pre-populate the fuller information in the accident database.

    We had a 'problem child', a detective, whom I'll call Bob Smith. He did lots of things to annoy us IT people.

    One day I double-click the shortcut to load the Access database to do the transfer (yes, I know Access is despised, but it's excellent if you know its limitations and respect them). And something else opened, not my program. I did it again, same result. I open File Finder, go directly to the share with the program, open it directly, and it is not my program. Bob Smith had created a new database with the same name as my loader.

    In a loud voice I said 'Bob Smith Must Die.' A detective friend Terry, who worked in IT and was in the same office, turned around and said eagerly 'Oh?' Bob Smith was not well-beloved. So I explained the situation. I also restored my database from backup and locked down the permissions so that Bob couldn't do anything to it. Don't screw with the network admins!

    A few days later, Terry brought in a banner that said 'Bob Smith Must Die'. He had one of those HP inkjet printers that could run continuous-feed paper. And he had his daughters color in the letters with crayons. We later replaced 'Bob Smith' with a cut-out folder so we could print new names and add them to the banner.

    Bob Smith's boss, also a detective, came down to talk to us somewhat frequently. He always looked at the banner to see if he was on our shit list.

  • (nodebb)

    There are are few legit .com.au websites of the same name as gay oriented .com sites. Including a winner of Australian Idol, and there was a mistake when advertising her site missing the .au. That could have been embarrassing if some ISPs didn't intercept it and suggest the more likely site.

    We have another example as a client. One of the guys was checking out their "existing site" and couldn't work out what was going on. They were supposed to sell computer parts but that site was selling ... something else.

  • Chaos215bar2 (unregistered) in reply to Zemm

    So Australian ISPs were intercepting DNS requests for the domain of a (presumably) perfectly legal site and suggesting that the visitor might have wanted to go somewhere else? How is that not far, far worse than the mistake they were trying to fix?

  • (nodebb)

    So now I'm picturing a time when "emales" (and "efemales") are a thing.

  • Mike (unregistered)

    Gmail gets even better when my elder Finnish father pronounces it as "shemale".

  • (nodebb) in reply to Chaos215bar2

    Apparently you could still click through to the .com. But they must have had some sort of proxy server running for that domain name. But I just checked, looks like the .com is owned by the singer and not the gay porn star now. Worse that it was in a newspaper ad by Australian's largest ISP!

    http://www.smh.com.au/news/Breaking/Porn-apology-over-Idol-win/2004/11/22/1100972298598.html

  • Anonymous (unregistered)

    A long time ago, I "inherited" the email-address of some cd-manufacturing company. I just registered the address (t-online) without knowing that someone else had it first and then stopped having it. The first time someone I got an order to press some-thousand CDs, I looked at my trusted 4x-SCSI-CD-recorder and responded "can do, but might take some time". Sometime after that I actually hunted down the original owner of the address (as in "googled who" that might be) and told everyone asking me to record CDs via mail that his address book might be out-of-date. I no longer have this address and sometimes I wonder if someone else now uses it and gets the same volume orders.

    Now that I think about it: Our family might be cursed with that: Once, we "shared" a phone number with that of a popular Taxi company (just prefix a '7' - as drunk people at 3 AM seem more likely to do). Once, I "shared" a phone number with a hospital (dial a number trice instead of twice). It felt strange when there was someone on my answering maschine asking me to cancel an appointment with her doctor. Took me some time to find out the correct number so I could tell callers. Some people were really polite about it (especially on late or night calls); some people got really angry at me - as if it was my fault that they dialled the wrong number and I picked up the receiver again and again.

    Thankfully, this toned down to someone I know sometimes accidently inviting me to their band sessions - because the person actually playing an instrument is right next to me in their address book.

  • (nodebb)

    Oh yeah, I know about the equivalence between the two, but sometimes I'm talking to a customer disservice droid and I need this ... person ... to understand that when I say that my email address on their system is @googlemail.com, I do NOT mean @gmail.com, and that if they think it does, that might explain why they can't find my account info.

  • (nodebb) in reply to Anonymous

    Many, many years ago, like academic year 1985/6, I had a dorm room whose phone line had been used the previous year by someone running a Bulletin Board System called "The Back Door". I used to get phone calls at any time of the day or night, especially at night, and the caller would invariably start by playing modem whistles at me, trying to connect to the BBS.

    Once or twice I tried to catch them on my modem and type out "This is not The Back Door". I think I managed it successfully one time. But that did prompt some of the would-be users to call using their actual phones, and I told them that no, The Back Door was no longer operating on that number. Sadly, one of these voice calls was at two in the morning, and the news was NOT well received, leaving me with an earful of (bad word).

    I eventually tracked down the grad student who'd had that room the previous year, and he apologised for not having got the word out.

    A short while later, I got a phone call from one of the long-distance networks about him. I have this recollection of it being Sprint. Sadly for him, it was their collections department, trying to find him so they could get him to pay his bill. I say sadly, because it was, in fact, not long after a particularly foul-mouthed caller had notified me of his displeasure when I told him that The Back Door was no more, so I gave the gentleman from Sprint the new contact details of the previous resident, and left it at that.

  • Hannes (unregistered) in reply to Anonymous

    Apparently, I too own a very popular e-mail-address. The provider offers different endings, like "[email protected]", or "[email protected]", which of course are two different and two valid e-mail-addresses. And since it's so popular, people add numbers to it, like "[email protected]".

    Sometimes I recieve E-Mails from people I don't know, most of the time at the beginning of a new year. Often they confused ".de" with ".net", or forgot to add the numbers and whatnot.

    And yes, I too know about the pain sharing a similar number to a bigger institution. In our case it was a bank institute and callers got really confused when me or my brother answered the phone, since we still where kids back then and sounded like kids on the telephone, too. I imagine some callers must have thought a worker brought his/her kids to the workplace and we where answering the phone there, lol.

  • FuuzyFoo (unregistered) in reply to The_Quiet_One

    GMAIL was actually "Gateway Mail," back in the days when Vaxen roamed the primodial IT infrastructure. It's how I was able to send email messages to someone, like IN A COMPLETELY DIFFERENT COUNTRY! Nuts, huh?

  • Banyaluka (unregistered) in reply to Thaumatechnician

    I love these English word plays. It's like asking a cab driver 'Are you free?' to hear 'Nope, I charge like everyone else.'

  • James (unregistered) in reply to Steve_The_Cynic

    A while after that, I had to do battle with people assuming that when I said "@googlemail.com" I really meant "@gmail.com"...

    Yeah, that's completely wrong. @googlemail.com and @gmail.com are the same. I had one of the first UK Gmail addresses when they were all invite only and I have always used @gmail.com even though absolutely everything said it was @googlemal.com.

    You are TRWTF here. ;)

  • MaryX (unregistered)

    Watson: efemales are very much a real thing, so I suppose emales are too. Two of my closest girlfriends are efemales - and males in everyday life.

  • Álvaro G. Vicario (github)

    I've a mailbox where I regularly receive "welcome to Foo Site" messages which are clearly not a result of any mistype but a combination of lack of e-mail validation to sign up and people that think they're making up an address but are actually entering mine. I definitively wouldn't like to be the owner of "domain.com".

    P.S. I couldn't avoid recalling the story from 2011 [1] about the poor interviewee who misheard the question about whether she was familiar with mail services...

    [1] http://thedailywtf.com/articles/The-Programmiss-and-Male-Services

  • Randy W (unregistered)

    Back in the dialup days when were setting up email, our smtp server was named mail.xxx.net. Probably said it a thousand times, no one ever typed it wrong UNTIL one lady did. I then had to start spelling it out.

  • Evil Code Monkey (unregistered)

    This sounds to me like a case of someone who has gotten used to being the final authority on what's correct (possibly because everyone keeps lying to them...) and thus can't get out of that mindset when they actually are wrong.

  • Essie (unregistered)
    Comment held for moderation.

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