I just came across the website Clientcopia. It makes fun of people for asking stupid questions or making equally dumb remarks - typically clients, but also managers, employees- anyone really is fare game. The sites focus is “to cope with difficulties of a client attaining professional services - and act to overcome them, despite the client’s blatant stupidity.”

Visitors can leave their “Stupid Client Quote” and it gets rated by other visitors on a 1-5 scale. Now…some of them are really funny and will make you ask yourself, “can anyone really be that dumb?”

Yet, when I was reading I began to think of some of the ringers I’ve said over the years that could very well be on there. Most of them stem from when I graduated from college and started working at a computer security company and had never owned my own computer. As you can imagine, I said some pretty priceless stuff. I have this awful habit of spewing things out of my mouth without thinking - or - if I know there is someone close by that can answer something for me fast, I will yell out my question. Gchat only made this situation worse, for obvious reasons. The worst feeling is when it comes out of your mouth, you know you’ve said it and it’s so blatantly stupid and it is hanging in the air and you can’t take it back. Plus, I’m blonde. Double wammy.

The site is great for a quick laugh at the expense of others -but, if you stay too long it may make you a little down regarding the state of our decreasing intelligence levels. But, then hopefully you get a good one, it makes you laugh, and sucks you back into reading more.

Here are some great ones:

• I work as a computer tech at a local high school and lets just say we have some computer illiterate teachers. Here is a story I heard from my boss: One of our teachers called my boss and said, “Mr. B, my printer ain’t working! Could you come by and take a look?” My boss says sure and goes over to the school figuring she was just hitting the black and white copy button. When he gets there he asks her to show him what she was doing. She says, “It won’t print in color.” So my boss asks her again to show him. She proceeds to pull out a black and white picture of a tiger and hits the color copy button. She says, “See it don’t work.” My boss justs shakes his head and explains, “Now this is a smart machine, but it don’t know that you want that tiger orange.” She says “OOOOOOHHHHH”. Boss just shakes his head and walks out.

• Customer: I think I need you to come out to the office and give me the cable to connect to my bank as I don’t have access to it. Myself: What exactly do you mean by cable (I usually have to ascertain if his terminology is the same as my own)? Customer: I can access the google, but when I try to access my bank it doesn’t work. I think I am only using the google cable. Myself: Sir, there is only one internet. Do you perhaps mean some sort of accounting software that’s on your intranet? Customer: I wouldn’t know about that. Myself: Ok, how do you usually go about accessing your “bank”. Customer: (provides me with the website address of a bank). Myself: Ok Sir, that’s actually on the internet. If you can access google you should be able to access your bank. Customer: Ok but I’ve already gotten under my desk and unplugged the google cable already. Myself: Why? Customer: because I usually switch between 2 cables when I’m going to access my bank, but my banks cable no longer makes a click so it must not be working. Myself: (confused) I think I’ll need to come out. Eventually I went out and found that whoever had set up there network had left a spare network cable just lying on the ground behind the PC. The customer previously had tried getting access to his banks website and it failed (maybe the banks server was down, I don’t know) so the customer had gone under his desk, found the spare network cable and plugged it in. He could then get access to his banks website, an unfortunate coincidence, as now every time the customer wanted to check his banks website he would switch the cables around under his desk, he had been doing this for 2 years. But recently the clip that holds the network cable in the wall had broken so when the employee didn’t hear the reassuring “click” he assumed the cable was now broken. I showed him that the “google cable” worked for both his banks website and everywhere else. He wasn’t even embarrassed that he had been crawling under his desk switching cables around for all those years.

• Designer: “We should probably talk about the look and feel of the Web site before we get to work. Just explain how you would like it to look…” Client: “Well, I don’t think we really want it to look too much like a Web site. You know what I mean?” I looked at my partner who was about to burst into laughter. I didn’t know what to say except “Okay”.

• Client: “We want a website that can play DVD quality video, but we don’t want to use streaming video and the load time must be zero.” Designer: “That’s impossible. Everything has a load time. DVD quality runs about 100 megs a minute.” Client: “We’ll take our business elsewhere…”