From: jwgh at earthweb.com (Jacob Wolf Gibney Haller) Subject: Encapsulated Grapefruit Salad Date: Fri 30 Jul 1997 Message-ID: <jwgh-ya02408000R3007970946370001@news.earthweb.com> Newsgroups: alt.tech-support.recovery
I posted a version of this story a few days ago, but unfortunately it lacked poultry. Apologies to those who are seeing this for the second time.
So lusers at other companies are getting in the habit of sending RTF files to our company. Netscape by default seems to interpret these as text, so that at the end of the message you get pages and pages of RTF formatting.
This means that I occasionally get calls from people who get sent these files and don't have the foggiest idea of how to deal with them. It's an easy fix, which I can tell them over the phone; go under the View menu, select 'View Attachment as Links' [and let me say at this point that if anyone yells at me for posting 'Useful Information' I'll track them down and force-feed them a hardcopy of the FAQ], left-click on the link that now shows up in place of all of the rich text formatting, select save to disk, save it to the desktop or whatever, and open it as you would any other Word file. Piece of cake.
Recently, one of our lusers called me with this problem ("Someone sent me this file in email and it's in code!") so I started to walk him through the above process.
Me: OK, are you looking at the message?
He: No. I'll open it now.
[pause while this happens]
Me: OK, now click on the 'View' menu.
[At this point I pause and wait for him to catch up, in case he can't find the 'View' menu.]
He: Sure. Oh, there's an item that says 'Decode (ROT13)'; do I want that?
This was perfect. I managed not to betray my intense amusement at this to him, but I wouldn't want to wager that I didn't rupture anything.
The relationship of the title of this post to its content is left as an exercise to the reader.
-jwgh
--
"People now ask me what I am going to do next. I feel I can hardly
write a sequel to /A Brief History of Time/. What would I call it? /A
Longer History of Time/? /Beyond the End of Time/? /Son of Time/?"
- Stephen Hawking, /Black Holes and Baby Universes and Other Essays/