Some people should never be let within arm's reach of a computer. This happened several years ago, but the memory is seared into my brain.

I had just assembled a Cyrix 5x86 based system, and many of the neighbors in my apartment were impressed with this feat. This included a building maintanence man.

So, one evening, there's a knock on my apartment door. The mantanence man is at the door, saying there's a problem with his computer. Apparently, he can't get the game he bought at the same time to work with his computer. So, I wander over to see what he has.

What I found appaled me. He had jammed the Diablo CD into his 5 1/2" floppy drive so hard it took us both to get it out of his 286/6 running MS-DOS 4, and an honest to god Herculese monochrome video card. 640k of RAM. And bless their black heart, the previous owners had Norton Utilities for DOS 4 installed, so I was able to check the machine for other problems. I found none.

He asked me what he needed to run the game, and i told him, "A new copy of the game, and a new computer. One with the requirements on the side of the new box."

After quick analysis to his second question (something to the effect of "What do I need to play the game?" I told him that he could do what I did and use the case, keyboard, mouse, and 3.5" floppy, upgrading the rest to meet the game requirements on the side of the box.

Oh, he'd need to buy another copy of the game, too.

He wasn't mad, just upset. But he'd only paid $25 for the system and game combined. I never did find out who sold these things to him - but he did say that no one had questioned his rather mismatched purchase, so he thought it was ok.