Vaguely related - this reminded me of a support call I had where similarly the real world apparently merged into the digital world.
I was doing IT support for a small Australian company back in '98. A guy called me from a remote office, and after a few pleasantries he explained that the screen saver had fallen off the monitor of his dumb terminal, bounced on one of the keys on his keyboard, and now terminal was locked up. He wanted to know what key to press to unlock the terminal.
Eh?
I knew the guy, and although he wasn't trained in IT, he knew his way around the basics, he wasn't completely clueless.
I asked him to explain the problem again as I wasn't sure I'd understood. He repeated exactly what he'd said the first time.
I replied "What do you mean the screen saver fell off the monitor, that's impossible? Besides, it's a dumb terminal, they don't have screen savers."
After a little more fumbling around this weird upside-down world he was presenting me with, it suddenly clicked. He was talking about the physical CRT anti-glare screen filter [0] that used to be common around then, that literally hung in front of the screen. This has come unstuck and hit the scroll lock on the terminal. He called this a screen saver.
Since then the phrase "Screen saver" seems to have now morphed to mean what I used to call a desktop wallpaper, but that's a separate topic.
I was doing IT support for a small Australian company back in '98. A guy called me from a remote office, and after a few pleasantries he explained that the screen saver had fallen off the monitor of his dumb terminal, bounced on one of the keys on his keyboard, and now terminal was locked up. He wanted to know what key to press to unlock the terminal.
Eh?
I knew the guy, and although he wasn't trained in IT, he knew his way around the basics, he wasn't completely clueless.
I asked him to explain the problem again as I wasn't sure I'd understood. He repeated exactly what he'd said the first time.
I replied "What do you mean the screen saver fell off the monitor, that's impossible? Besides, it's a dumb terminal, they don't have screen savers."
After a little more fumbling around this weird upside-down world he was presenting me with, it suddenly clicked. He was talking about the physical CRT anti-glare screen filter [0] that used to be common around then, that literally hung in front of the screen. This has come unstuck and hit the scroll lock on the terminal. He called this a screen saver.
Since then the phrase "Screen saver" seems to have now morphed to mean what I used to call a desktop wallpaper, but that's a separate topic.
[0] https://dylbs6e8mhm2w.cloudfront.net/productimages/500x500/E...