Sunday, June 23, 2013

How big is a million floppies?


Just had quite a classic incident here. A woman had come in to collect her laptop - she'd managed to drop it down the stairs, so the techies here had just restored all her stuff from backup after repairs.

So she was telling us she'd bought a new 1TB drive for backups. The conversation went like this:

Her: How big is 1 terabyte?

Techie: Umm...

H: You know those old 100MB floppy disks?

T: You mean zip disks?

H: No, not zip disks. Floppies. (A floppy was produced at this point, she handled it and confirmed that was the right one).

H: How many floppies would fit in a terabyte?

T: oh... umm... getting on for a million?!

H: A million? How big is a million floppies?

T: what?!

H: How big would it be? Would a million floppies fit in this room?

T: wtf? why?

H: I need to know how big it is for my backups.

T: i've no idea if a million floppies would fit in the room! Work it out yourself

H: I need to imagine how big it is. Have you got any in stock?

T: No, nobody uses them any more!

H: I'm going to collect a million floppies. I'm going to make a teragigadactyl. (She's flapping her arms at this point - i think she was referring to a pterodactyl dinosaur)

She was totally serious through all of this, the rest of us were in stitches :D

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