"I believe the stapled floppy disk story was genuine from the Commercial Union insurance techies in Croydon IIRC from the distant 80's"
I've seen it myself. It's one of the stupid things that users do, along with fridge magnets holding floppies to the filing cabinet. Nobody TOLD them they couldn't do it and they don't know about magnetic fields, nor did they get any training or look at the (cryptic) warning graphics on the disk envelope.
One of my staff took both a "coffee cup holder" call AND several "I can't use my computer, the power's off" calls whilst in a previous university helpdesk job - and that was _after_ he'd read about them on the nascent internet of the early 1990s.
About half the calls we took about dialup problems were due to frustrated other members of the household picking up the phone and pushing buttons or whistling at the modem until it hung up. It never seemed to occur to the users that nobody could phone out and in a lot of cases nothing was actually said about the problem until after we'd sent someone out to diagnose.
(Most of the rest were due to dodgy phones that relied on line power to keep their memories intact starting to change the impedance of the line as their internal capacitors ran down - this was easily fixed by plugging in a "privacy adaptor" - which was simply a bridge rectifier and zener diode to keep such phones locked out when another one was using the line.
Only about 10% of such calls were down to genuine line faults and the telco got to the point of fixing them fast when we called even if they'd been ignoring customer complaints in an area (or linesmen were writing off faults as "fixed" when they weren't) - our account manager made a point of forcing the telco helldesk to tabulate complaints linkable to cables and the clustering made it quite clear where trunk cables needed replacement.
This made us unpopular with linesmen in some towns as it reduced their callout rates by 90% - they'd been milking the system for all they were worth - which brings us back to email trails as it became clear that these problems were known about for some time but not dealt with until we - as a customer with a large number of customers using telco lines and able to identify clusters of problems - started making noises about the issue. I'm quite sure that telco customers in those towns to this day never knew why their lines which had been crackling, humming and randomly cutting off for decades even after the switch to digital exchanges suddenly all started working perfectly.)
FWIW:
It's not just computers where users do stupid things even when you tell them not to:
One of the "never ever do this" rules about handling liquid gases is putting them into unvented containers - back in the 1980s if you used a thermos instead of a dedicated dewar flask it _had_ to have a 1/4" hole drilled in the lid to make sure of this. This is a safety precaution drilled thoroughly into new students - so one day a 3rd year biochem student wandered casually into the workshops (bottom floor of the 6 floor biochem tower block) asking for assistance opening his thermos. "Hang on, this is cold. What's in it?" "Liquid nitrogen" - a small scream, rush for the door and toss into the adjacent duckpond later, the tech was still thanking his lucky stars when there was a loud but dull "thud" and the contents of said pond (including most of the mud from the bottom) deposited themselves along the entire vertical surface of the block (which being brutalist 1970s architecture with recessed windows made it a bitch for the cleanup crews). Legend has it that it took 2 years for ducks to return.
Understandably, materials handling rules were changes after that to absolutely and completely ban the use of commercial thermos containers for moving liquid gases around (uncertified containers of any kind actually) and banning the transport of liquid gases in non-dedicated vehicles using any kind of container (someone managed to nearly asphyxiate themselves with a dewar of LN2 in the boot....Darwin in action). Photos of the building were used as part of the safety training for students at that univeristy for a long time afterwards.