The implication being that he felt the computer was perfectly functional for other tasks in "O" mode - just this PESKY software that wasn't playing ball?
Your software doesn't work when my PC is in 'O' mode
Modes of operation always present a challenge for users. Especially when they invent their own. Welcome to a mysterious On Call with an all-too-obvious solution. Today's contribution comes from a reader Regomized as "Ivor" and concerns a particularly puzzling support call from a customer struggling with Ivor's software. It …
COMMENTS
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Friday 29th April 2022 16:44 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Saw that coming
This came too late in my career. I am going to savor saying a bright and sunshine-y "Aye!" when powering things on and a dejected "Ohhhhh" when powering things off for the rest of my life. This little ditty is going to improve my work life a spot in the shitestorm of little things that continue to accumulate and make it crappier on a daily basis. Maybe for once today won't be worse than yesterday.
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Friday 29th April 2022 13:25 GMT Arthur the cat
Re: Saw that coming
At least on a help desk you know many of your customers are going to be non-techies. Back when I was an academic one of my tasks was supervising a third year lab for CS undergrads. You'd be surprised(*) how many of them didn't consider the state of the power switch on their terminal before complaining "it doesn't work"(**). Half way through the course it was well known that I'd be scathingly sarcastic to anyone making this mistake so when yet another undergrad complained he immediately added "and I've checked it's switched on". So I reached round the back and waved the loose 3 pin plug at him, asking "and what else did you check?".
(*) Or maybe not.
(**) Probably the world's least useful bug report.
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Monday 2nd May 2022 16:28 GMT captain veg
Re: can't be that stupid
Some years ago my office was on the opposite side of a corridor from accounts. One afternoon an accounting person popped in and asked if would take a quick look at her PC, since it "wasn't working". No problem. Switching the monitor on effected an instant fix.
We found that quite amusing, until a couple of weeks later the exact same person came back with the exact same problem with the exact same cause.
-A.
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Friday 29th April 2022 23:16 GMT John Brown (no body)
Re: Saw that coming
"I guessed what the O mode was well before the end!"
Same here! One of those occasions, and being within the context of "On Call", I guessed that almost as soon as I saw the bit with O mode not working and I mode working. That's quite a rarity for me :-)
As others have stated, maybe the person calling should have been put in O mode! On the other hand, being the 90's, it may have been the users first use of a computer and it may have been an appliance device with just the one function. And thinking back, maybe not all that many devices had I/O labels on the switches. Domestic devices would more likely have on/off, or one of quite a few different ways of indicating the function.
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Friday 29th April 2022 17:32 GMT Anonymous Coward
My father got his mother (in her 80s or 90s at the time) a flip cellphone. She asked "How do I answer the phone?" He said "You pick up the receiver" and opened the flip. She asked "How do I hang up?" He closed the flip. She asked "How do I call?" He opened the flip and started dialing.
She used it for several years.
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Friday 29th April 2022 08:20 GMT Felonmarmer
My guess is they used the wall socket to turn on/off, like a toaster.
This was also the time of the Turbo button, so it's vaguely understandable, but they must have been only using the PC for running one piece of software, autorun from boot for them to think it was a fault in this software, rather than on anything run on the PC, like the OS for example.
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Friday 29th April 2022 11:46 GMT Prst. V.Jeltz
so it's vaguely understandable
no. no its really not . I worked desktop support for far longer than average ,longer than anyone should , in a variety of environments , and I've been reading anecdotes like this since the internet was accessed with Netscape.
I've seen it all.
This is by far the stupidest support call I ever heard of. I'm having trouble believing it , as another poster noted.
Its either a prank, or made up entirely or ... well the alternative doesn't bear thinking about
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Saturday 30th April 2022 15:30 GMT Will Godfrey
I find this totally belevable
As an impressionable teenager, my first proper job was home-visits TV servicing. I was permanently scarred by the 'unbelievable' things I saw. Bare wires stuffed in the old 15A unswitched round pin sockets for starters!
"Well you see, it saves messing about when you've got lots of things you want on at the same time"
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Friday 29th April 2022 19:52 GMT doublelayer
Maybe the people being called weren't in the same place and couldn't do a desk visit. As someone who has done that, getting the user to answer questions just by sending emails or even talking on the phone involves a lot of explanations and walking them through steps. That's when you know what they need to do. When you're still trying to work out what the modes they're talking about really are, that requires more debugging work.
An alternative suggestion is that some users really don't like being told to do something to prove a problem exists. I've had people refuse angrily when I say that I can't reproduce their stated behavior on my system, so could they run it again on theirs with the debug logging on and send me the log.
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Saturday 30th April 2022 21:12 GMT doublelayer
That does seem to be the question that resolved it eventually, but not the way I would have asked it. I would have started with "What is 'O' mode?" and, depending on the answer they came up with, I could have been thrown off course. Alternatively, another initial question I am likely to use when getting a report like this is to ask "What does it do when it doesn't work properly?", which could equally have given me a red herring.
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Saturday 30th April 2022 18:17 GMT Scene it all
I was talking to the people who did human-factors testing of documentation. They would get 'subjects' completely unfamiliar with the product and film them interacting with the computer. The idea was to make sure the documentation was not making unwarranted assumptions.
The user had problems getting the computer to do anything. The instruction step said "Put the mouse pointer on the icon and click." Nothing ever happened. Upon watching the video recording they saw that the subject interpreted the word 'on' to mean 'on top of', as in 'just above'. They would never have caught that without seeing it happen.
The wording was improved.
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Monday 2nd May 2022 19:52 GMT captain veg
Re: take the diskette out of the envelope
Back in that era a colleague successfully walked a customer, over the phone, through inserting a floppy disk into the (5.25") drive. "Now close the door". "Hold on." (STOMP STOMP Stomp Stomp stomp stomp. SLAM. stomp stomp Stomp Stomp STOMP STOMP.) "Hello? Done that. What next?".
Few years later I advised a colleague to "close Windows" and she stood up, turned round, and shut the open window. That was a deliberate joke, though.
-A.
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Friday 29th April 2022 16:28 GMT martinusher
This switch is on the power supply -- its the alternative to removing the power cord. Leaving the power supply connected to the mains means that standby power will be active which opens the door to things like Wake on LAN (or receipt of a particular broadcast packet).
I used to frustrate our IT people by switching off everything before leaving. No 'standby' modes -- anyway, I don't like leaving equipment powered unless its designed to be on 24/7. Things do fail.
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Friday 29th April 2022 19:02 GMT Anonymous Coward
" I don't like leaving equipment powered unless its designed to be on 24/7. Things do fail.
Our company instigated a "switch off on leaving" policy for video terminals. The idea was to save money on all that wasted electricity. Within a month they had rescinded the policy as there was a large number of terminals that died when power was re-applied next day. Electrical equipment tends to be content to be left running - but power on surges stress it. Often literally seen with incandescent light bulbs that go out in a brilliant flash when you switch them on.
For a while now my tried-and-tested remote control mains switches have become unreliable - by not always switching off until physically taken out of the socket. The control logic indicator showed it was apparently switching off correctly. The thought was that it must be a residual control current holding in their 10A relay - or a weakening relay spring. However it only happened when controlling certain devices - even though their measured 1A consumption was not unusual.
This week I finally solved it. The afflicted devices all used switched mode psus. The capacitive start up surge was enough to temporarily weld the relay's contact - which would then be dislodged by the physical shock of unplugging. Apparently even a 30w switched mode psu can surge over 30A for 100ms. The solution was to use the remote control switch to power a hefty mains relay with 30A carrying and 50A surge capacity. A very satisfying loud clunk as it operates.
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Friday 29th April 2022 19:57 GMT Stevie
Lightbulb Fring
Amazing how many people don't believe that tungsten filament lightbulbs pop on being turned on.
I had a floodlight bulb in a bathroom that lasted for 30+ years because the switch had a dimmer built in and no rocker on/off like modern dimmer switches do.
Just like in a theatre, fading up - even really quickly - saves the bulbs.
Had a car that ate headlights and tried to get my EE Dad to help me design an in-line fader (he was fading fast himself and I hoped to revive his spirits with a nice little project) but he had no interest even when I expleined that I wasn't worried about overvolting in my own car (which he obsessed on) as much as economy in all the cars I'd ever own.
"Fortunately" a mechanic overfilled the engine oil on that car and killed it.
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Friday 29th April 2022 22:32 GMT Martin-73
Re: Lightbulb Fring
Yep, soft start circuits are very good for prolonging life, the old fashioned dimmers did indeed operate like that. Modern LED bulbs often die in the same way, the surge when switched on (due to caps charging through the FULL BRIDGE RECTIFIER!*) often kills them, along with underrated components that can barely survive normal use.
*apologies to Mehdi (ElectroBoom)
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Saturday 30th April 2022 10:45 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Lightbulb Fring
My household "filament" LED bulbs are tending to fail partially. One of the four "filaments" becomes intermittent. In general I have found the life of these LED bulbs not much different than incandescent ones.
An annoying feature of LED bulbs is the poor descriptions. Wilko sold me some "60w" ones which appeared to be identical apart from the cap - BC22 and ES. The boxes describe one type as A++ efficiency - and the other "E". I understand that the ++ ratings have apparently been deprecated - but the "E" rating seems very unlikely? Possibly the new scale is optimistic about future developments in energy efficiency.
A year ago - Wilko online sold me LED "100w" bulbs with a description of "standard GLS 6.0cm wide" . In fact they were not the standard GLS A60 but A70 - which at 7.0cm wide are too big for many enclosed shades/globes eg bathrooms. They apologised and accepted a return.
This week the listing was still for A60 standard GLS - and they are still sending out A70 ones. "Oh - just return them to a store" is their reaction.
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Saturday 30th April 2022 04:45 GMT david 12
Somewhere around 50 years ago I read with interest a Bulletin Board thread discussing if computers should be turned of (saves thermal hours) or left on (saves start up stress). These threads used to run for weeks because users would only login perhaps once per week.
The thread was effectively terminated by two guys, who wrote, respectively,
1) I used to leave my computer on, then one day while I was working, the side of the monitor turned brown, smoked, and flamed. Now I always turn the computer off when I leave the room.
2) I used to leave my computer on, then one day while I was working, a gout of flame erupted from the power supply at the back and ignited my curtains. Now I always turn the computer off when I leave the room.
And ten years after that, I worked for a fire-alarm company, who reported that the most common cause of office fires was computers.
They use non-flammable plastic now, and computers sleep when not in use, but back in the day....
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Monday 2nd May 2022 03:28 GMT TSM
Around 20 years ago the organisation I worked for had a strict policy of having all computers turned off at the end of the day. This policy was accompanied by a photo of the mangled remains of a computer in one of the workshops whose monitor, IIRC, had decided to set itself on fire one night.
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Friday 29th April 2022 09:33 GMT Howard Sway
it was a button with 'I' and 'O' on it
That's not an 'I' and 'O', that's a 1 and a 0. Presumably thought up by some techie who can only think in binary, and assumes everybody else will understand it too. There can't be any other reason, unless they thought that users wouldn't be confused as to whether 'O' stands for On or Off.
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Friday 29th April 2022 10:18 GMT tfewster
Re: it was a button with 'I' and 'O' on it
Another reason would be to avoid having to label them "On" and "Off" in every language in the world. Or at least have different marking for different markets.
I must spend too much time with Lusers - as soon as "O" mode was mentioned, I knew where that was going.
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Friday 29th April 2022 14:12 GMT nintendoeats
Re: it was a button with 'I' and 'O' on it
In fact I am a software developer, I just don't think of my kettle (which uses I and O to indicate On and Off respectively) as a computer. Call me crazy, but when I flip the switch I'm thinking "Close the circuit" not "Set the POWER_ON bit to true".
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Tuesday 3rd May 2022 11:06 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: it was a button with 'I' and 'O' on it
In the 1960s there was a prepared papertape you could feed into a Friden FlexoWriter. It moved the head to the centre of the carriage - then proceeded repeatedly to peck a character at the same position. It started slowly - then gradually built up the tempo - like Ravel's Bolero.
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Saturday 30th April 2022 15:56 GMT dajames
Re: Oh...
Many years ago my colleagues and I decided that a 3.5" diskette was not floppy enough to be called a floppy, and started to call them "biscuits", reserving the term "floppy" for proper 5.25" jobbies.
Of course, "biscuits" came in two versions, too: 720k "biscuits" were blue and the 1.44MB ones (at least in our store cupboard) were black.
I explained this to one of the secretaries, once, and pointed out that the High Density diskettes were the better sort, and were called "chocolate biscuits" because they tended to be black like very dark chocolate.
"Oh, yes," she said, "they even say CH on them. That must stand for chocolate".
[Young persons who have never seen a High Density 3.5" diskette may not know that they were typically marked with a stylized "HD", stamped into the plastic next to the shutter.]
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Friday 29th April 2022 10:46 GMT The H-J Man
Unfortualetly not that an uncommon situation on a Broadband helpdesk.
Once asked a customer what version of Windows they had, there reply was ColdSeal (For those who dont remember, they had annoying adverts on the radio)
Was once asked will it be us (The ISP) who will be calling the Police as there computer had performed an illegal operation.
The funniest one was the customer who called us to complain that we had changed there webased email to a soft porn site (They used hotmail - I'll leave that one for you to work out)
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Friday 29th April 2022 10:59 GMT PerlLaghu
Academics can be stupid too
Back in the last century, I was working as user support for a University [lets call it The University of Poppleton], and I got a call about broken email.
After spending some time determining they didn't know what program they used to read their email (it was a blue bird), and that the icon was missing from their desktop - so the problem was about computer configuration, not actual email... we then tried to find out if the program was actually installed on the computer.
.... of course, when they said they couldn't see the start menu, or any other icons either, I started to get a bit.... "concerned"
I then found out that the "big Box" has no lights on it, the keyboard did nothing if you tapped the NumLock key, and it was all a bit silent.... now I was moving from a failing email system to a broken computer problem.
A chance question lead to the comment "Oh, we have a power-cut just now"
Bloody academics: they spend so much time thinking about esoteric quantum whotsits, they forget about "normal" stuff - like computers need electricity to effing RUN!
GGNnnnn!!
(Why did they take my ClueBat from me!??!!)
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Friday 29th April 2022 11:56 GMT Prst. V.Jeltz
Re: Academics can be stupid too
I had virtually the same thing , also at a college
the best way this professor could describe "System boot fail: Error booting from disk in drive A"
was "I cant get my email"
This news did reach me via some sort of helpdesk , so i'm blaming them even more than the
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Friday 29th April 2022 23:40 GMT John Brown (no body)
Re: Academics can be stupid too
"Back in the last century, I was working as user support for a University [lets call it The University of Poppleton]"
I used to visit a university near Poppleton, let's call it the University of Bork. They had a campus-wide power cut. Much hilarity ensued as they discovered just how much of the network and various devices attached to said network, had only ever been soft-configured as the network and associated services had been changed, and/or retired over the years. Switches with unsaved config changes, devices with IP addresses handed out by now non-existent servers and, of course, the old favourite we all love, devices that had not been powered off in years having to be sent to the great junk yard in the sky because they couldn't cope with the first power cycle in possibly a decade!
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Monday 2nd May 2022 01:57 GMT David 132
Re: Academics can be stupid too
> I used to visit a university near Poppleton, let's call it the University of Bork.
If we're talking about the name-redacted-for-legal-purposes University I think we are, then honestly I'm surprised you were able to get to the computer facilities, given the prodigious amounts of canada goose sh!t that covered every outside walkway when I was there. I hear that the JB Morrell library got closed down and relocated before it could slide down the hill onto the road and crush the CompSci dept building, so there's that I suppose...
I remember watching A Very Peculiar Practice when I was there and thinking gosh, that campus isn't this one, but could pass for it any day....
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Friday 29th April 2022 12:00 GMT Prst. V.Jeltz
Re: Oh power related calls
more than once i've had:
"Come quick! very important! , the Top Brass are all in the conference room and suddenly its just 'crashed' "
The Top Brass are not great at checking wether the plughole they are plugging their shiny expensive battery powered toys into is switched on.
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Friday 29th April 2022 15:11 GMT TooOldForThisSh*t
Re: Oh power related calls
Two Good Power Stories:
First week on the Help Desk for our division of a large US manufacturer I had a call from an office with a printer that was not working. Tried all the usual troubleshooting steps like paper in printer, tried reprinting job and checking settings in software. Nothing worked. After about 15minutes of trying finally remote user mentions the light on the printer is burned out. Turn ON printer and dozens of the same printout appear. Doh!
Second was a call from the Corporate Help Desk on a Saturday night that none of the computers at a South American manufacturing site were working. A quick ping or two showed everything off-line so I called the phone number listed in our database for the local IT contact. Woman answers the phone in a foreign language that I did not understand at all. Tried as best I could to ask for the IT guy and explain who I am and she starts what I assume was a long string of curse words in her native tongue. Man picks up the phone in broken English and explains that he had been fired months ago and he didn't give a SH*T about out computer troubles. I apologize and call the second name & number in our database that was a person in another country. In the morning I get a call that everything is fine now as power had been turned off for maintenance at that site.
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Saturday 30th April 2022 16:28 GMT Paul Hovnanian
Re: On the other, other hand...
I have a radio tuner with an "OFF" indicator light. The bezel surrounding the power button illuminates when plugged in but switched off. Turn the unit on and the light extinguishes.
It does make sense in that it outlines the one button you must push to make the thing go. It is easier to find in the dark (with black buttons and a black faceplate). And once turned on, lots of other panel indicators illuminate to reassure one of the state of the equipment.
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Friday 29th April 2022 15:15 GMT Boris the Cockroach
Knowing
someone who's worked the helldesk for a large multi-national IT company
Every story from there about the users is true.. every. last. one.
The more surprising thing though is the number of calls from higher manglement(you know.. the guys in charge of millions of pounds and 1000's of jobs) and are just as dumb as the rest of the staff
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Sunday 1st May 2022 12:04 GMT TRT
Re: How friggin' tough could it be to just print the words?
I haven't been able to find a reason for that in the English speaking world but the roots go back to Germanic and are antonyms - on is to, towards, into, part of and off is away from, out of, not part of, from.
One of the earliest uses I can find is related to archery and combat - on target and off target. In an electrical sense I suppose it follows the gas sense or the water sense though there may be some rational thought behind this as for water and gas taps you would refer to them as open or closed, which for electricity is the reverse of the intent - closed contacts conduct and activate but closed taps block flow and deactivate. The flow of electricity is often likened to the flow of water and so it seems that in early demonstrations it may have been confusing to say "I close the contact bar and the electricity flows like water".
But I wasn't there, so.., guesswork.
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Monday 2nd May 2022 15:45 GMT Marty McFly
Re: How friggin' tough could it be to just print the words?
Yeah, and that makes sense. Except instead of "1" the character used is "I".
Some people see 'zero' or 'one'. Some people 'Oh' or 'El'. Other people see circle or dash.
To be completely transparent, I never knew that was supposed to represent a '1' for binary meaning 'On'. Pretty darn good chance I would have figured that out pretty quick. I always saw a dash and a circle, and then thought the circle was the 'Oh' in On or Off, and got frustrated.
A different font choice for the '1' would have made this much more obvious.
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Friday 29th April 2022 20:05 GMT doublelayer
Re: How friggin' tough could it be to just print the words?
You have three options:
1. Print the words in every language your users will need.
2. Make different cases for each market, each with only a few languages printed on it.
3. Use a universal symbol.
Is 3 really so hard? You also have the option of ignoring the symbol and simply understanding that, if the device is not in the on/off state you want, flipping the switch should put it in the other one. If it doesn't, your issue is something other than the switch setting.
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Friday 29th April 2022 23:47 GMT John Brown (no body)
Re: How friggin' tough could it be to just print the words?
"You also have the option of ignoring the symbol and simply understanding that, if the device is not in the on/off state you want, flipping the switch should put it in the other one."
And to be fair, the option of simply not having any indication of which way is on or off isn't that unusual on many devices. Some manufactures seem to rely on people using their kit having a modicum of intelligence and noting that if it's not whirring or no lights are showing, it's either off or not plugged in. Or both. The user is expected to be able to figure that out for themselves. If they can't, they probably should not be touching it, never mind actually using it :-)
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Monday 2nd May 2022 11:03 GMT My-Handle
Re: How friggin' tough could it be to just print the words?
"And to be fair, the option of simply not having any indication of which way is on or off isn't that unusual on many devices"
I can think of several extremely common examples of this. Light switches come to mind. They're not usually marked and, depending what room you're in and how many switches are on the circuit, up / down may not be consistently correlated to on / off. Yet people are somehow able to work out that when it is dark you may need to flip the switch.
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Monday 2nd May 2022 12:05 GMT rototype
Re: How friggin' tough could it be to just print the words?
Interestingly I have experience that in some countries the light switch is up for on and in other countries it's down for on - I've yet to see a light switch that works left to right but I have a feeling there's probably some out there...
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Monday 2nd May 2022 19:08 GMT doublelayer
Re: How friggin' tough could it be to just print the words?
I don't think this is a country thing. If it is, my country's system is to do it at random. Admittedly more often with up being on, but I can find examples of both in a lot of houses, and of course any circuit that has two or more switches will do both. I've seen a few left/right switches, but they're less common and usually control something other than lights. For example, I've worked in a lab where the safety circuits had left/right switches, probably so they'd look different from the lights and hopefully have fewer accidental flips.
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Monday 2nd May 2022 12:49 GMT Terry 6
Re: How friggin' tough could it be to just print the words?
Yes. Two way switches can be up/down in and on/off according to who used them last and where. When you need to go upstairs, you press the downstairs switch, light on the floor above goes on. When it's sleepy time you press the upstairs switch. Light goes off. If you don't wake up too early (while it's still dark), the next time you make this journey the opposite opposite side of the switch will be ready to press. People manage with this, all the time. If the caller in this story did phone for help without simply pressing the switch and seeing if stuff works as required, then said user would have to be considerably more stupid than the norm- and not just in matters of tech.
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Monday 2nd May 2022 13:09 GMT My-Handle
Re: How friggin' tough could it be to just print the words?
Thing is, just by being on the helpdesk you are being exposed to a self-selecting section of the user base. The dumber the user, the more issues they are likely to experience. If you're working for a really big company, with tens of thousands of employees, you can expect to be dealing with a handful of people in the bottom 0.1% or 0.01% of computer ability.
That's a very low bar, and my expectations of the average ability of the human race aren't all that high to begin with.
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Friday 1st July 2022 15:28 GMT Ghostman
Re: How friggin' tough could it be to just print the words?
An actual universal signal would not be hard to come up with. My idea is to make the switch with two different images of a light-bulb. On would be represented by a light-bulb with lines representing rays coming out of it representing that the bulb is "lit". The other representing off would have the bulb with an X through it showing "off".
If you've ever seen a comic strip, you would associate the images with off and on.
It's not really alien technology, you know.
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Friday 29th April 2022 15:47 GMT adam 40
I-mode, then O-mode
Reminds me I worked on I-mode back in the day, on the Tosh ts21i.
I remember a visit to Germany to do some IOT testing in Dusseldorf, probably E-plus labs.
As I had a local SIM for demos I went wandering around with a sample handset, and came across (!) a german sex shop, so naturally I had to investigate.
After perusing the wares on offer I sauntered up to the counter and showed the guy the new ts21i, merrily downloading a few dodgy images, to demonstrate the new way of accessing pr0n in your pocket.... so I suppose I had reinvented O-mode, in a way....
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Friday 29th April 2022 15:54 GMT JassMan
Somebody should have told Microsoft not to do that
Ivor was baffled. "This was the '90s," he said, "and no one could think of such a config option in our software." I think it was a bit disingenuous to show the on/off switch on the back of the computer rather than the one on the front which most people use. I don't know when Windows changed the way the ⱷ button functioned, but I remember being quite confused for a while when I started noticing that some files on my office computer were no longer the same ones next morning. I attempted to be environmentally friendly by switching off at the wall. I was reprimanded by my manager for interfering with ability of the IT department to maintain the software on our PCs. I can only assume they were using the wake-on-LAN option to do out-of-hours updates. When I investigated I found that "start" button, although it is labelled with the internationally recognised On/Off was actually Hibernate/Wake by default and could be set to a variety of functions. At some stage, they managed to get hardware vendors to make the physical button on the PC follow the start button.
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Friday 29th April 2022 17:03 GMT Algernon Postlethwaite
O.F.F. Mode
In another life as an RAF technician (Pontius was still a pilot) had a job card presented with the fault logged as "Radar Failed To Operate in O. F. F. Mode." The job was cleared and signed-off with the entry "Operational Full Failure (O. F. F.) mode deselected. Radar confirmed to operate when Operational Normality (O. N.) mode selected".
When I worked on Black Helicopters (they were actually green but the engines were sooty) a fault was logged as "Stopwatch Stopped". It was signed-off with "Stopwatch confirmed stopped. Stopwatch failed to start. Stopwatch wound. Stopwatch started. Stopwatch watched and stayed started. Stopwatch stopped."
Oh to be young again and amused by such simple things...
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Saturday 30th April 2022 04:53 GMT sanmigueelbeer
It could've been worse.
I read this story about this software that kept on crashing (or does not work efficiently). The employee kept up the complaint but no one listened. So he got frustrated and called the software company helpline and, after a few hours on the phone, promised to "send a tech".
Lo and behold, the next day a "tech" showed up with three other people. The tech then proceeded to troubleshoot the issue and after a few minutes this tech nodded to his companions who then reached into their pockets and pulled out their law enforcement IDs.
The software was a pirated copy and after a sweep, the company was fined several million dollars because it was installed in several work stations.
If memory serves me correct, it was a TV station in Eastern Europe.
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Saturday 30th April 2022 09:40 GMT zeltus
Why O & I?
Does anyone know why O (off) and I (On) were chosen as pretty much universal symbols for power switches?
OK, so O (On) & O (Off) would be pretty confusing but why "I" for On? Indeed, does "O" really mean "Off" - is this an English-speaking vanity?
Why not a completely pictorial/symbolic pair of, umm, symbols? If so, what should they (have) be(en)?
Enqui=ring minds demand answers...
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Monday 2nd May 2022 13:13 GMT My-Handle
I myself have made that mistake. My work machine is a quiet one, and the screens turn off after ten minutes of inactivity (not an unusual feature, I'm lead to believe). I've gone up to it, wiggled the mouse, started typing, and wondered why the thing isn't working.
The difference is that I can problem-solve. I'm slowly gaining more and more experience that this is actually a rare skill.
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Monday 2nd May 2022 09:13 GMT Richard Pennington 1
WAY back in the day ...
... I did A-level physics a long time ago (I'm retired now). For the practical exam, one of the tests was to identify an electronic component in "black box" mode (i.e. it had been boxed and wrapped so that the component itself could not be seen, but there were visible connectors). A group of us went round the room from component to component, performed various simple tests, and wrote down our results.
About the seventh box in, I came across a box with two terminals, which appeared to be completely open-circuit. Several other students got the same result, and one of them mentioned it to the teacher who was invigilating. We were all called back in to repeat the tests on a replacement box.
It was a light-bulb, and it had blown during testing by one of the earlier students.
[For those millennials and Gen-Zers who don't know, old-style incandescent bulbs had a resistance which rose as the voltage, and hence the filament temperature, went up. In this case, a student had probably given it a significant excess voltage, causing the resistance to go to infinity and stay there.]
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Monday 2nd May 2022 11:36 GMT Sam Therapy
Everyone's heard of this one but that's because it often happened...
Way, way back, I worked at British Coal (remember them?) at their Pensions and Insurance centre in Sheffield. There was a standalone machine running an overnight process, and after working faultlessly for ages, suddenly started failing. Nobody knew why until they realised the fault began when they moved the machine to a new location. The power socket was one used by the cleaners, so they used to unplug the computer, plug in their cleaning gear, do their work, plug the computer back in and so on.
The thing got moved back to its old place with an inaccessible socket and ran faultlessly ever after.
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Monday 2nd May 2022 12:56 GMT Terry 6
Ah. For once you can't blame the cleaners. Just the opposite. Someone decided to take over their socket. Someone who so lacked understanding of the building and the work that goes on there* that they both allowed this to happen and then failed to realise immediately. Someone who would appear to be totally oblivious of anything other than their own job.Which is not a recommendation for anything above the level of apprentice/PFY
*If someone has put a socket there it's quite likely that some other someone has a use for a socket there.
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Monday 2nd May 2022 14:06 GMT Eric Kimminau TREG
My only equivalent to this
I worked the helpdesk at a computer company in Dallas called "Softwarehouse", which became the business you most know as CompUSA when it went public. I remember the frustrated user who called installing Lotus 1-2-3 v1.0 in 1982. This behemoth was either 14 or 16 x 5.25" floppy disks for the installation. We must remember that beginning PC users are quite literal. This particular user installed the first floppy disk in floppy drive A:\. When the installer asked for the second disk, he put it into floppy drive B:\ which of course failed, prompting the installer to present on the screen "Please install the next floppy disk". Not having any other place to put his next disk, because he was never told to "Remove disk #1 and insert disk #n", he began pushing the floppy disks into the small opening between his 2 drives. On disk 7, there was no remaining space and he could fit no more floppy drives into said space, at which point he called our technical support line.
Understand, he talked us through this installation process and was quite proud of himself for successfully getting to disk #7 and was quite concerned that there was no more space for any additional disks in his brand new computer.
When we finally asked him to reboot and boot failed (because it was trying to boot of disk #1) we began to understand. The customer was quite surprised when we asked him what was in floppy drive A: and asked him to remove the floppy and read its label to us. "Lotus 1-2-3 disk #1" he proclaimed proudly. I then asked him to remove the disk from floppy drive B: and read it to me. "Lotus 1-2-3 disk #2" he exclaimed with pride which then begged the question "and where is disk #3?" to which he replied "How do I remove the other disks from the drive slot?"
Ahhhhh! "Sir, Im sorry but we are going to need you to bring your computer and the Software box with all the remaining disks into our repair center." When he protested, he was given the choice of either bringing it in to us or he could break out the phillips head screwdriver and clean what we expected to be bent and damaged floppies from the empty space between his two floppy drives.
He grudgingly brought the requested items in and we assisted in the return of the damaged software installation kit and performed the installation for him, with him watching over our shoulder as we explained that you needed to only use drive A: and remove each disk before proceeding with the following disks.
THe joy of technical support.
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Monday 2nd May 2022 18:08 GMT geekbrit
Instrument kept turning on
I worked in software for a gas detector company - wear one of these gadgets in a confined space and it would tell you whether you were about to be blown up, suffocated, or poisoned.
In a new model, the hardware team were on a cost cutting binge, and the first thing to go was the on/off switch. After one of the two remaining buttons was held for a couple of seconds, the software took over and tickled a circuit several times a second to keep the instrument alive.
All went well until it was noticed that occasionally the device would come back to life on its own a few seconds after switch off.
The full hardware team worked on this for days, until the extremely sleep deprived HW Manager strode up to me with a fierce grin and a manic look in his eye.
"You're doing it! The power goes off, then there's a kick on the power maintain line!"
I looked at him, wondering when the penny was going to drop, then prompted him. "So the power goes off?"
"Yes!"
"And the CPU clock stops?"
"Yes!"
"Then what could I possibly be doing to toggle that line?"
He didn't say a word, just spun on his heel and went storming back to the workbench.
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Monday 2nd May 2022 18:11 GMT me212
experts(sic)jjust as bad
I once got a report back from a senior systems guy running an integration test that just said literally 'dont work'.
No details of what part didnt work, no details of what part of the test was run ( this tests were large so could have been any of number of things that failed).
When I confronted him the same day his response to how it had failed 'I can't remember'. Tosser.
What really stuck in the throat that this lazy so and so was probably earning twice as much as me as he was a contractor.