Tech support world record? 8.5 seconds from seeing to fixing The working week can be a trek. And so can a holiday, which the On Call author has taken this week – but not before preparing a new installment of The Register’s Friday column that recounts tech support tales kindly contributed by readers. This week’s On Call is a compendium of responses to our recent request for your fastest …
I've seen that before, can't stand IT departments like that. Like the time we had laptops that would get into Windows (some were still on XP) and explorer would freeze for about 10-15mins when accessing network drives. Was random. We were just told to "Rebuild them". I said "But that's not fixing the issue is it. It takes at least an hour or so to rebuild and give them it back. They then have to set all their settings up again. Just give me a chance to fix it". I was told no. REALLY FUCKING ANNOYING. Eventually, the manage in IT that kept saying no got hit with the bug, so I was FINALLY given time to fix it (mainly because she was going on leave for 2 weeks so didn't care).
Ran process monitor and process explorer, just watched process monitor for anything odd. We'd seen before in Task Manager (which is shit) it would show explorer running at 50% when the issue occured. So I watched that with process explorer. The best thing with process explorer is you can see within the process, not just, as Task Manager showed, explorer running at 50%. In Process Explorer you can see all the .dll's that process is running. And there it was, a .dll within Explorer that it had called, was what was running at 50%. The .dll was related to our encryption software we were using on the laptops, but what did it do? Went to the PGP site and found an article about it, that it could cause hanging. Turns out all the .dll did was scan network drives for encrpyted files, if it found any it would change their icon. It can be disabled. We only encrypted the laptop so it wasn't needed. Disabled it, problem went away.
What was once an over hour rebuild now only took about 1-2mins.
Got no reconition for that.
@steviebuk
"...We were just told to "Rebuild them"..."
I hated that! We had recurring problems with MS Office (particularly Word), where something would change (I think a formatting change that we could not undo, but details are vagque) and nobody could help me getting it right (not the boffins at HO, nor Microsoft. The answer was always "uninstall and reinstall - it is the quickest way to resolve". Except it was still in the days of Windows for workgroups (or maybe early Win95) and Office came on 24 stiffies. And more often than not, installation would fail when you only had two or three stiffies to go. I still suspect that it was a particular key combination, but none of the people affected could tell me exactly what key combination they had accidentally pressed (most of them were experienced, could touch type and could type fast). But this is not my story, this is just to voice my gripe about having to reinstall rather than fix the problem.
I got a call from a senior Financial director (quite clued up, and he knew his limitations) who had bought his own laptop (as the company did not feel it was warranted) and had run into problems while setting up Windows (Window for Networks - it was early days) to his liking, and then ended up with only the graphics (i.e. window borders, et cetera) and text in the window headers, but nowhere else, and he could not recover from that. The shop where he had bought the machine said the only way to fix it was to reinstall Windows, at an eye-watering cost (captive customer, etc.).
After talking him through what exactly he had been doing just before the problem presented itself, the penny dropped when he said he was changing the colours as he did not like the default colours... He had changed his font colour to be the same as his background. I talked him through the steps (alt-m, or was it ctrl-m?, right arrow three times, down two right one, etc.) to change the colour and it was magically restored seconds later. If he could he would have given me a kiss over the phone! And he bought me lunch some weeks later when the opportunity presented itself. This was some two or three years before I was given the opportunity to move into IT and became the local help desk (HO said there was no need) in our region.
It was interesting times; there were no manuals or guidelines on what to do - I had to wing it. Ended up doing almost everything, from fixing hardware, building PC's, installing servers and maintaining the local network (before DHCP, natch! I had Lotus 123 files for each branch with all the IP addresses for every machine).
Icon for the "reinstall" crowd.
So so agree !!!
I cannot understand why you live with a problem just because it is 'quicker' to ignore it.
Your job is the provide IT assistance amongst other things and users having a regular problem will naturally call IT all the names in the world for NOT helping them.
That is why IT/Support services etc gets a bad name.
I personally would just 'FIX IT' even if I had to use my own time as it offends me to lower my standards because it is the QUICK solution.
Although it is often thankless to do the right thing, but you should do it anyway ... professional standards and all that !!!
BTW
Getting a good name with the senior staff is NEVER a bad thing.
:)
Its because of shitty internal politics and SLAs. Some tit has decided what the SLAs are and when the IT manager is shit, they want to stick to those SLAs instead of explaining to the customer its better, in this case that is affecting everyone, to breach the SLA and find a fix instead of rebuilding. Very rare to get a manager like that, we had one and he was amazing but sadly left due to all the internal bullshit politics.
The same thing with Windows in general. “You must reinstall Windows every six months” was a thing for a long time. I started to know the fixes needed to keep it running. The only one I remember now was when the right click context menu was slow in Internet Explorer, was to run the Microsoft Registry Cleaner and it would clear out some entries related to the menu and then it would open instantly.
I have a friend who is a university lecturer, quite senior. He told me his laptop was broken and the keyboard just sent nonsense to the screen. He was unable to use it for two months, until one day I visited his home and pointed out that the num lock was on, which on his tiny laptop meant half the letters on the keyboard became numbers.
> He told me his laptop was broken and the keyboard just sent nonsense to the screen
I've had someone come to me with a laptop which couldn't connect to the wifi. Which turned out to be because this particular laptop had assigned one of the F keys as "toggle wifi". And if I remember correctly, this setting persisted between reboots...
Definitely not the most user-friendly system I've seen!
I've been caught like that.
I thought one of my old laptops was broken as the wifi was enabled but just couldn't get it to work. Took me ages to realise that there was a physical switch on the side that enabled / disabled it. Windows had no clue it was turned off though, it just couldn't find any signal.
That's how the switch is designed. It doesn't disable the WiFi interface, because disappearing interfaces could cause problems, now mostly fixed, with a variety of operating systems. Yes, that includes Linux. Notifying the software was considered unimportant because the operating system couldn't turn it on; the user had to do that by physically toggling the switch again. Windows didn't have access to anything that would indicate that it had been switched off.
For the same reason, old laptops with a physical brightness control for the screen didn't report that number to the operating system, nor could the operating system override it.
hmm sounds like a dell. solved that problem numerous times. lately the problem is that no one can see them during teams or zoom meetings. slide the small switch at the top of the screen to expose the camera lens. Once had a user who couldn't turn his computer on. been using it for months by flipping the switch on the surge suppressor to turn it off and on. someone had helpfully flipped the power switch on the monitor after the computer was turned off with the surge suppressor switch. computer was booting but the monitor was off.
"I've had someone come to me with a laptop which couldn't connect to the wifi. Which turned out to be because this particular laptop had assigned one of the F keys as "toggle wifi". And if I remember correctly, this setting persisted between reboots..."
Some laptops have an option in BIOS to switch the default operation of the Function keys between proper function keys and the random icons printed on them so some users need to press F9 to switch the cameras off and other have the press Fn-F9. I have no idea why identical models have different settings. I'm pretty sure they do not get changed at initial build and users don't get the BIOS password so it seems like maybe they come from the factory randomly set like that. I always change them to the "silly icon" mode since that's the majority anyway and what most users expect these days.
Yes, we had a whole bunch of computers like that, years ago. A key that turned off connection to the network, which was placed in a perfect location to get knocked by accident. It didn't happen frequently enough for me to remember that this was the problem, for quite a while. So, a quick fix once I'd recalled it
Oooh, yes!
I got bitten by this as well. Somehow my Bitlocker-Password didn't work :D - imagine my amazement when I told it to show me what I typed in...
Now the stupid thing is that the "num lock" is persistent after reboot, which is annoying if you use a full sized keyboard at the office and the laptop without a keyboard on the road / at the dinner table.
Same department (Anti Social Services) would log tickets:
Escalate them.
Deskside Support would pass on the ticket to us.
Down in the IT Service center carpark wooden hut
We would get the ticket just before lunch & go to lunch.
Return to find another escalation & decided it needed another cup of tea to process what the root cause was.
Walk into the department, to the howls & various cries then flick the Sony monitor's physical power switch at the back, that the user had flicked to save money just before they went on two weeks holiday!
Walk away after very loudly & pointedly pointing out the root cause, leaving said worker having to awkwardly explain to their manager who had escalated the issue repeatedly what the root cause was.
Alas they pulled that same routine about 3 more times, before someone rubbed a braincell together.
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Almost that exact scenario. I could see under the desk that the light was not on. I asked him if he had checked the power strip. Annoyed, he said "Of course, yes." I crawled under there and turned it on then told him that in fact it WAS on but the plug was loose in the wall socket. I learned early on that however tempted you may be to point out how ignorant a user is, you never, ever want to do that. Or intentionally embarrass one. No matter how much of an a-hole they're being.
Me too , describing to a user over the phone how to switch a wifi switch on the side of a laptop is impossible .
UNLESS - you have compiled a list of all models of laptop in circulation on the estate , found out exactly where the switch is (if exists) and saved photographs of its location to describe to the user.
"Left hand side , just to the right of the little vent , but before the three circle holes - it should be pushed towards the back of the laptop" etc
And then, of course, the oft-told story of the team at Acorn plugging in the first ARM sample, being overjoyed that it worked first time...
...and then noticing that they hadn't even connected the chip itself to the power supply. It needed so little power it was just fine using stray currents coming via i/o pullups.
M.
To be fair here, most camera privacy sliders could do with being designed with the human element taken into consideration - how many actually make it *obvious* at a glance that they're open/closed, and how many simply look like a slightly darker part of the bezel regardless of which state they're in... Maybe take a leaf out of the car industry book, and make the slider out of bright yellow plastic so that a) your attention is immediately drawn to its presence in the first place (i.e. you know that the laptop actually does have a slider), and b) when closed it then shows up clearly against the bezel so you know the camera is blocked.
Same principle applies to everything else UI-related on modern systems - e.g. the fad for making caps/scroll/num lock indications ever smaller such that when illuminated they can easily be mistaken for a speck of dust... Do product designers these days have to take special classes in learning how to forget that their products are used by, and therefore need to be useable by, humans?
I've been convinced for decades that car manufacturers have a human disfactors department. Most specifically, a department to review mechanical maintenance, and reject designs that make it too easy.
What is obvious is that designers don't do their own maintenance, otherwise they wouldn't design what they do.
I can attest to the Japanese thing, some of our products (not cars) I'm certain were designed to be maintained by creatures whose arms feature at least 5 elbow joints, some of which flex in the opposite direction.
That combined with the seeming need to use at least 6x the number of screws that are actually required (and that end up actually being in the machine after a few PM's), of which at least 1 will be cunningly hidden behind a panel whose removal first requires half of the machine to be disassembled...
Nurse, the dried frog pills please!
I had a car some years ago, I think it was a Mazda 6, where the official instructions for changing a headlight bulb started with "remove the front bumper assembly". It was just possible to do it without that, given small fingers and some forceps, and a willingness to shed blood. Makes a mockery of the legal requirement to carry spare bulbs in the car.
I have Ford Escape. One headlight went out. I like to replace both at the same time.
The dead drivers side headlight wasn't too hard to replace.
The passenger headlamp was mostly blocked by the radiator overflow tank. I wasn't able to totally get it out of the way so I looked for a video on taking the headlight out. It seemed like it should be simpler. I could see 4 screws. Then I found the instructions on that and found "remove the front bumper assembly" to get to the last screw on the bottom of the headlight assembly.
Finally forced my hand in to get the lamp loose by partly unsnapping the overflow tank (the back part would not come loose). Then I found out the wires were too short to pull it out far enough to change. I the bulb lasts a long time.
I have a Prius that had the remove bumper to change headlight instructions. I found a YouTube video that showed removing a fairly small plastic piece behind the headlight gave you _just_ enough clearance to remove the weather cover and then the headlight. ...and without blood loss too!
I was in a workshop yesterday (having my car's aircon regassed). The woman in the next bay was attempting to have her aircon repaired, and the mechanic was having some trouble getting to the compressor, for which he had to remove the bumper.
This proved impossible, because after a recent accident, her insurers' approved mechanic had done, and billed the insurance for, a full repair. They'd increased their profit a bit by not replacing the clips and mountings that held the bumper on, instead gluing it to the wing.
I see your Mazda 6 and raise you a VW Golf (of around 1990s vintage IIRC) that work had as a pool car. Being known as the person everyone goes to with any sort of technical issue, I got asked about spare bulbs and "shouldn't we have some spares" - so I gave someone a list and sent them to the nearest car parts shop for them. I think one tail light was out which had prompted the question.
While I was swapping that - nice easy job, but for the seam on the fuel tank designed to just-n-so prevent removal of the lamp holder assembly from the housing/lens unit _ took a look at what other delights the manufacturer might have thrown in.
Headlights. Hmm, how do we do those ? In a fit of defeatism I looked in the manual where it had the instructions "take to your dealer" ! FFS, changing a light bulb is a dealer job ?
1998 Dodge Stratus. Replacing the battery involved jacking up the car, removing the driver's side front wheel, and peeling back the wheelwell to access it. Draining the radiator fluid was the usual petcock... with a hex head, as it was only accessible with a socket on an extension on a U-joint on another extension. And being a transverse-mounted V6, changing the 3 rear sparkplugs required removing the intake manifold.
I borrowed my brother-in-law's spare prius while my ICE car was being serviced. the prius had not been driven for a while and the 12V standard car battery in the boot ran flat. I was absolute flummoxed that the car could not start even though the big main battery was charged. like wth ? which designer thought that was a smart idea ?
It's a combination of cheapness and safety. If you totally disconnect the power pack when the car is idle then it can't ever drain to 0% (which in lithium ion batteries causes all sorts of problems), and it will survive cold/hot weather better if there is no load on it at all.
Secondly, if you use a standard 12V battery for the car's internal systems then you can use off the shelf parts for them without having to have a 12V transformer constantly running to down-voltage from the battery pack, or without creating custom parts which run off of a different higher voltage.
Plus for modern EVs you have a totally independent source of power to keep the computer systems monitoring the battery running, helping prevent the battery pack from being damaged by cold or heat or whatever.
That has to be the most stupid idea ever - disfigure a perfectly crafted hardware design to make it actually easy to use. No, totally bonkers idea.
That is a joke in case it wasn't clear. But I suspect it's the real reason, they won't do that because it "doesn't look nice".
Like the Oracle HR software we've been inflicted with at work. People keep going on about how great it is. It's not, it's a pile of unmitigated [insert expletives and references to defecation here]. It uses lots of whitespace to make sure stuff doesn't all fit on the screen unless you use full screen on a massive monitor. It makes links (things you can click on) hidden - there's literally zero clue whether some text is clickable until you hover over it. The contrast between the grey text and grey background is "poor". And the most annoying feature of all - many things involve multiple steps to get a list (e.g. of leave bookings) as you want it, you can't ctrl-click to open in new tab (you get an error message) to see the detail for an entry, and the back button doesn't take you back to where you were but to the default view so you have to reset the filters etc. again.
>"your attention is immediately drawn to its presence in the first place (i.e. you know that the laptop actually does have a slider), and b) when closed it then shows up clearly against the bezel so you know the camera is blocked."
I read your comment, thought "gee, would be nice to have a slider on my laptop". Then thought "wait a sec...". Guess who posts as an anonymous coward and just discovered that his laptop has a built in privacy slider?
FWIW, the HP Zbook has a crosshatch pattern on the slider, so it's somewhat noticeable when it's closed.
hmm, my camera is a red dot when the cover is over the sensor. sort of black when the cover is off the lens, but not all the laptops here are the same. if you watch the lens as you open and close the cover it's more obvious but it you accidentally close the cover without looking at the lens it isn't as obvious. i didn't think it was possible to cover the lens by accident until i saw someone do it while trying to adjust the laptop screen. pinched the switch and moved it to cover the lens and didn't notice.
Yup
Something like a bright coloured slider with a simple "red" for "covered" and "green" for "open", so your eye is drawn to how you turn it off, and there is an easy, readily understood colour code for it's current state.
If they wanted to get really fancy, have a light that comes on next to the slider when the camera is plugged in and corresponds to the status of the slider.
Even better also then print what the status light/position of the slider means near it.
One of the things the Amazon Echo show's got right was the privacy slider does have the colour coding showing depending on it's position, what they didn't do well was make it a little more obvious at first glance or if you've never used one before what the slider is for, it can look like just another one of the buttons.
> so the LED would light up when the camera is turned on.
Sort of - this feature is common on laptops these days but the light is usually software controlled, so it can be disabled with the camera running. More info here if you can spare 5 minutes
Two personal bests for me, both Excel related.
1. A couple of colleagues were trying to figure out how to count the number of words in a set of strings (best practice for the purpose of these strings was to keep them under ten words).
Wrote a formula that counted the spaces, then added one to calculate (simplified) wordcount. 3 hour task reduced to 20 seconds.
2. CSV file imported into Excel had newline characters from the website input form. Junior team member had been put on fixing the file manually, had spent 8 hours to get a quarter of the way through before somebody suggested talking to me.
Built a formula based on empty cells that condensed each mangled row back into one. 32 hour task reduced to 10 minutes.
I got asked to retype a Lotus 123 spreadsheet data into Excel, no direct import or export options on either.
Saved as CSV, imported CSV, time 15 seconds. The person who asked for it to be done told me to go away and do it properly like he asked.
See below for my other post of another incident with the same chap who asked for this.
Not seconds but minutes, but this one still impressed me.
I was writing some noddy code in C to endian swap a huge amount of data. I was doing it very slowly by reading data into memory, duplicating it, then copying multiple bytes of 8bits at a time back in (probably in a loop doing just one byte per loop)
Then a very clever colleague wrote a few lines of C that involved generating a pair of 32 bit ints from some binary masks, some bitwise AND/ORs and a single very fast arithmetic operation. I can't remember it exactly anymore but it was very impressive and reduced the processing time from "I'll run this over lunch" to "did it actually do it?".
TACS mobile (ask someone old enough to remember) ESNs were in the form nn/nn/nn/nnnnn and the network required hex for activation with some peculiar rules about how the leading digits were packed up (IIRC the middle nn got split up and possibly transposed with the adjacent nns. We were using C, the other team used COBOL. They couldn't find our function for doing the conversion as it was just one line.
Of course having got it into one line the line had to be shortened and made quite incomprehensible.
Nasty... I think Excel currently lets you - hmm. A true "import" into Microsoft Excel 365, "version 2410 (Build 18129.20158 Click-to-Run)
Made reasonable sense of this - but I don't see any "controls" to refine it.
"one","two","three, four",5,"6",seven
Columns:
'one
'two
'three, four
5
6
'seven
(without the ' marks shown - I might be remembering those from Lotus 1-2-3)
Fairly recently, might have been earlier this year, I was asked to help with an importing problem. The office staff had been handed a CSV file with 50 million rows and they had been struggling with it for several weeks. At first they thought it's the same thing as a spreadsheet file so tried to open it in Excel but that has a limit of 1 million rows and would not go. Then they tried to break it into several smaller files but every spreadsheet program they tried still crashed on each attempt. So next they went back to the source (another company who wanted to send data to our server) and they agreed to write a script that would connect to MySQL on our end and insert every row... one at a time and looked like it would take a whole year. I agreed if they could send me the CSV file directly and one "mysqlimport" command and 90 seconds later it was done.
Often it's just because they don't know any other way. Examples from previous jobs :
1) I'm asked to export some data from a Filemaker (remember that ?) databe and import it into our ERP system. Not a big task, but as it's going to be repeated several times/year (new products) I automate it by writing a calculation that gathers all the data I need complete with the right delimiters and in the right format into a text field I can export. I note that the person who designed the database did a massive calculation along the lines of "if price-int(price)<0.5 then rounded_price-int(price) else rounded_price=int(price)+1" - I casually mentioned the round function to them, they stuck their tongue out at me as a form of rebuke.
2) We're doing some data migration, which again involves pulling information from an old system to be imported into a new replacement. It's taking a while and I get the blame for "the system is so slow". I take a look at the command they are using (in vi), and see that it's (from memory) something like ":g/string//string/p". The trailing p on the end means to print each line that's processed - large file, serial terminal. I suggest dropping the p and am told they can't as that's the command they've been told to use. Eventually I persuade them to try ...
3) and this is one I'm sure everyone has had. Told to export some data to be sent to a customer. I create a text file as that's universal - anything can read it, plus the system it's coming from can't run Excel and I sure as heck don't want to have to learn the internals of an Excel file to generate it from my script. I get told my exported data is wrong, I check and it isn't. But it is, all the leading zeroes are missing ! Yes, open Excel, hit import, keep defaults, complain that the source data is wrong when Excel mangles it.
And I could go on. So many times I've been in one side or the other (yes, I'm not immune to it) of a conversation that includes "did you know you can ... ?"
HTML6 really needs to introduce a <sentence> ... </sentence> container; and then the rendering engine can handle the delimitation between sentences in the way the reader prefers, as opposed to the way the writer prefers.
Although, thinking about the ways in which UL's regularly get abused, this could end up going badly awry.....
> UNTIL I noticed that the website had replaced the original single quotes with <accent-grave> and <accent-aigue>
My ipad loves putting in weird double quotes instead of normal ones which breaks the HTML links in this Esteemed Organ, I changed the default just so I can make proper links here - I hope you commentards are all grateful
Guys writing Cisco configs in Word!
(Cisco CLI is 7-bit US-ASCII)
Got used to receiving configs with smart quotes and telling them how to turn off smart quotes, hyphens, etc(*), but it took me a while to convince one guy that his Word template was throwing up an error because the offending character was invisible
(*alternatively get them to use Notepad++)
One of the products I support has an import routine which reads an XML file in for creating orders which uses node attributes to hold the data rather than the element values, and without fail there are several tickets a month raised by customers about it not working because somebody somewhere decided that Word would be a great thing to use to create / edit the XML input file and it had switched all the quotes out for the "smart" variety.
Came in after taking the Monday off to find colleagues doing a AD cleanup, one guy starting at the bottom of the dreadsheet with surnames beginning with Z & working up, the other working from A downwards.
I apply my thunking cap along with a cuppa & a short time later, having tested it my Powershell script is read to run.
How far have you got Levi?
I'm on the "T'"s!
How far have you got Tyler?
I didn't start it!
WHAT! exclaims Levi
I didn't start it! As knowing him (me) he would rather spend 45 mins with Powershell to update everything in 45 seconds than doing this manually for the next 3 days!
Levi was not a happy bunny, as he had spent all day Monday on the task & part of Tuesday morning, Tyler had wisely left it to me.
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A friend and co-worker was set to inspecting lists of purported phone numbers and discarding any that weren't apparently standard US, i.e. ten digits. I sat down and set up a table or two and a query in Access and showed her how to to import a list and reject those not matching. She thought it was magic, and I trust it made her work less tedious.
My first proper proper office job was doing promotions for the website of a large pharmacy chain. I got the month-long cycle of manual work down to about fifteen minutes, scraping the company's own CMS (as we had no direct database access) with VBA opening Internet Explorer processes for each individual product to get the information we needed into spreadsheets. It was useful to almost every part of the team, but so intensive (and probably inefficient) that I had to batch it up and commandeer any free PCs in the office on the day that I ran it, or I wouldn't be able to access my email or do basically anything else.
After explaining it to a colleague (graphic designer) at lunch, he sat back and beamed "you've automated yourself out of your job!". He wasn't wrong.
If only there was a standard command that could count the number of words in some text piped to it!
2 probably would be entirely do-able in awk, if I only had the 'fu; though I cheated and used Perl the first time I had to do it, and kept the script lying around with the intention to tidy it up and make it a bit more like a general-purpose command the second time I had to do it. Good luck if the fields with embedded newlines weren't surrounded by speech marks.
FTP on windows to Unix box rang a bell there (or opened old wounds. ; )
TCP/IP QoS/ToS?
I vaguely recall having to add an undocumented line to a config file (netrc?) to change some odd* default QoS/ToS setting.
So I imagine that Usenet chap is up for two pints. ;)
<sub>* Solaris' System V TLI based networking could also be decidedly odd.</sub>
Ring Ring
User: "My computer is beeping constantly!"
Me: "Take the file off the corner of the keyboard!"
User: "How did you know that?"
Me: "Magic!"
Of course the beeping resulting from a constant field overflow was distinctive, even over the phone, but you don't tell the users that as it would destroy the aura.
I work in schools and I get this one a lot:
"My mouse is going crazy! I think someone has taken over my computer! It's jumping all over the screen!"
"Remove the decorations you put around the interactive whiteboard."
"Oh."
Especially relevant at Christmas, and have also had the same because teacher was leaning back on their chair and the chair was touching the board.
I have a work laptop that has an incredibly sensitive trackpad. If I try and use it with the screen closed (external KV&M), the mere proximity of the internal screen makes it borderline wild. And the other day, I forgot and had the headset cable touching it, which also had interesting effects.
IT support could only offer the "turn off trackpad when mouse connected" setting. But that doesn't help because a) I sometimes want to use the trackpad, and b) I use a switch to switch my keyboard and mouse between multiple systems, so some of the time the mouse isn't connected.
I had a user complain that any key press on their external keyboard, which was connected through a laptop docking station, would bring up the right-click menu in any application. The keyboard of course had one corner resting on the right "mouse" button below the trackpad on the laptop, which was sitting open next to the external display to accomplish a dual screen setup.
"Of course the beeping resulting from a constant field overflow was distinctive, even over the phone, but you don't tell the users that as it would destroy the aura."
These days, it's more likely to be a Teams or similar call, almost certainly with the default noise cancelling turned on. Odds are the beeping will be noise cancelled and the techy won't even hear it. Progress :-)
I can't be the only one to have taken printer support call that went "I've just changed the ink in my printer and it's not working any more".
Queue one walk to the offending printer, remove the cartridge, remove the bright orange "Remove before fitting" tabs, refit cartridge, walk back to desk.
Had that with a judge in Scotland.
Senior Sheriff for Edinburgh so a very smart guy.
Admittedly it was an HP cartridge with a very small sticky on it which was easy enough to miss if you didn't look at the picture on the packet.
He took it in good part unlike some of the prima-donnas I had to deal with when they realised their common sense had failed them.
I was 'impressed' by a user who managed to jam a toner cartridge into a printer with the bright orange plastic still attached to it. It took me quite a while to get it back out, but the printer still worked afterwards.
They must have used a lot of force to get it in.
My other half did this. Toner went in OK, and the printer worked, but didn't come out again without breaking the toner feed. That, and destroying the ribbon cable to the scanner bed with a pair of scissors meant a new device was required. One which they have been advised not to fiddle with.
Some moron decided that all HP Inkjet cartridges should be in one centralized location, he would even "salvage" from offices being closed down.
A number of "my printer wont work & I've changed the ink" calls went along these lines, on one occasion I refused to walk down the hill in pouring rain.
What's the number on the cartridge "89"
It should be a "68".
It looks the same!
It isn't.
OK I've got another one same number this time, still won't print, come down NOW!
Is it new, sealed out of the box?
No
Then it's empty or dried up, put a new one in please.
Because that just adds the following, pointless conversation to the fix:
Me: "Did you remove the orange pully things from the new cartridge before fitting it, like the instruction on the box say?".
User: "Yes.".
Walk down and what do you find when you get to the printer? Yes, an empty box/silver bag/old cartridge sat next to the printer (not IN the bag and box of course so leaving another back toner smudge on the white desk) - but zero orange tabs. Remove cartridge, see 2 orange tabs still attached, sigh, remove orange tabs/refit cartridge/see perfect prints start spooling out, grab a tea on the trudge back to your desk.
Probably related this one here before. Pager call at about 5am on Saturday. Newsroom printer not working, no news from IRN, on-duty journo panicking. Must be my fault as I had been "playing with" the serial feed from the satellite crate during Friday. Of course not - it was fine when I left.
Instant diagnosis - printer is "off line" for some reason. Journo insists no, he's checked it. The little green light is definitely on. The red paper out/jam light is definitely off. Engineer on call must come out immediately otherwise journo'll be reduced to listening to Radio 2 for the bulletins.
Crawl out of bed, dress, into car, drive into central Cardiff, park, wander up to the newsroom, push the "online" button. Reams and reams of fanfold tractor-fed paper start spewing out.
M.
Fastest one I ever had was when working in support at my first job for a local UK council, fresh out of uni and still quite green.
Call came through that a PC in the front office wasn't working and just had a black screen. I did the usual phone troubleshooting of "is it turned on?" "Oh yes, there's a green light on the front". "OK, turn it off, wait a few seconds and turn it back on again". "No, still nothing, the screen is blank".
So as it was only one flight of stairs, I popped down. Walked over to the PC and hit the power button, only to see it spring into life. I learned a simple lesson that day - don't assume the users know the difference between the PC and the monitor (yes, they thought the monitor was the PC and were just turning the screen off and on again). I think the visit to the office took all of 10 seconds - 30 if you include me explaining that the little Dell box under the monitor was in fact the computer...
Edit: And a second one a number of years later for a PC where the mouse wasn't working. User had actually unplugged the mouse and plugged it back in, still no joy. I walked over, picked up the mouse and peeled the gaffer tape off the sensor. Laughter from some guys in the office as their prank had worked and one rather red-faced and irritated user!
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The all in one iMac design has a lot to answer for. My school in the 90s only had Macs (with the honourable exception of an ancient BBC microcomputer in the library) and upgraded them all to the first all-in-one CRT monitor + integrated computer iMacs (brightly coloured plastic like a Dyson vacuum, with an inexplicable large handle on the top, as if people were regularly moving them around). I think 90% of students at that school left believing that a monitor and a computer are the same thing.
Even the hard, serious SF of the period missed LCD panels as the future, even though they existed in some form already, Star Trek was one of the few that almost got it, but they limited it to touch panels/controls and the main view screen[*]. "Normal" video comms was usually CRTs too, albeit in "space age" housings.
* And who know what type of display Mr Spock was looking at when he peered into the "binocular-like" device, cunningly disguised whatever future tech he was using :-)
I recall the TV show "Battlestar Galactica" used Tektronix storage-display-tube graphics terminals.
I'm still waiting for the wall-sized 3D-image projection panels described in Fahrenheit 451, though I'm not willing to pay 1/3rd of my yearly income for one of them!
...and anything else intended for a more heavy duty, industrial type use. I had a few repurposed "cube-like" screens over the years from various manufactures, not just Microvitec
Surprise! They still exist :-)
Those iMac handles proved handy for the scrote that walked into the university lab round the corner from ours and walked off with a computer and somebody's PhD thesis.
What's a "backup"?
Footnote: that's when we finally activated the security doors that the NHS had fitted, but the university refused to use...
> The all in one iMac...
Actually it was brightly coloured translucent plastic.
Do you remember all the USB hubs, mice, keyboards, modems, and other peripherals that went to that same translucent plastic style for about 10 months, until they realized how shit their circuit boards looked and that it wasn't such a good idea after all?
Still, it was kind of cool being able to see the circuit board and other innards, at least for me.
> Do you remember all the USB hubs, mice, keyboards, modems, and other peripherals that went to that same translucent plastic style for about 10 months, until they realized how shit their circuit boards looked and that it wasn't such a good idea after all?
Oh yes.
Advert link: https://youtu.be/awZv4Ok4rlc
"the little Dell box under the monitor was in fact the computer..."
Even today, some users[*] like to show off their technical knowledge by calling that box "the hard drive". Calling it a PC or computer can often be the downfall of the clever phone techy :-)
It's not always their fault. No one ever told them, they never got any formal training, they just learned by osmosis. They are often the most "dangerous" users, especially when it comes to trying their own "fixes" before calling for help.
Not the quickest fix, but the quickest removal of the obstacle to doing the fix.
In the 90's I part-timed IT support with civil engineering design. My main IT role was looking after a MicroVAX and a Novell network. It was very stable and normally only needed sorting out the backups on Friday night and an hour over the weekends to change the tapes. But every so often it needed a bit more TLC and I was the only one with experience with VAX and VMS.
I was out of the main office in a subsidiary part of the company when the call came through that the MicroVAX was down and I needed to get in. So I went to the boss of the subsidiary and said I needed to shoot off to get the MicroVAX rebooted. He said no. I said no one can do any work at the main office. He said (and I quote) "Go back to your desk and earn money!"
So I went back to my desk, rang the main office and told them I couldn't come and why. Seconds after putting the phone down, my bosses phone rang and I could almost hear the incoming side of the conversation it was that loud! He summoned a flunky to tell me I could go because for some reason he didn't want to tell me himself. Three months later (his notice period) he was gone.
Fix took about 15 mins, plus an hour travel time, and I was back at my desk earning money.
They got rid of the VAX in '99 when the IT team brought in from the subsidiary side who were all MicroSoft guys lied about the VAX not being Y2K compliant to management.
Had an almost identical problem and solution with my wife a few months ago. By the time I I had finished apply the "fix" to her problem, her face had gone bright red, a situation made worse because I did not say anything about trivial problems, and managed to not say it very loudly. The normal domestic harmony was badly strained that week.
I think sometimes having someone stood looking over their shoulder helps users take it slow and (eg) correctly type their password in, but there's other problems that would seemingly magically disappear when I was in the room. I even had one user who would call me over to stand next to their desk purely because their computer would always work correctly then.
I recall many years ago having a user complain that the system wasn't letting her log in many times - this was back on a Xenix or OpenServer system with serial terminals. It took a few repeats to get into the user that when they hit a wrong key, pressing the left arrow (cursor) key actually meant they were adding to the error, as in "passe←word". It looked OK on the screen so they assumed it must be right.
To be fair, the software they used all day was fine doing that within text entry fields, so they were used to using the left arrow key instead of backspace.
"Boxen feel my soothing aura no matter where they are, like Jesus and the Centurion."
I've been know to suggest to users that instead of actually phoning support that they just pretend to phone support while within "earshot" of the offending bit of kit, then go go back and try it again. Apparently it works sometimes. Either because the offending kit is now trembling in fear and behaving itself or because the user has had a chance to think about something else for a few minutes and is now in a better state of mind and this time hit the right keys in the right order :-)
"I opened the drawer, took out the CD and flipped it over," Russel told On Call. "Job done! They had put the disc in the drive upside-down."
Likely, this user was of what I call the "top league". It's a very rare, jolly annoying breed, which have a learning curve over 2 000+ occurrences of the *very same* fucking incident to even thinks to try the fix from the last 2 000 times.
I have one of those in the office, and it has become knee-jerk reaction for me to answer "have you tried X" and it always works. I'm often below 10 seconds ...
But those users are a bit of a cheat to records :)
Back in the early days of writeable CDs, I had a box of a brand that were unlabelled, with nothing to indicate which side was which (and no, they weren't double sided, I don't even know if any CDs were.)
At first, the quickest way to find out which way up the disk should be was to just try it and see if it worked. Later we worked out that there was some tiny printed wiring around the centre home that have you a clue.
"The server's down!" (yes, singular).
I was working consultancy for individual schools and worked 3-6 hours for a different one, often a few a day.
This was an emergency call while I was at a different customer's site. They were increasingly desperate, which is a good time to talk terms. I agreed I'd come and fix whatever the problem was - however long it took - if they paid emergency rates so that I could justify tearing myself away from the other customer I was already with that day. But also that's all I would be doing - fixing that problem.
Asked the customer I was with and they were happy for me to "swap days" (because it would similarly benefit them if anything were to happen, and it was a rare occurrence).
CYCLED over to the other side of town through freezing ice and snow.
Got there and went to where the server was (it was sited in the school office, sitting in a corner, with its screen turned off - this was "normal" for Borough installs that I had inherited at the time).
Turned the monitor on for the server (it was always switched off to "stop people playing with it" - high security!).
"Press Enter to continue boot...." white DOS text on a black screen. Nothing else there.
I pressed Enter. The machine booted. Everything started working.
Apparently it was a BIOS option that the Borough put on their servers - most ridiculous!
So technically the fix was within a few seconds or so of arriving.
But, diligent as I was, I diagnosed further.
I noticed a disconnected fan heater hidden under the office desk just a few metres away, clearly trying to obscure itself under some cardboard. It was hot to the touch, but not plugged in. I put my Poirot detective skills to the test. There was nowhere else to plug it in except near the server.
I gathered the suspects and had my moment:
The office secretary was cold (it was snowing outside). She wanted to plug in a heater. There were no sockets available. So she plugged it into the extension lead (I know, I know, don't go there, it wasn't my setup!) that the server was plugged into. It popped the breaker. The server went off. Rather than admit to this, she unplugged the heater, hid it, and flipped the breaker back on (the breakers popping happened a lot in that school, especially in winter). The power came back on, the server started to boot, but the BIOS option made it wait forever until someone came along and pressed Enter.
For several seconds of fixing, and 5 minutes detective work, I was paid a full day's wage at emergency rates, and was home by 9am.
You remind me of a time a customer called our hell desk, ranting about how rubbish the UPS we'd supplied was - forgetting that it had been working just fine for a year or three. It's beeping madly, it must be faulty this [expletives roughly translating to rubbish] you've sold us. The techie kept his cool, logged into their server and checked the UPS status - it was on bypass due to overload.
Have you plugged anything in lately ? Pause while the customer went and checked. By the time they were back on the phone, the UPS was showing as normal again.
Indeed, someone had been a bit cold (to be fair, the server room was in the corner of an "officially unused for rating purposes" upstairs space and there wasn't any sockets near where they were working, other than the ones in the server room clearly labelled "UPS maintained, IT equipment only".
Funny enough, the people who rant that it's clearly all your fault, the equipment is rubbish, and so on ... rarely apologise for their attitude when they realise it's their fault.
Something similar happened at home recently. I took a panic phonecall while at work that the "the computer cupboard has gone off" and an important document couldn't be printed.
Ok, is the UPS beeping?
No.
Aah, so the internet must be off as well?
No, that's fine.
Huh? If the power is off, either the UPS is beeping while holding everything up or it's run out and everything's off.
I'll take pictures.
Pictures confirmed breaker was on and server, modem and switch were absolutely fine.
However, realised that one of the two UPSes was indeed off. Second UPS powers a special computer circuit in the study. Realisation dawns, the study power is off.
Turns out someone had plugged the vacuum cleaner into a spare UPS outlet because there was a table placed in front of the normal (house) socket on the wall by the door. The cleaner is loud enough that they hadn't heard the poor UPS screaming on overload and it had eventually tripped out.
Managed to switch the UPS back on, but by the time I got home that evening it had completely died.
Partly my fault because I had intended to fit non-standard sockets to that circuit, but couldn't afford it at the time and have not got around to swapping them later.
M.
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I'm sure it's been said many times before but in South Africa we make it harder for people to abuse sockets.
Our standard plug socket is three pins in a triangle, not unlike the British plugs but with round pins (very old British 15-amp standard).
Plugs for protected circuits have a red casing, and the top of the earth pin cut away to give a flat horizontal surface on top. Red sockets have the earth socket shaped to match, so white plugs simply don't fit.
Yes, plenty of options on that front around here - I could have fitted 5A round pin sockets, sockets with T-shaped earth pins or earths rotated 90 degrees or - my personal favourite and probably what I will use when I get around to saving up - Electrak turret twisty things (RS link - they don't have anywhere near the full range). The only plug / socket combo I would argue is possibly better than good ol' BS1363.
M.
I was dropping off a small sandblaster for a friend, and had arrived just in time to see him about to start his lawn mower.
"I just replaced the blade, did a plug, oil and filter change, how many pulls?" he yelled across the driveway.
I wandered over, assessed the situation, and said "all of them ... it wont start. In fact, it'll kick back at you."
"Bullshit" was the reply.
He jerked on the cord, and the mower pulled it back out of his hand, wrapped it around the center portion of the handle bar[0] and smacked him in the chest.
"The key between the crank and the flywheel needs replacing" I told him.
Again, the reply was "bullshit" ... I said "whatever" and went about my business. Life's too short to argue with people who won't listen.
A week later, as he returned the sand blaster, he asked me how I knew about the busted key. Seems he fiddly-farted around with the poor thing for three-four days before finally giving in and breaking out the puller to remove the flywheel. I simply said "I'm clairvoyant, remember?". To this day he doesn't know that I saw the bent mower blade that had obviously hit a large rock while the machine was running in the trash can as I walked across the driveway ...
[0] Sears Craftsman mower with a "collapse to store" handle.
I had an urgent call - a big meeting was about to start - 20 people sat around the room and the projector wasn't working. They said they'd tried everything.
I wasn't even tech support, just a friendly software guy the meeting organiser knew.
Walked over, took a quick look, removed the lens cover, walked out. Kudos +1
Small scale team meeting (just 3 or 4 of us all told) in team managers office, clustered round her pole mounted monitor.
"Have a look at this" she says and punched a key on her laptop. An impressive amount of nothing appeared on the screen.
I am sat to one side and could see the edge of her monitor.
And the power rocker switch on the back.
Which was off.
Took longer than 8 seconds.
My computer keeps freezing. Me tries it, no issues. He tries it, it freezes.
Here, try this one. Same thing, it freezes. I try it, it works.
Note: No rebooting involved, it just freezes when he uses it.
Umm, that copper bracelet you're wearing. It's not one of those magnetic[*] rheumatism cures, is it? Why yes, it is, how did you know? Try taking it off. Fixed.[**}
* Yes, in my head I "said" Stupid magnetic-woo-magic things.
** Yes, of course it was the magnet triggering the laptop lid sensor.
"If it was triggering the sensor, it was copper-plated steel."
It may well have been, but the woo in these things is the magnets. They definitely have magnets, Usually "scientifically" placed to touch your skin at special "pressure points" on the wrist to "stimulate acupuncture points" or "control energy flow" or "connect to lay lines" or other such woo.
Call came in from a user unable to log in on his Win98 laptop. A popup from some driver was covering the logon box.
Rang the user explaining that the fix would only take him a couple of seconds, only to be told "It's your job to come down here and fix it."
So first task was to visit the break room and brew a hot beverage.
Second task was to sit around drinking said beverage while conversing about news and gossip.
Third task was to head outside - oh good, the rain has stopped and the sun is out - and walk the half mile to the building where the user's office was.
Knock on user's office door. User decides that he will take his two visitors to the office next door, As they enter that office, I am given permission to approach his laptop.
Alt-Tab, Esc
I knocked on the door of the user's fresh location and put my head around it before it had even closed.
"I told you it was a very quick job" I announced, smiling.
Had this colleague who had keyboard trouble which he had struggled with for the longes time. He would be busy typing and then suddenly a little textbox would pop up. It looked to me suspiciously what I would imagine a Windows IME to look like, even though we're not in IME country over here. Told him to uninstall the weird Chinese language packs that he had installed for reasons never adequately explained (to paraphrase D. Adams). Problem solved. (The victim was not stupid).
Not a support call but I was once asked to write an extra feature for a piece of config-file driven software I'd written. It was a custom job for one team and, although they'd never asked for a particular feature, I thought it would be useful and took just a few minutes of my time to include.
Several months later the team leader was asked for the feature (they'd not read, or forgotten about, the instructions I'd provided).
I replied to the effect of: "see instructions, section 5, request met before you'd even thought of it, how's that for service?"
She complained to my manager that I hadn't acted quickly enough.
CD upsidedown! Might have only taken me 10s to realise the backup to floppy failed because the PC was upsidedown but as it was it was done over the phone. Turned out they'd had an office move and the desktop computer had been replaced the wrong way round.
You'd have thought the operator might have noted the model number was also upsidedown after 2 years of use.
When I worked in the Bradford area I was summoned to Yorkshire Bank, Otley to fix a fault. I arrived at the bank just as the machine operator was putting the phone down after making the service call.
I revelled in the "Gosh, that was quick" praise until I realised I had gone to Yorkshire Bank, Otley Road, Bradford by mistake, just as they too put a service call in.
Hate to quibble but Argus is a member of the Royal Fleet Auxiliary (RFA) not the Royal Navy, making it RFA Argus not HMS Argus
Your story is unlikely to be related to the last HMS Argus which was a WW2 aircraft carrier, long since decommissioned before Argos became a thing.
I just had my A/C fail for 2 days (fortunately Florida has cooled off enough where it's merely miserable but not life-destroying)
I have this awful Honeywell internet-connected thermostat, which is a piece of shit. It's dead. LCD backlight is off. No response to touch. Nothing
Guy came in, unplugged the float sensor on the drain, and it came to life. He snaked the drain and all is well again.
NOW WHY THE FUCK IS THAT THE RESPONSE MODE in the thermostat? It's got a 5" LCD, why the hell could it not put up an error message instead of rolling over and playing dead?
Because this is still 1860s era technology in spite of being a brand new 19 SEER heatpump. The thermostat has no connection to the float sensor. The float sensor operates by cutting power to the thermostat and thus shutting off the A/C so nothing overflows.
Yay. Advanced technology. Whoo.
I just bought (another) one of those. Nice to know. Connection instructions are a bit...brief, but I have two of them (in different houses) working well, and when one goes off for a winter weekend, it's reassuring to be able to check on the house to see that the heating hasn't failed.
Before now, I have walked into the director's office, in response to a desperate phone call, computer won't boot, been at it an hour now; only to bend down towards the screen and *boing* system boots suddenly as if my being within 2 feet is the cure.
The other one was a non-booting BBC micro - took the cover off, touched the CPU saying well, this is the CPU... felt a tiny, tiny spark under my finger. Looked for the source of whatever electrical thingy was going on and noticed the system was set up about 500mm from a ham radio set, with the aerial feeder running suspiciously underneath where the BBC's case had been before I'd lifted it up. I suggested replacing the feeder cable, as the outer looked somewhat scuffed and one could see the braiding wasn't perfect, and keeping the two things on opposite sides of the room from now on.
You've just reminded me of an old one.
waaay back, we had a client with an old Apple ][ setup running something in their workshop (mostly spot welders). it was corrupting floppy disks - so it got brought to use and we couldn't find anything wrong, ran diagnostics for ages, all perfect. Took it back, it corrupted disks within minutes.
Some will have guessed right away. But what do old CRT monitors and floppy disks have in common ? Yes, they both involve magnetics. If you look at old marketing stuff, you'll see an Apple ][, with a couple of floppy drives sat on top (two side by side are conveniently about the same width as the computer), and the monitor sat on top of them. What most people didn't know, is that the Apple monitor had a plate in the bottom of the case to control the amount of magnetic field - so it didn't corrupt floppy disks in drives it's sat on. The customer wasn't using an Apple monitor, and we'd not had them stacked that way when we were testing. Actually, for some time we were in that "most people" group who didn't know that.
Back in around 1990, I was a student.
One weekend, one of the terminal rooms was fitted with a bunch of huge vaxstations. Up until then, most uni computer access was via vt220 and similar terminals.
As I was walking past one, the girl using it said "it's just switched off! all my work!".
Realising it was the screensaver I said to her something like "It just needs to know who's boss". I then bent over towards the screen and said sternly something like "I've had enough of your bull. Start working NOW!", and then thumped the table, near the mouse. The mouse moved, the screen woke up.
I then casually walked away.
I spent the rest of the time I was in the room hoping to hear her threaten the computer with the same line, but alas, it never happened. Still, I like to think that she's been dealing with screensavers the same way ever since!
Or laptops with Noddy functions that take precedence over the Fn of the key in those positions. Usually you can select an Fn-lock to make the traditional function the default instead of whatever Noddy crap has been assigned to it.
Not all of them though, may personal laptop in particular. Don't know how many times I've put it to sleep trying to rename a file by stabbing F2. In ordinary circumstances that little niggle would have been enough to send it back, but I got one hell of a good deal on it and apart from that retardedness it's actually a nice enough machine.
"Fn" is the key typically activates the *alternate* function of function keys, so what you wrote is confusing as heck. Saying "Fn" if you mean function key is typically incorrect, although I do remember one crazy Logitech keyboard from the 90s where the "alternate" was the primary, and you actually had to press Fn to get the normal function keys.
And now that's the more common thing on laptops. At some point, they all decided not to have separate volume keys, but since those were commonly used, they decided to make the default function of the function keys the additional one rather than the system one. The main difference between models is how difficult it is to get back to normal. On some machines, it's just a key command (FN+ESC or FN+Shift are common). Other times, it's a BIOS setting. Other times, there is some hidden application which sends a command to the keyboard firmware. Sometimes, there's nothing at all.
A now much happier redditor told of many quick fixes in his job. Unfortunately, the way he got to do those fixes was to be uprooted from his current assignment, frog-marched through the corridors, and thrown into the room where the fault occurred, whereupon he usually diagnosed the typical not-plugged-in, not-turned-on, and lens-cap-still-on faults that bedevilled the cut-rate educators working the establishment.
Since the uprooting was usually done by someone in an official uniform that tended to induce obedience, he had little choice in the matter. Also his real work was rarely acknowledged despite keeping a woefully poor setup working. He has now moved on to better things and the institution that treated him so cruelly is hopefully flailing.
is my quickest, not counting walking up to the desk.
Just walked in, got grabbed "Oh great you're in, the screen on my desk isn't working and I've rebooted the laptop".
Looked at laptop, looked at screen. Laptop was black screen with bit of a glow, that gave it away.
"Yeah, you need to switch the monitor on"
Done.
They felt ashamed.
> seconds from seeing to fixing
I've found The Problem even before I got in the building. Call "Server crashed!!". Walk over to the main building, but as I got near there was a utility truck by the parking lot and a whiff of burnt meat. Probably possum in the 6kV step-down transformer for the building. A very unhappy-looking campus electrician was getting organized, and I could see he was in no hurry, so I needn't be. I held my nose, came in, told the staff to call me again when the lights came back on.
ETA: this was a while back, only Lois and the server had UPSes. Also I had just begun the changeover from thinnet coax backbone to TP hubs, and had deferred UPS on the hubs because first I overlooked the need for power and second I knew we had no funding until a few crises happened.
For years I have supplied tech support for my family. My brilliant and tech-savvy wife teaches at university. Calls me as class is about to start. "Help! Laptop dead, totally, I mean dead-dead, Jim." I ask about symptoms, what she's tried, usual diagnostic questions. Thinking cap on. Cap off. "Turn the thing over, remove battery (older Dell with extra cap slide-in), replace battery." "Wow, my hero. It's working now." "Just part of the service, ma'am."
Process of elimination: only thing she hadn't already considered. The battery must have been twisted/jarred loose in her overstuffed backpack.
Had something similar happen to me. On a trip, laptop wouldn't boot. I wound up stopping at a hardware store to get a #0 Phillips, opened up the drive bay (thus the need for the #0), reseated the drive and everything was copacetic. Apparently, the drive had some somehow worked its way loose.
The days of the turbo button were good days for a quick fix.
My Computer is running slow I need you here now and I mean now. Walk through the door press the Turbo button. How is now? Ah it's working perfectly. Time to fix the distance between the door and the computer,
My WIFI no longer works I need a new laptop. Quick look round for the laptop for the hidden switch flick it onto the on position it bingo.
The modern day version of the Turbo button is the webcam shutter. My webcam no longer works. I've tried everything" Flick the shutter there you go. That was from someone who was high up in IT department.
So late '80s. We had written some user level test software using the COM port to talk to the devices being tested.
A customer called and had an issue -- it would write data out to the COM port, but wasn't reading the incoming data for feedback. So I pack up my briefcase with every small thing I can think of (breakout box, toolkit, cables, you name it...), and hop on a plane. When I get to the customer's site, I talk with him and he shows me what he's doing.
Remember, this is the '80s, so it was a desktop computer with two COM ports. I ask him how he's using it, and he says, "COM 1 for writing, COM 2 for reading". I say, OK switch them. Now neither works.
A light bulb goes off in my head. I open up the computer and look at the DIP switch bank -- remember, this is the '80s, so that's how things were configured. Sure enough, both ports were configured as COM1. I flipped the dip switch to set up the second port as COM2, and guess what? Everything worked.
I think it took me 15 minutes total, but that's because I had to talk with the guy first. Meanwhile, now I have all day to mess around until I have to get to the airport, as we had allocated all day if necessary, and I was done by 9:30AM.
Many moons ago my boss was writing some code to send data to/from a VAX system.
The writer at the VAX end sent a message late one afternoon saying that the transfer protocol would indicate it was finished by sending Done.
I looked at this and was sceptical. Didn't know that much about VAX systems, but did know that they tended to use all uppercase. I said that I reckoned what would actually arrive was DONE. So my boss coded for either, and would log which actually arrived.
The following morning hoots of laughter from across the room. The log said it had seen DONE (and everything worked).
Then there was the time I was on the PEBKAC end of it, being a non-IT engineer at the time. We had separate DOS boxes with monster CRT monitors on top but still also used conventional filing methods a.k.a. Lever Arch Files. I was sat at my desk and lifted a lever arch file across from one side of the desk to the other and managed to clout the monitor with a corner of the (very heavy) file. The screen instantly went blank. With full adrenaline on board I managed to panic only a little, being convinced I had done some serious damage, before calling IT support. Chappie came up to my desk, took one look, thumbed the brightness control (which was under the monitor's front edge), and voila, all sorted. Doh.
Probably faster than 8.5 seconds.
Windows 7 and 8 suddenly developed internet connection issues when the router was changed from telekom standard hardware to fritzbox.
Only in IPv4 mode, though, and ipconfig/flushdns could resolve the issue sometimes.
Pulling the ethernet connector out, waiting a few seconds and pushing it back in or going to network settings, disabling ipv4, then reenabling again would also work.
Turns out win 7/8 really likes to preserve its first router setting on 192.168.2.1 instead of the fritzboxens 192.178.2.1 address and would revert whenever it had one of its many mysterious user annoyance feature activations. Other symptoms included DNS on *.168.*.* while DHCP correctly on *.178.*.* and every imaginable mess up of the 168 and 178 bits until it finally settled temporarily on all three options 178.
Sometimes its the hardware settings, sometimes the registry or other software issues, sometimes DHCP takes too long for wins liking,sometimes all of the above.
Really easy to "quick fix" but can be a PITA to find out which issues little win actually has.
Was wondering this too, as I'm certain my FritBox at home is on 168, and has been since the beginning (over 6 years ago) without being changed/set there at any point.
Indeed the whole thing has been bulletproof, except for early on occasionally dropping wifi and that was I think as it was in a cupboard and overheating. Angling the thing upward (and later putting it somewhere more ventilated) and it's been totally reliable ever since.
Phone call from my boss:
Help, my printer isn't working and I need to get this report out by lunch time. (Days before emailing PDFs). Our centralised IT support (outsourced to IBM at the time) were quoting next working day (Monday) to come and look at the problem. The rest of out team are either not IT literate or else also out of the office.
My boss shared the office with another manager and they had a common printer with a two way switch box to allow either user to use the printer (remember them?) We go through the usual, is the printer turned on, does it have enough paper, is it jammed, is the cable plugged in etc.
I am out on another site at the time about 10 miles away so I drop everything, jump in the car and head back to HQ.
I walk in and immediately realise the the switch is set to the other user (who is also not in that day). I turn the switch and the printer starts churning out multiple copies of the report. To make it even funnier, the switch is clearly labelled with the user's names on each position.
I quickly open the printer queue and kill the next 20 copies of the document.
My boss at the time having a First Class honours degree in engineering from Cambridge (UK, not Mass.). I am allowed to go hone early as it's a Friday on the proviso that I keep my mouth shut..
my version of the CD story --
Customer called, "DISK READ ERROR"
me: "is there a floppy in the drive by any chance?"
Customer: <pause> "No. No floppy in the drive."
me: "ok. I'll have to come out and take a look, sounds like you have a bad hard disk."
me...hop in car, drive down-town, find a parking place. Walk to building where customer was. Walk into office, walk up to computer, push the button on the 3.5" floppy, out it pops. Hit CTRL-ALT-DEL, machine boots right up.
Customer: "Oh. THAT floppy. I thought you meant this one [points at 5.25" drive, which...to be fair, did not have a disk in it]".
Primary contact at customer (not the person who called me): "oops". IIRC, she was somewhat annoyed at the person who called me, so she figured she'd just let the other person deal with the problem.
I did point out that between driving, parking, and walking, I was out about $10 and two hours, so I was going to have to bill 'em an hour, "is there anything else you need done?" So I ended up doing general handyman stuff for the next 45 minutes or so (I believe I ended up fixing a desk fan, few other things around the office) before I left. IIRC, I left the invoice somewhat vague about the exact nature of the problem. If they asked, I'd have told, but we had a very good relationship, so no problem.
so...diagnosis: from "seeing the machine" to "fixed" -- I'd say it was less than 8.5seconds. But a lot longer than that to get to make that diagnosis.
I did have a walk-in-and-obvious power problems in building call. Fast to diagnose, but took shockingly long to convince the people there that the computers were using power and thus, if the power was bad, the computers weren't going to be working. Finally, "I guess we probably should cancel the copier repairperson, too, huh?" yep...
That last guy got off really lightly; I fixed a similarly stupid issue that was costing the company around £1,000,000 a week (1990s numbers), and got the tech management team so angry, they concocted a story to get me fired.
Within an hour of telling the site manager how easily it would be to fix, and detailing exactly how to fix it with minimal down-time, I get called into a room full of senior engineering management and given a severe reaming.
Because it was their incompetence, back when they were the techs, that caused the mess.
I got pulled from the site and the job given to someone on the favoured "B" team, and I was assigned to light bulb replacement duties for a month, before the made up incident they used to fire me.
I got my revenge though, and a few years later, they were ALL made redundant; the company's main site is now a housing estate, and the head office, a luxury apartment complex.
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