User unboxed a PC so badly it 'broke' and only a nail file could fix it Welcome to a fresh instalment of On-Call, The Register’s reader-contributed column in which you share your tales of tech support triumph, and we try to retell them in an amusing fashion. This week, meet a reader we'll Regomize as "Harriet," who shared a tale from the mid-1990s when she worked as a software trainer and …
I have encountered bioses which balked during boot-up if keys were held down; sometimes with the somewhat amusing message:
++ No keyboard detected
++ Press any key to continue
I have at times had to remove a book that had slid onto the corner of a keyboard on a cluttered desk to "repair" a computer.
May have mentioned this before.. but here goes...
Towars the end of his life, like many, my dear father was in a home linked to the outside world by his computer.
I got a phone call one day claiming "the bloody computer is bloody broken and won't start".
In the background I could hear the telltale beeps of a stuck key. Knowing his proclivity for a, shall we say, unstructured desk filing system I immediately supected someting impinging on the keyboard.
Rather than take a 100 mile round trip to fix it, I asked him if there was anything on the keyboard... first came a denial and I asked again mentioning I could hear the poor machine complaining. "Oh....." said he, followed by silence then "somone has knocked a pile of stuff that has slipped on to the button labelled esc". Pile was removed and amazingly the PC then booted as expected. He couldn't hear the beeps because they were too high pitched.
Icon because although it wasn't coffee/keyboard incident (that time) it was the esc key.
I've had similar, but with a client on the phone.
"Hello, my computer won't start"
"Move that folder off the keyboard and try again"
"What. Oh... Yes, that's got it. How did you know?"
"I recognised the beeps"
It being a folder was something of a lucky guess, just from familiarity with their desk layout.
Phone rings...
User: My computer won't stop beeping!
Me: Remove the file that's resting on the keyboard!
User: Wow - how did you know?
Me: Magic!
It doesn't hurt to keep the users in ignorance sometimes and increase the aura of IT invincibility.
My Dad, who has the TV so loud it hurts. Still, he is better off than my Mum who finds it very hard to hold a conversation these days (even with hearing aids).
Dad also took ages to accept he needed glasses - he would hold the newspaper at arm's length and complain the print was too small...
I had to get glasses recently not for close to that is fine but for distance as I was realising that road signs were getting harder to read.
The shock is when you first put them on and suddenly realise how bad your eyes had got. The only problem is as they are distance glasses I can no longer read the computer screen with them on, so in the office I do without unless we are using a big meeting room screen.
I was on a train and looked up at the dot matrix display at the end of the carriage... one half was clear, the other was blurred and unreadable.
It then occurred to me that it was a kind of parallax effect caused by a pole between me and the display... each eye was seeing only half of the display and my left eye had seriously changed, and until that point I hadn't noticed
I had something similar: I am now in my mid-60s. Shortly after COVID I walked into an opticians with the comment that although my left eye was spot-on, my rith eye was seriously off-whack. It turned out that I had an enormous cataract in my right eye. Fixed, after the usual NHS wait.
When glasses became a need, I went straight in with varifocals. Some people find them disconcerting at first, because objects seem to "move" as you move your head, but I found them fine. Bifocals work out a bit cheaper, but my left and right eyes need different prescriptions anyway. When driving I can read the road signs and the odometer equally easily.
The only problem with them is when attempting close work above head height - I can't tilt my head back far enough to see through the lower part of the lenses.
It's remarkable how many road users seem to have no awareness of what is going on around them, and, in many cases, right in front of them. Forcing car drivers to learn to use the road on a motorcycle first would lead to a lot more careful and considerate drivers, and would, I suspect, weed a lot of the worst people from the gene pool as well.
I'd go further and make them use cycles, then limit them to 50cc 2hp motorcycles with a 30mph top speed before allowed to ride anything larger
Then again I'm also in favour of mandatory retesting every 10 years (Several nations have mandatory eye testing at license renewal and that's shown up a surprising percentage of blind drivers in their 40s, let alone older)
I actually quite liked the French system: 14 year olds can ride (without licence or training) a 50cc PTW (Powered 2-wheeler), with licencing required after 16 or 17 for anything larger.
The effect it has is that virtually every French road user has both road/driving experience from an early age (when more impressionable and quicker to learn), and also an appreciation of the dangers inherent in PTWs : ie they're far more "aware" of PTWs and don't tend to ignore them, like the drivers of many other countries do. (Obviously is a generalisation, outliers still occur).
If this is a regular problem, & you don't mind spending to make it go away, seek out an optician that can supply "pilots" glasses. Essentially a normal bifical or varifocal, but with an extra close vision zone at the top of the lens. Designed for pilots to help them focus on the overhead switch panel.
16 when i got my first glasses. recognized people by their voices or context, not their faces. finally looked at trees and saw the individual leaves and looked at the ground and saw separate rocks and stones. prior to that i had to walk up to the blackboard in 5th -8th grade to see what was written there. never did homework as i didn't know there were assignments on the board.
That's typical of sensory deficit. I was born with very poor vision in my right eye; it's not really that I can't see things to the right of me; they **aren't there** till I turn my head slightly. My grandmother was convinced that 'these days everybody mutters', and I'm beginning to think she was right.
Such beeps aren't all identical. Some are higher-pitched than others.
At 60, I've started to lose the high frequencies. I can hear most adult male voices with no trouble at all. I visit my wife at the elementary school where she works, and can barely decipher what the kids are saying. I hear the microwave and other higher-pitched electronic beeps, but if I'm a few rooms away, not very well.
I'm not too badly off yet, but can see where the trend is going.
If I were around at the design phase for such gadgetry, I'd recommend a lower-frequency beep for such gadgets. (Not to mention that even when younger, I found high-pitched shrieks more annoying than lower-pitched noises.)
Yep I remember that also. I stopped being able to hear that in my mid to late 20s. I recently had some issues with wax buildup in one of my ears and had my hearing tested as part of the overall treatment. They said my hearing is pretty good for my age ("mild" hearing loss) but I was only able to hear up to around 11 KHz in their testing so I've lost hearing well beyond the 15-ish KHz flyback transformer in standard US TVs.
Considering I was a club DJ for a few years in college I feel fortunate I wasn't more affected because we had massive speakers and the dance floor where the DJ booth was was surrounded by glass (so that the rest of the club was just loud but not ear splittingly so) and no one gave a second thought to hearing damage back then!
Ah, the 'line whistle'. It was mainly the core and windings of the line output transformer that made that noise. On 625 line sets it was 15.625 KHz; 525 would have been 15.750, and 405 was 10.125. My pal restores old TVs for a hobby. He's in his 60s and can only hear the 405 line whistle faintly, but it drives his wife mad! He says he has learned to avoid certain types of component in the line stages of sets, mixed-dielectric capacitors and inductors with loose cores, as these make it worse.
Whilst in college, I had neighbors in the dorm with a TV that, for some reason, had a rather loud and annoying (to me) flyback-frequency (15.75 KHz on the US side of the pond) whine. They, and most of our fellow students, heard nothing. Fortunately, I wasn't usually close enough to the TV (five or ten meters) to really be bothered by it.
Forty years later, I don't hear it. And it's not just because CRTs have become obsolete.
I have that background whine constantly
Tinnitus is a bitch - and it's higher pitched than I can actually hear these days (capping out at 11kHz).
It used to be that if I dialled up a signal generator and speaker on the whine frequency it would give tinnitus relief for a few hours so I got to know the frequency of these internal whistles - all 5 of them
There are several aspects to deafness - one is acuity (typically inability to hear high frequencies), another is sensitivity (inability to hear low volume sounds), another is cognitive (inability to make sense of what the ear is picking up). The latter is most common amongst younger (than me) people, and probably caused by lack of practice.
As someone who has always had (and still has at 60) excellent hearing, they are all annoying traits in other people! I wish my eyesight were half as good...
fixed a keyboard related 'fail to boot' remotely
May have mentioned this before.. but here goes...
I've definitely mentioned this before , but i just cant let it go .
I could have fixed a "non bootable floppy in drive A related fail to boot" remotely if it hadn't been reported to me as "user cannot get email"
If your father was more stubborn, another approach would be "hmmm, I'll need to look up a fix, but first, can you find the serial number printed on the underside of your keyboard?"
Related: Back in another millenia when I worked at a small custom PC building shop I grew tired of installation CDs disappearing due to being left in the drives of new machines. I added a final item to the final machine test checklist. Before final power down, the tech was instructed to verify the eject button worked on the CD drive. The techs that complained the most also discovered CDs at the highest rates.
If your father was more stubborn, another approach would be "hmmm, I'll need to look up a fix, but first, can you find the serial number printed on the underside of your keyboard?"I was definitely thinking of XKCD'S Keyboards are Disgusting.
On my EPOS replacement work, I added a final line to the build instructions: Ask user to log on and do a test card balance enquiry. That forced them to discover the card reader was in a different position to the old machines, and prevented loads of help calls "I can't find the card reader".
Oh boy do i have some stories about people relocating their own IT equipment.
One of my favourites is a monitor that had a dissected DP connector stuck in the display. Presumably someone had tried to remove it without releasing the retention tabs, and pulled it hard enough to rip apart the connector.
One of my winners so far was diagnosing a monitor that although powered on, claimed it had no input signal. Cables all looked fine until I attempted to unplug the DVI cable from the back of the monitor to find it jammed fast. Out came the Leatherman pliers to yank it free.
Someone had managed to fit the DVI-D connector in 180 degrees out of whack, presumably with a hammer. The pins that hadn't been mashed flat into the back of the connector had been pressed together to the extent they appeared to have merged together to form a new pinout.
Another excellent one was someone shipping a brand new HP Elitebook laptop (about £1500) in a standard FedEx parcel to a overseas based service manager without any protection like foam or bubble wrap. The Elitebook arrived at his home with a curve in it akin to a banana, and was promptly returned to head office.
In my little collection I have two Elitebooks - a nice little 11" 2013 era Elitebook 2170p, and a 14" 2014 era Elitebook 840 G2. Both are very solidly built. Sadly the Elitebook in question was a G6 of around 2019 vintage....suffice it to say that although they were still somewhat solid feeling it certainly wasn't the "brick shithouse" construction of the older ones.
Some numpty at IBM once managed to get the RJ11 modem socket next to the RJ45 network network socket on certain models of laptop. Those using them with dialup (this was a few years ago) were forever managing to plug the RJ11 plug in to the RJ45 socket and spending some time wondering why they couldn't connect and then finding that the landline didn't work so they couldn't phone Tech Support to help sort it out!
My favorite story happened to a client of mine who decided to relocate to other side of the town all by themselves since the company had a van.
This 2-floor building didn't have an elevator, just a stairwell connectoed to a mezzanine - and the big MFP was of course on the second floor. When I arrived at the scene to disconnect comms, I had hard time keeping straight face when the MFP was upside down and in several pieces on the mezzanine.
Same company also had a subtenant - a marketing company owned by the company that was moving out - and who used the same fast fiber internet connection. Once I had ripped out the firewall, switches and such someone from them came to the comms room to ask what's going on. Apparently the mother company hadn't communicated their relocation to the other company!
I wrote this message because I could use the word 'mezzanine'.
Once had a decommissioned Windows server shipped to HQ in a box. Just a box. No packing materials at all. Nothing. All the memory was rattling around inside and even the CPU was out of its socket. Miraculously when every thing was reinstalled properly, it booted right up. Case looked like it had been beaten with a hammer, but it booted.
Fault docket from late 1970s... "Could someone repair my footstool"
The 'footstool' turned out to be a GPO badged modem (so from late 60s/early 70s) that was working but the case had fallen to pieces
(rumours are that you could drop one from 6ft and it would still work)
A now-defunct company for which I once worked hired movers who didn't know computers. Management had decided that the new server room would be the one with a huge transformer in the middle of it, and the movers set one of the file servers on that, thus scrambling the hard drive contents.
A place I worked at seemed to think efficiency came with rearranging the office every 8-12 weeks. We tech support guys were told to not move our PCs and leave it to the "Facility Department guys," as, "They know what they are doing," (suggesting that we - the actual tech people - didn't have a clue).
We all know where this is going, don't we? Should I continue? Sorry, I can't stop myself...
Tech support calls covering certain major contracts went somewhat out of SLA. Client-build, test PCs were down. It was a list. Nothing changed for a couple of moves before someone higher in manglement than the amoebas who barked meaningless orders at us during the day, asked an important question: "Who knows the kit better than those who put it together?"
Took a while before anyone heard us though.
Ah, I miss those days.
Ah, the facilities people. One place I was doing a large scale deployment, the facilities people in the loading dock insisted that once the cage of PCs we were rolling around reached the dock-level doors of the lift, only they were allowed to move it. They promptly rolled it off the edge of the loading dock, to crash maybe 5' to the ground below. I let them sweat for a while before admitting the PCs were going to the site where disks would be removed and securely destroyed, and the rest disposed of.
Had an engineer that went out to a GP site at our place who, despite being decent, had a mind blank and had forgotten what the voltage switch did on the power supply. Decided to play with it and then plug it in and turned it on. It went bang :)
He had to come back to get a new PC.
Long enough ago that we all still worked on desktop PCs and I was in a non-technology role, management decided to reorganise our entire office but declined to allocate any IT staff to support people moving between desks. (In fact the whole thing was chaotic enough that nobody allocated me a new desk at all, I just got told I had to leave the office I had - because it was bigger than my new manager's office in a different town - and I had to find a space myself, that ended up being in HR so I had to shut my door to not overhear confidential conversations....). I digress.... but you can imagine the carnage of people with limited computer knowledge trying to put their PC, monitor, keyboard, mouse etc back together in a working fashion. I at least recognised that I knew nothing, brought in an Ikea bag and managed to fit everything into it without having to unplug any cables bar the power and network. Slightly to my surprise it worked, and has been repeated many times since, including house moves.
@Custard
Data General sold a machine called the MV/2000 DC (department cluster). This had a row of serial ports that were number not from 0, not from one, but something like 18 or 30. I remember a call from a customer who had carefully sketched a picture of the plug layout before moving the machine, but apparently not carefully enough. It was hard to know exactly what to say to her "Well, I drew a picture." I guess that we managed to help her without having to send somebody there.
In the 80s, my dad pulled out our top loader washing machine (it was old. This is in the UK, I didn't realise they were popular in the US) and labelled every wire in the motor, There was about 10 or so from what I remember. Fixed whatever was wrong with it and put it back together. It still worked for several years after till we went "modern".
Reminds me of the time we did a hardware refresh of dell AIOs, we had bought some nice trollies that could move 30 at a time safely for deploying to desk, sadly not so safe as we found around 50 with scratch screen, as the staff that had been invited in to help and work overtime, had ignore our orders and stacked them on top of each of other screen to screen. Dell refused to warranty as it was user damage, even when reminded of size of hardware order and I don't blame them.
I was at customer supporting a mid range system (it would support about 100 end users).
The boot sequence was usually
- press the IPL button on the CPU
- swing you chair round, and press enter on the operator console. The first display to hit enter was the operator console
- it would prompt "enter IPL parameters"
Except one day when I was there.
- press the IPL button on the CPU
- swing you chair round, and press enter on the operator console - nothing happened
we repeated it, and had the same result.
A few minutes a guy from the help desk wandered in saying "Ive got a guy on the phone who says his screen keeps saying "enter IPL parameter"
The guy was sitting at his desk, bored, so sat there with his finger on the enter key.
He was educated to only touch his keyboard when the logon screen came up!
Way back when I managed a couple of VAX systems I used to have problems with upgrades. Despite telling people the systems would be unavailable for several hours*, whenever the system rebooted someone would manage to log in before we could get on the console and disable logins again. I did eventually find a solution to disabling user logins during the restart but it took a while.
*Upgrades for the 11/780 were provided on 8" floppies which had to be fed in turn into the PDP-11 system controller mounted on the inside of the cabinet door! Towards the end of my time there we did start to get updates on 1/4" mag tape.
My first job was managing a VAX 11/750 at a college, DEC would sporadically send updates on half-inch tape. It took a couple of days to back up the system fully and apply the updates, so we did this during the summer holidays when nobody was around. The machine room was the ONLY place in the building with air conditioning (running at a chilly 16 degrees C) so we usually did the job on the very hottest day of the year so we could maximise the time in the blissful coolness.
When I started the operator console was a 300 baud DECwriter IV teletype/printer, we did upgrade that to a VT220 running as a glass teletype with the printer slaved to it. One of the main advantages of keeping the noisy old printer attached was that you could tell if something odd was going on if the printer was making a lot of noise (you could hear it in our office next door). That might be a very rare hardware or software failure, most often it was someone who had forgotten their password who was triggering events logged on the console. Who needs Splunk when you've got a DECwriter?
That still happens. I had one a few weeks ago. Replaced the EPOS equipment, set the new kit building, went round to the front of the counter to do the post-installation tidying up of cables and stuff and screwing the front of the counter back on. After forcing my knees to raise myself off the floor, discovered the user had killed the build and attempted to log on. "I saw you'd finished...." By doing so he killed the build, so I had to strip out the PC, label it DOA, and spend another hour putting another new PC in.
10Base2 networking was such an insane approach. I'm not surprised that "everyone has to be connected to everyone else in a very specific way and if anyone sneezes anywhere in the building the whole thing goes down" did not turn out to be a winning strategy in the long term.
Ah, the innocence of youth.
Back then the only alternative was cable the thickness of a hose pipe with a bend resistance closer to mild steel with a minimum bend radius of, IIRC, 2 metres com=connected with vampire taps, a drop cable and a 15 pin connector. 10Base2 was a vast improvement. Networking with Cat 3 (yes 3) was still in the future.
Ot the weird problems the happen when someone extends the network with 2m of 93 ohm arcnet cable instead of the correct 50 ohm. It seems to be fine until network load reaches a certain point and the reflected packets cause an unrecoverable level of collisions.
I was involved in a "rapid site relocation" because of impending flooding. That meant all the computers, phones and MFC were powered off, unplugged, put in a truck and taken to a higher ground site where there was a network connection. When we got unpacked and I plugged it all in the printer didn't work. The printer was very important because that's how requests for help due to the flood were given to field teams.
IT helpdesk swore black and blue that I shouldn't have moved the printer and I'd broken something. Turns out that over the evening that we moved someone stuffed up the print server and _no_ printers in the organisation worked. I pointed out that if I'd waited for IT to do the move the printer would have been completely submerged in flood water, and I guessed that wasn't good for it. Never got an apology for the threats to "report an unauthorised IT move".
Lucky they didn't know about the "extra network kit" from home that let all the laptops, phones and the printer share the one working network outlet, or how personal laptops and USB sticks were used to transfer PDFs and then print using a USB cable to the MFC.
Remote sales offices for a timeshare sales company in the late 90s. We supplied the offices with modular laptops we got from a company in London called AJP (hard drive, fl;oppy, CD-ROM, processor fan, battery all replaceable modules), and Canon BJ-20 printers.
Got a call from one of our sales offices in Romania saying their laptop wouldn't sit flat on the desk and it wobbled around.. Apparently there was a big circular thing sticking out of the bottom of it.
This didn't match with any of the laptops I knew. I got them to take a photo of the machine and email it to me.
It transpired that the computer had been overheating so they took it into a local computer shop. They didn't know the cooling fan was a modualr element you could get replacements for from AJP, so the computer shop went with what they had. So we now had a laptop with a hole cut into the bottom panel and a low profile desktop CPU cooling fan fitted.
I had been about to renew the warranty on this 2 year old machine at the time but didn't bother after seeing what they had done.
They bought some rubber feet to glue to the bottom of the laptop to lift it off the desk.
We needed to convert a PC to a print controller for a mainframe (long story) and that required connecting the PC to an impact line printer with a block multiplexer cable.
Thick as a man's thumb, with a connector that looked like a decent sized chromatic harmonica crossed with a sandwich box. Not your average circa '99 back-o-the-pc socket compatible plug.
So we ordered a special board for the pc, to be plugged into one of the expansion slots.
Said board arrived and looked like something a talented high-schooler might have made in their parent's garage; thick fiberglass board with very few thick tracks on it and some chips, a humongous socket for the block multiplexer connection and a weird-looking edge connector that had a long bit, a small gap, and a shorter bit.
It would not go in the slot. The non-coppery bit of the edge connector was too long by a quarter inch or so.
Colleague was all gloom, doom and despondency, then went into full 'nothing to do with me' mode when I whipped out m'trusty Swiss Army knife and started to file the very expensive board. No, no respirator, no protection for the 'clean' room environment. I was tired and wanted to go drinking.
Saved the day. Literally, because that installation enabled the print pool, formerly the victims of a 27 hour day schedule, to get a Cool Hand Luke moment after my re-arrangement of the workload (despite their luddite resistance to anything new) got that down to 22 hours by removing unecessary stationery changes and buggered-up for years line-up routines.
And was I richly rewarded and promoted? No. Within four months I was fired off that project so the colleague could take over and get the credit.
Within four months I was fired off that project so the colleague could take over and get the credit.
No BOFH-like response on your part to your 'colleague'?
I'd expect something like you shoving their desk (or disassembled desk parts, if you've no handy freight transfer doorway on the upper floors) out of the building and down onto the car park, covering the pile with kerosine, standing back a goodly distance, striking up a roadway flare, and tossing it onto the pile.
After that, word came down from on high that the IT department had to deal with all relocations of computer equipment
Thats a mixed blessing ,
depends if you want / can get the overtime for office relocations - which happened at huge expense nearly every weekend in big publicly funded place i worked at.
also means a special trip to give someone a mouse because they arnt allowed to plug it in :(
My Yoga 7 convertible is susceptible to that sort of thing. One of the USB ports is for charging. The others aren't. But the faint moulded shiny plastic symbols are barely visible. Luckily the Lenovo badge is on the other side of the case' edge, so I use that to identify the right one.
What is it with USB-A connectors these days, anyway?
"Put the USB symbol on the side that would be face up in a typical installation" is a very nice idea for usability. And I have, for instance, a charging cable that has the USB symbol done in white on black - very convenient.
But >90% of all USB cables seem to be designed on the principle of "make it barely visibile even under close inspection", black on black with as little distinction from the rest of the plug as they can manage. Overtly user hostile design.
One place a {cough} few years back, when I started the boss told me of the following.
They'd built a factory control system with a conventional computer of the times, feeding an RS232 network to a fairly remote PLC, and about a couple of years after it had been running faultlessly, got a complaint it had failed.
An engineer was duly sent out to look at it, and found they'd moved the computer while they were resurfacing the floor and when the job was done moved it back, and plugged the mains in. Switching on they got a message "PLC not found", when our chap turned up he found the network hadn't been plugged it and indeed couldn't be found - literally. There was no cable visible.
After much to-ing and fro-ing it transpired that the elfin safety bod had seen the trailing lead and cut it off where it went behind the paneling. He thought it was a trip hazard! This required quite a bit of destruction and reconstruction as the cable had dropped down behind the paneling, and enough had to be removed to find the cut end, make a plug and socket joint, then re-thread and put it all back together again.
"After much to-ing and fro-ing it transpired that the elfin safety bod had seen the trailing lead and cut it off where it went behind the paneling. "
I hope the elfin safety person was sacked. One of the first and most important lessons in H&S is NEVER touch, mess with or operate anything you don't understand. How was he to know that cable wasn't carrying mains (or higher!) voltage?
Not exactly computer tech but I was on my way back to base for a spare part I needed to fix a computer out in the sticks. I had to make a call of nature so pulled up in a lay-by and when I got back to my car (a Ford Cortina) it wouldn't start. A quick look under the bonnet revealed the contact breaker had stuck closed, and my tools were at the customer's site.
I had a look around the lay-by and found a length of rebar and a half brick which I used as a hammer and drift to open the contacts slightly and I was on my merry way.
Driving an Anglia to Dublin from Belfast, two of us to visit TCD and the a third going to a job interview I heard a distinct click and the engine died. I'm not sure why the first thing I checked was the distributor but I lifted the cap to see a contact. Just the one. The moveable contact had broken off and moved itself into the depths of the distributor where it stayed for good. The interviewee got a lift to Dublin and I trudged to a garage and back or possibly got a lifts (depths of time and all that) to get a replacement set. Eventful trip but useful, years later the specimen we collected from TCD was one of the cover illustrations on my friend's book.
is a number 2 copper/hide mallet, hit it with that its either fixed or so broken we need a new one.
This , of course, applies to the computer user as well, however one 'smart' user decided to run away seeing as the mallet is an 'arms length' tool. but mallet can fly faster than man can run....
On a brighter note, the PFY brought some of her archery gear in for some expert thinking about modification, we made a fake quiver up with some fake arrows and hung that on the office wall, then put some coloured tape around the arrows and a colour code chart on the quiver. blue for normal arrows, green for poison, and red for incendiary......
Things have been rather quiet on the idiot operators front this week.....
I have gone to customer sites to:
- pry a floppy disk out of a disk drive with tweezers so the hard drive would boot properly
- used a ball peen hammer to move a rocker switch that was stuck because someone poured orange juice in it, and it was stuck in "off" position.
Both of those were $300+ support calls, by the way. And I can't count the times I'd driven across the city (and twice flown across the country) to end up basically just plugging something in properly.
My best "can you fix it?" was when an VIP executive who heard I was "good with computers" came into my office in 1985 with half of an 8088 processor, and asked me if I could fix it.
When I say half of a processor, I mean it was literally broken in half.
My first question, naturally, was "what did you do?". This was the mid 1980s, and the IBM XT had been released to replace the PC. The differences between these two IBM machines was that the PC had 1 63W power supply, three slots, and no hard disk. The XT had a 130W power supply, five slots, and a 10MB hard disk.
The VIP had a PC without a hard drive, and he wanted a hard drive. So, he bought a book (I think it was a Peter Norton book) explaining how you could upgrade a PC to an XT. You couldn't just put a hard disk in a PC, there weren't enough slots, there weren't enough bays, and the power supply wouldn't take it. An ingenious vendor came up with something called a HardCard, which was basically a low power hard disk on the card, so it didn't need either a bay or an upgraded power supply.
The VIP didn't go that route, however. He read the book, and the first step was to replace the 63W supply with a 130W one. So, he unmounted the power supply, took it to a local electronics store, and said "give me one twice as powerful as this one". And they did. This is the point where things went wrong.
The company didn't have actual IBM PCs, as it turned out. They used a local clone vendor that was half the price. Their machines weren't awesome, but they worked. And their engineers make some different design decisions. For one thing, they thought that a 63W power supply was stupid, so they put 150W in every machine, PC or XT, by default.
So, when the VIP asked for "twice as powerful", the electronics store said "sure", and gave him a 295W supply. Oh, dear.
The VIP then installed this overpowered power supply in his PC clone. However, it had an extra ground wire he didn't know what to do with. And because the PC originally supported RF modulators, there was an RF line to the motherboard which looked kind of, sort of like the ground wire...
Long story short, he grounded the 295W to the motherboard directly via the RF port.
When he turned the PC on, the results were quite spectacular, as evidenced by the half of the 8088.
When I inspected the damage, I discovered that:
- the CPU had exploded up off the motherboard, with half going into the monitor on top of the PC
- the monitor, fortunately imploded rather than exploded, so the VIP wasn't hurt
- not only did the CPU split in half, the motherboard did, too
- the solder actually melted; some of it actually coagulated into a small ball that was rolling around
- the surge blew out the printer that was connected via the serial port
- you could make out where the PC had been on the desk by the scorched silhouette outline
The "unlikely tool" used to fix the problem was a directive that "nobody upgrades PCs on their own any more without talking to a tech first". It was one of the very few companies I ever worked at where I was able to requisition new hardware without getting grief from senior management.
"An ingenious vendor came up with something called a HardCard, which was basically a low power hard disk on the card, so it didn't need either a bay or an upgraded power supply."
AFAICR it needed two slots because of the size of the disk rather like GPU cards today (nothing new under the sun). Maybe it also included some other interface functionality so it could replace and existing card.
"AFAICR it needed two slots because of the size of the disk rather like GPU cards today (nothing new under the sun). Maybe it also included some other interface functionality so it could replace and existing card."
Mostly, at least in all the ones I saw, the HDD was at the end of the card away from the slot, so only took up the back 1/3rd or 1/2 of the adjacent slot so only really an issues if the other slots were needed for full length cards. And by the time of hard-cards, many expansion cards with 1/2 length or shorter anyway.
Oddest fix I have done was fixing a PC with a wall plug.
I was once on a clients site to fix a server issue. As I was leaving a staff member asked if I could help as her PC wouldn't turn on. I wasn't in a rush so said I could have a quick look. The PC had a front bezel. The power button on the bezel was just a spring loaded piece of plastic with a peg that pressed the actual power on button on the case behind it. For some reason the peg wasn't pushing the button enough to turn the PC on. Looking in my toolbox I found a bag of wall plugs that had come with a router for wall mounting it that hadn't been needed. I chopped the end off one of the plugs and jammed it onto the peg. This extended it far enough to push the button in. Customer was happy.
I've done the same, multiple times. Usually it was when ATX PSUs first started appearing and so many people were used to chunky mains power switches that they pressed on the plunger activated 5v micro switches a bit too hard, breaking the plunger. So gluing any bit of handy plastic inside the button to act as a plunger was a quick fix. Sometimes, button had a small hole for the plunger to sit in that was big enough to screw in a small machine screw to be the plunger, such as the smaller ones used to mount the FDDs with. :-)
User: Whenever I push a number I just get symbols. I googled it and it says I've got Sticky keys turned on.
Me: or you could move whatever sitting on the shift key on the keyboard.
User: No nothing there, I'm not an idiot.
Me: The other keyboard, the one on your laptop.
User: Oh. Yes that's done it, you folks are geniuses.
A few times over the decades I've had to take part in office removals.
The Powers That Be seem to delight in not paying for professionals to come in and sort it all out. Instead they prefer to get it done for free* by sending us some boxes and telling us to do the packing.
* It's not really free, We spent a great chunk of time dong the packing instead of our jobs. And had to stop doing our jobs a lot sooner too because it took us a lot longer to do something the professionals could do in a matter of hours, then unpacking ditto. And yes, stuff gets broken. But it's all hidden costs, since no extra money is allocated, just time. And the broken stuff gets replaced out of existing budgets.
When we last moved (same building, different floor) we got boxes so we could pack stuff we wanted in a particular place. We also got bins for any crud we wanted to part with.
IT got moved by the professionals, same as anything not packed by us.
No better time than a move to organise several years of assorted stuff, with a preference for the circular file (pretty much all the important stuff had been digitised before or in the early phases of the pandemic-induced lock-downs).
Another one that's not exactly IT, but, back around the turn of the century (no, not that one! I'm not that old!), I came into possession of a somewhat obscure variety of car called a Sterling, which, despite being a joint venture partnership sort of thing between Honda and Land Rover, apparently had at least some Ford electrical components in it, judging by the silk-screened logos I found in the course of this repair.
So, it had an electric moonroof that I quite liked, but one day, it just wouldn't budge. I opened up the centre console where the control switches for it were, and examined the PCB therein. I noticed one of the soldered pins seemed to have a bit of a crack around it, and figured that was the likely culprit, but at the time, I had no soldering iron (and even if I had, getting power to it would have been a bit awkward at the time; I don't know if lighter-socket soldering irons were a thing already by then, but I certainly didn't know of them). So, after a bit of a ponder, I got out my little pen knife and my Bic lighter, heated up the blade of the knife a few moments over the flame, touched it to the solder, waved my magic wand and said 'abracadabra!', and presto! the moonroof was back in action. I was feeling rather chuffed with myself for that one.
Fire saved the day. -->
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