User demanded a 'wireless' computer and was outraged when its battery died By Friday morning, Reg readers’ batteries can sometimes be a little low, which is why we always use the day to offer a jolt of amusement in the form of On Call – the reader contributed column in which we celebrate the lows and lows of tech support. This week, meet a reader we’ll call “Cathy” who, early in her career at a PR …
And old quote for Asr:
Don't you mean
"The Internet is down." meaning "I accidentally took my printer off line"
"The Internet is down." meaning "I fiddled with my registry and now my computer won't boot"
"The Internet is down." meaning "I forgot my password" and
"The Internet is down." meaning "My favourite porn site isn't responding"
Anyway the state picks up the tab unless your rich
Actually, the state picks up the tab if you are more or less f'ing destitute. You really do not have to have much by way of assets before the state does not pick up the tab - and don't forget, "assets" includes your home. Even where the state does pick up the tab, it may not meet all the costs, so you end up having to pay out of your state pension - hopefully having a little "pocket money" left over. And yes, I do know people who literally only had pocket money left.
Also, you may have seen announcements about care home fees getting a lifetime cap and thought - great, there'll be something left after my house is sold to leave to the kids. Think again, that cap only applies to the care element - the hotel element is uncapped.
State care (or in my case province) was actually more expensive than putting both my parents in a private residence.
If I'd gone with state, I would have been paying for two separate rooms as my parents need different levels of care.
Private residence meant I could have them both in their own little apartment, and pay for the added services each parent needed.
Private also meant they get to stay together.
Words have meanings after all!
And those meanings change over time and between demographic groups.
Your kids don’t talk like their parents; did you?
(Or to put it another way, your kids ask you for something that you deliberately misunderstand to be obtuse, seems like the words are doing their job just fine. ;) )
Yup, and having to figure out a way to explain to them that the WiFi and the internet are different, that the WiFi connection speed is not their internet speed and that the reason why they can't get a decent teams/zoom/whatever conference call quality is because theyre using talk talk and are connected by a piece of damp string to a dial up modem somewhere.
All without calling them a fucking moron.
Not to mention their utter confusion when you try to explain that the mobile signal from the Telco is not Wifi and Wifi is not the signal from the Telco. And lets not go anywhere NEAR the confusion of 5g, 6g and their relationships to both WiFi and mobile/cell standards.
See icon. I need one just thinking about it!!
Or the reverse - client complains that their internet is not what it's supposed to be. Pay a visit to find they are running a speed test over WiFi and so it maxes out at around 50-something Mbps. Connect laptop to router via cable, low and behold, they get the 70-something Mbps the FTTC connection is supposed to give them.
"70Mbps? Good grief. I have an actual underground laboratory in the rainforest on a pacific island and I get 1.5Gbps for roughly quid /month"
In the US they can't provide high levels of bandwidth unless the government gives those providers some sort of exemption, tax abatement or grant to upgrade the systems they paid so much for in the 1990's. It's very depressing when I see base level service in Japan that's 10x the speed I'm getting at 1/5 the monthly price.
But this is the UK, where most of us are only just getting a copper free connection. Until quite recently (as in, THIS year), in my town the only (wired) options were BT Openretch, and ... err that's it. And FTTC (a.k.a. VDSL2) maxes out at a smidgen under 80Mbps downstream if you are close enough to the green box that you could reach out fo the window and plug a cable directly into it - before getting my FTTC connection last month, I only got about 35Mbps due to line length.
Then suddenly we have a choice of two fibre networks - Openretch and Fibrus.
"Pay a visit to find they are running a speed test over WiFi and so it maxes out at around 50-something Mbps. Connect laptop to router via cable, low and behold, they get the 70-something Mbps the FTTC connection is supposed to give them."
The dumbed down TV shows that people watch equate the "internet" with "WiFi" with the "Web". If you don't have the correct words and concepts for a thing, you have no way to think about it properly. I also get that if anything technology related interests you as a child, you are automatically labelled a nerd and shunned. It promotes an "ignorance is cool" culture. It does up to the point where you don't have the money for a new phone and need somebody to replace a smashed screen on the cheap.
That happens a lot with my mum.
So I built her a gizmo with a few colour LEDs, one each for WiFi, "the Internet" (can ping Google), our email server (port 25 responds), and her solar system's web page.
It's basically an ESP with a few LEDs from an addressable RGB light strip, all built into an IKEA picture frame that has enough space behind the actual picture plane to hide the electronics.
Now when "the WLAN does not work", I can ask "which lights are red and which are green" and save eveyone involved a lot of frustration.
Neat idea, but ...
In my experience, some people (thankfully, SWMBO doesn't read this site), seem incapable of actually doing that. E.g., away on a 3 day business trip, SWMBO calls me to say there's no hot water. I ask her what lights are showing on the boiler - and she completely fails to mention the big (significantly bigger than all the rest) red one right in the middle !
I have actually done a fair bit of WiFi and radio testing using cables to replace antennas in conjunction with attenuators and more sophisticated radio channel emulation.
I was not happy with the client that tried to test WiFi over an actual radio connection where they had so much kit that interfered with other kit that the noise level was sufficient to stop any of it from working
Called "cycles per second then" and before about 1930 the Medium Wave was called Short Wave. I have a 1930 portable wireless and the Short Wave is Medium wave. More than half the insides is the batteries. A 2V lead acid, a tapped 9V pack and a 126V pack. The aerial coils and moving iron loud speaker are in the lid. It was for picnics and probably the servant carried it from the Rolls.
Wireless charging is amusing as it's inductive, so the mat or "charger" must be in contact and that needs a cable and power supply. Less efficient than a direct cable and trickier than a security radio or DECT handset charging dock.. Oh, and cordless kettles!
> Called "cycles per second then" and before about 1930 the Medium Wave was called Short Wave.
Looking at magazine THE RADIO RECORD September, 1923. Stations are cited by WaveLength, not CPS or MC. WBZ (now Boston, then Springfield) was on WaveLength 337. (Seems to be Meters which comes to ~~890,207 CPS; Wikipedia gives other numbers in this time.}) Power started at 100 Watts (and less than half of that to the antenna) but was 15,00 Watts within a few years.
Calling the Broadcast Band "ShortWave" is before my time. Lot of turmoil at short waves in the early 1920s.
Doesn't matter who they are, how much they earn or how important they think they are. Anyone yelling and ranting like that at me down the phone is just getting the call ended straight away.
Damn straight. The one time I was sworn at by a colleague (needlessly, I might add) I walked off the job. Cost to the company? €126,000. The man that swore at me is no longer employed there.
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When I worked in PC repair, we had a laptop sent in with an all caps note attached saying we were not allowed to power the laptop up, or examine the hard disk.
The laptop belonged to a best selling childrens book author and contained their next book.
The service centre manager contacted the owner, explaining there was zero chance we could diagnose the problem without booting the laptop, the manager was treated to a foul mouth rant, followed by a warning that booting the laptop would result in a visit from her lawyers.
We returned the laptop unrepaired, with a print-out from the warranty contract detailing how they had already given us express permission to power up the device in order to diagnose the issue, if they wanted their laptop repaired, please return it with a note confirming they agree to our terms and conditions.
We never heard from her again...
> best selling childrens book author ... foul mouth rant
That's the trouble, all those years of being sweet and syrupy for the children - well, the publishers, parents and interviewers, mostly - with no safety valve, they'll blow at any time.
OTOH had a lovely chat with an author at a Con couple of weeks back, she's great fun, up for making a fool of herself. Read the first one of another of her series this week: yikes! Double yikes! Had to finish it before trying to get to sleep so at least I knew the heroine was still alive, if not entirely safe & well (not a spoiler, it is a series).
That's reminded me of the time the Brother was sent to do an HD swap on a PC in the bowels of a government building. Having finally got past the security checks he was escorted to the machine to find that the HD was missing. He pointed out that he couldn't swap something that wasn't there, left the new HD with the machine and walked away. Presumably someone with the necessary clearances was able to install it and set it up as there was no comeback.
I was sent to a UK military base to install their end of a packet network connection to a Whitehall building. When I asked for the ID information for the remote end, my escort phoned them up only to be told the info was classified and I couldn't have it.
I left the config page open, told the folks where to put the info, how to test the link and left them to it. I presume it worked as I never got a call about it.
On another site, I turned up to upgrade a NetWare server and I was taken to a filing cabinet with a big, solid metal strap padlocked through all the handles. This was duly removed and I was shown the Tosh T3200 laptop 'server' in the bottom drawer. "The most secure server in the building" I was told.
While I was doing the upgrade, a telephone started ringing and ringing quietly in the next drawer up. I mentioned this to the person nearest to me and was told "Oh, we don't answer that one."
> On another site ... filing cabinet with a big, solid metal strap padlocked through all the handles ... a telephone started ringing and ringing quietly in the next drawer up ... "Oh, we don't answer that one."
Congratulations, you have been called to Outpost Delta.
Please make no attempt to interact with either SCP 270 or SCP 145, one of which will be present depedent upon the phase of The Moon.
Familiarise youself with the use of amnestics and be prepared to self-administer before leaving the establishment.
Oh, clearances - endless fun.
A few years back, I was surveying a ship that had facilities that (as far as my hosts knew) I did not have the proper clearance to even know they existed. Part of holding security clearances is that you don't tell anyone about them unless specifically required to.
They showed me arond anyway and just requested that I should not specifically mention that in my report, i.e. write "no evidence of [safety issue] on deck X" rather than "in [secret facility]".
"... we were not allowed to power the laptop up, or examine the hard disk."
I once found myself in a similar situation. I took my laptop to an authorized repairer to have its dead fan replaced. It was full-disk-encrypted, and I wasn't about to provide them with the pass phrase. Not that I'm nearly as Important (or self-important) as that author, but my life was on that machine.
I warned them up front that they wouldn't be able to fully boot it, but said that if it got as far as the pass-phrase prompt (and the fan worked, obviously), I'd consider that a successful test on their part, and the job done to my satisfaction.
Yikes!
As I was writing that post, a couple of possible problems with my approach occurred to me -- but that wasn't one of them.
For the record, the ones I did think of were: (1) they fail to reconnect some internal cable whose device can only be tested once the system is up (camera or the like). (2) An evil maid attack.
You don't even need to be able to read the hard drive filesystem if you really want to test it. Mostly, with SSDs, they work or they don't anyway, but booting an external OS or diags tool is enough to read the SMART or equivalent data which 99.9% of the time tells you all you need to know, and if you REALLY want to prove a point, there are tools to run non-destructive read/write tests at the sector level, irrespective of the drives content or filesystem. But that is mostly only useful with spinning disks.
If the drive isn't the obvious cause of the problem, it can be temporarily replaced with a stock one for testing if that is required (rare). Mostly, I just boot a USB drive with the relevant OEM and/or other diags or even a full Windows or Linux image. Almost every user device I see is bitlockered anyway, so booting the internal HDD and it's OS is a non-starter almost every time. I can still run disk diags on the internal disk. If it passes the basic ones, odds are it's not the cause. Since it's mostly corporate I deal with, they already gave the user a replacement and are going to wipe/rebuild it after the repair, but I still always ask if I can install a plain vanilla Windows if I need to test it more in depth with the original hardware config in case of more esoteric hardware and/or driver related/combo issues where the specific faulty part isn't obvious. Even the built-in diags can be useful, eg Dell, Lenovo, but HP...less so.
"but that wasn't one of them"
It was THE way that many retailers "fixed" client computers - until some of them were taken to small claims for the costs of reinstalling/reactivating everything
It was fairly easy to prove they'd incurred costs, as my company charged $100 to reinstall and reconfigure their internet dialup and software, with an invoice specifically stating why it was outside our normal support terms.
It's still pretty much normal to have a "restore image" which is simply a new (clean) install.
Had to do something similar with a laptop- we had purchased the 'accidental damage' coverage for the unit at the place I was at, and in this instance, the machine had soda dumped into it.
I put a note in with the machine (after pulling the hard drive with had HIPAA-level data on it) that the drive was not supplied for that reason, and outside the scope of the repair. The company was also informed of that when I set up the repair order.
It got repaired and returned, and it sprang to life just fine after I reinstalled the drive on it.
We deal with a number of customers who for legal or security reasons (their own and/or State level) don't allow disks to be taken off site. Mostly, the warranty is still honoured for the site visit + labour, but they pay for the part being replaced if it's something not allowed back off site. These days, that's often all of the parts other than display panel[*], keyboard and the case itself :-) Everything else has some form of usable storage such as an EEPROM where credentials or other sensitive data might be hidden if taken off site. Mostly it's only that extreme with military kit. Most other secure places only worry about the HDDs/SSDs, which they retain for physical destruction.
* display panels probably do have updatable firmware these days, but I've not yet been asked to leave the faulty one on site for "security reasons" :-)
Years ago (before we were married), my wife's iBook had a bad CD drive. So they sent it to Apple for repair, paying the extra fee for making a backup first. The machine came back with a working CD drive, but a scratched screen and a fresh macOS installation, sans all user files.
ALWAYS make your own backup first, even if you're paying them to do so.
Yep had the same -- the problem machine in a distant country was taken the brands world wide outsourced third party repairs. They tested the machine and as the hard drive is encrypted they decide the drive must be corrupted so reformatted and installed with priated os. Sensitive information lost.
Apple would not replace the battery in my macbook without plugging their little magic dooberry in to run full diagnostics. I'd shown them the system info bit showing that the laptop was calling for a new battery. I nearly left without the battery, but really needed it and didn't want to buy a new laptop. They couldn't say why other than they wouldn't do that without doing that first. Hmmm.
Well, Windows does keep a record of boot/shutdown/logon/logout times. I'm a Linux guy but I have looked at those on my work machine. And of course there's the Linux syslogs...
Now granted, I don't expect Asshole Author to know this, but she might know people who do, or be able to do the simple Google search I did.
And *that*, ladies and gentlemen, is why you always treat your IT personnel with courtesy and kindness, and remember them with a token gift at the holidays.
Have always tried to do this, and it has always paid dividends. It also didn't hurt that our IT people are good folks to begin with.
As I've said before, secretaries/assistants, storespeople, cleaners, security and technicians (including IT personnel) - treat them right and you can get anything done anywhere.
For they are the people who *actually* run the place, rather than those who just think that they do.
That said I do try and treat everyone from the CEO to the lady who empties the bin with equal positive respect, and it's done me no harm so far.
Exactly. It's surprising how deferential the PHD's at my workplace can be on occasion when they've broken the robot -again- and find out I'm the only one in the building actually allowed to fix it.
Equally I'm polite to our facilities guys. After all, they control the Air con!
My arse has been saved on several occasions by these lowly but critical workers because I have always tried to be as nice to them as anyone else. Usually becasue I'm forgetful and regularly leave things behind. So having the cleaner come up to you and hand over your notebook you left behind in a hurry etc is a pretty good reward for just having been decent to people as you should.
Back in my days of doing more general support I was working for a boutique stock brokers. They decided to start doing 24/7 trading and informed me I would be supporting them. I pointed out I was the only member of IT support staff at the time and contractually I would not be working outside of my proscribed hours.
On the first day of trading I was phoned at 2am in the morning and was rudely awoken by a trader shouting at me because email was not working. My immediate response was simply to saw "Fuck off and don't call back, I will deal with it in working hours, which will now start at 10am as I was fast asleep" and hung up.
The next morning I was called into the owners office with my IT director and was given a verbal warning for being rude. I pointed out that I was not on the company clock, I was called in a personal capacity on my personal phone and that was a personal response to being woken up, if they wanted 24/7 support they would need to hire at least 2 more support staff and negotiate a new contract with me.
Unsurprisingly within 6 months I was offered a significant amount of money to leave quietly.
That place really was the wild west though, a memorable highlight was our developer throwing a ceramic bowl at our 60+ year old DBA and charging him with a butter knife threatening to kill him which resulted in my director and I rugby tackling him and sitting on him until he calmed down and was escorted off the premises.
I had a similar (UK) experience when I was informed by my US-based manager that I would be 'available' 24/7 including at evenings and weekends and expected to be online within 5 minutes of a major incident being declared. To this effect if I was 'going out' I had to carry a laptop with me at all times and if I was driving find the first opportunity to pull over.
When I pointed out that I was hired on a 9-5 weekday contract things got messy and I was threatened with a performance review, to which, it was hinted, the outcome had already been decided.
I got UK HR involved, who tried to tow the company line, but it was clear they were put in an awkward spot by the US folks and were very uncomfortable with the situation.
When I suggested we might need to involve third party arbitration to reach a sensible compromise, and agree reasonable compensation for my out of hours availability, and pointed out that they could not arbitrarily change my contract terms because that would turn in to constructive dismissal, I was offered a pay off on condition I signed an NDA.
Considering the toxic environment emanating from the US head office and the fact that the business seemed to have this pay-off routine as an SOP I decided to take the offer and bailed.
The UK folks were a decent bunch, but the level of backstabbing and blame culture at middle and senior management level in the US and in the offshore support team was just too much.
I was so glad to be out of there.
A nuclear battery might be the solution in terms of battery life, but the weight of the lead shielding might be a bit of an issue portability-wise, not to mention the weight of the uranium or plutonium used. The TSA also might want to have a quiet word if you arrive at the airport with such a device.
No you don't want a "moderator" in the room.
Well unless you want the board to "take care of themselves".
But then given that the board members are mostly water which is a moderator. Yes, be sure you are out of the building before they get there. Way out of the building.
I'd have thought it would "of course" be impossible. But...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MHW-RTG
(Voyager's radioisotope thermoelectric generator, closest thing to a real-life nuclear battery) says :
"Each RTG has a total weight of 37.7 kg... Collectively, the [three] RTGs supply each Voyager spacecraft with 470 watts at launch."
Or about 155 watts for a 37.7 kg RTG. Scale back a bit, make your laptop a power-sipping one, hand-wave the fact that the thermal output is about fifteen times the electrical output so it's gonna run hot, and you _almost_ have something feasible.
Somebody joked above about the "fully unshielded version".
Serious question: how much shielding did they use around the RTGs? On one hand, there's nobody out there to be harmed by their radiation. But on the other, the Voyagers' electronics might be susceptible and so need to be protected.
https://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/image/spacecraft/voyager.jpg
The RTGs (x3) are at the bottom left of that image. NASA probably did the calculations to work out the minimum distance they needed to be at the end of that arm.
This Hackaday article gives a run-down on the different types of RTG NASA has developed.
As noted by Stevie, they did need shielding against radiation, probably both from the sun and cosmic rays. But the RTGs emit alphas, which have a hard time making it through a piece of paper. In fact, most of the alphas will be generated inside the lumps of plutonium and won't make their way out.
I had that chain of thought in Singapore once. I found a really nice antique aircraft clock in a second hand shop and was going to buy it. But then I realized the hands were coated in radium luminous paint, and I really didn't want to have a chat with the anti-terrorism department of customs on my return to the UK.
The USA maybe....
The UK (and several other places - Inc Canada ) either would just wave you through or if referred to them by someone earlier in the chain do the following - ask why you had been sent to them, wait for reply, *sigh loudly as if losing the will to live* *roll their eyes* and tell you the door to arrivals is over there and disposing of the referral form. (I had the latter happen)
There's a thought especially if you could make it go bang remotely.
PR firm typically chockers with Precious Retards.
Some misunderstandings, when you look at it from their point of view, are understandable even more than just understandable when dealing with some of the impenetrable decisions of standards bodies.
This wasn't one of those; Cathy's client was the typical entitled upper manglement twat†.
† considered inclusive or neuter here with no reference to natural gender intended.
"Do not dispose of with normal household waste".
Lazy git ignores warning and chucks it in the bin anyway.
Except instead of it causing a fire like it would with a lithium battery, everyone else has the same idea, the batteries exceed critical mass and a nuclear explosion destroys the bin lorry and wipes out the neighbourhood within a one mile radius.
"especially if you could make it go bang remotely."
Many years ago, I was at a tech conference in - IIRC - Amsterdam, running demos and technical briefings on our company's new product which was a Computrace-like anti-theft system for laptops. Essentially it was firmware & software that phoned home periodically to ask "am I stolen?"; if it got a "yes" response, or the watchdog timer wasn't correctly reset at intervals by the software, the laptop would go into semi-bricked "lockout" mode.
Well, I was briefing a couple of potential customers who were showing a lot of interest in this product and hanging onto my every word, until a little later in the conversation I realized that
a) the customers had "Swedish Defence Ministry" on their conference badges, and
b) perhaps I should have described the lockout mode using a phrase other than "the laptop can be disabled remotely", when talking to gentlemen for whom the term "disabled remotely" implied explosives. I had to reverse-ferret and explain that no, we weren't putting an ounce of C4 into each laptop :-)
That said, in light of the recent IDF pagers operation to which you allude, perhaps we could have stolen a march and claimed prior art...
This. Every end-user support call I have ever handled boils down to "The magic rock stopped doing things! Please make the magic rock work again!"
I also like Mark Stanley's take on Clarke's axiom - http://freefall.purrsia.com/ff300/fv00255.htm
My Lenovo LOQ laptop goes one better than a shutter, and has an actual toggle switch tucked down the side connected in-line with the webcam power/data wiring. The odd occasions I need the webcam, I always forget I leave it switched off by default.
Equally I've had colleagues get confused by the little shutters when they haven't seen them before on laptops, originally assuming that their webcams either weren't present or just didn't work!
It may depend on the software in use, and I too leave the shutter closed by default, whether that be a keyboard FN-key or a physical slide shutter, but generally if I forget, the software is "clever" enough to detect the camera is now on but it's only "seeing" blackness and suggests I check the shutter setting. Of course, that's just my works laptops running Windows. My own, running FreeBSD doesn't do that because the OS assumes there's someone with a certain level of intelligence in the driving seat :-)
"Similar problems with the little shutter on the camera for video calls. Needs to be VERY bright orange!"
User: My sound isn't working.
Me: [shows them were the physical volume control is on the side/front of laptop is]*
* Yes, I remember when they had proper analogue volume controls with endstops. And the later ones that were "digital" replacements and would keep winding in the same direction for ever, so had to show some users which way was up and which was down :-(
IME it's usually a function key with, if you're lucky an obscurely place miniscule LED indicator labelled with an incomprehensible icon. Just for lack of clarity it's called "aeroplane mode" and the function key, if labelled at all, will have a 'plane icon. It will be even more easily pressed than a slide switch on the side and although you've been caught out by it previously is fresh every time.
Yes, I was going to post the same thing. From time to time (not often enough for me to remember for a long while) one or other member of my team would come to me for help because their machine had lost internet connection. And I'd look at it just long enough to think that I didn't have access to the network and Wi-Fi side of things and anyway hadn't a clue what was causing this and put a call in to the support team. And not infrequently at first they’d not have a clue either and someone would have to pop down the road to have a look. Eventually we started to remember this issue. And if I hadn't clicked what it was that time and called them they could remind me. Took a while though.
> switch on the side that turned it off
Those (such as the mute on my headset[1]) usually meet a drop of superglue to prevent them from ever being turned off again.
[1] the one that's almost invisible, impossible to see the current setting, really difficult to switch, yet it changes position every time you set it on the table. I'm impressed.
One of our users in HR got a laptop to replace her desktop. She didn't know that it needed charging but somehow it took a *month* for the battery to run out. She logged a ticket "it displayed an error message with something about power and then shut down. She needs the laptop for her work can we please fix?" I have no idea how she managed to eke a month out of the laptop, presumably by not using it much. The difference was that she was a lovely person, so we just explained it to her a bit better and then had a laugh in private.
It's almost as if "do unto others as you would have them do to you" should be taught to people... maybe carved in stone or something!
In a previous role I'd frequently do tradeshows and conferences. Our sales teams would be there too, to glad-hand the customers and pursue leads.
There were two types among the sales team.
1) Those who pitched in when setting out the demos on the booth, and stuck around after the event to help get everything loaded into flightcases, coiling up cables and neatly packing everything away.
2) And those who rolled in 30 seconds before the event opened, spent their time quaffing drinks & nibbles and ignoring us, then disappeared to the airport the very instant the show closed.
Funnily enough, when any of them would ask me in subsequent months to dive in at the last moment and help prepare a demo or briefing or code for their customer, I would always make time for the former type - working till long past midnight on more than one occasion (overtime? that was a mythical concept) and they'd love me for it.
The latter type of salesweasel would find that I took a week to reply to their **URGENT REQUEST**, or that I had 101 more important things to do that day (picking lint out of my navel, painstakingly cataloging my /tmp folder, that sort of thing.)
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In a previous employment at a small PC repair/retail business, we had a customer who wanted to switch from a laptop to a desktop "to get rid of all these annoying wires".
After he bought said desktop, he seemed surprised that the PC now needed a wired keyboard and mouse (well before the era when wireless options were available at a reasonable price) as well as power leads for tower and monitor, cable between monitor and PC, network cable...
To be fair, if they are willing to pay, you can build a PC into a desk and hide it all - although the mouse still needs to be free to move around - but there was a pantograph available before the mouse became all the rage.
Old issues of Byte magazine have adverts for really nice desks, with panels that hinge up to swing the CRT jnto view or slide into the top letting the keyboard to rise up (none of those drawers that pull out from underneath and stick it right into your belly).
There’s a chap on YouTube who seems to regularly rebuild his entire desk from scratch every so often starting with a chunk of kitchen worktop, and he’s big into Zen and clean desk with no wires etc. it’s really struck a chord with me and how I try to keep my desk like that but often it’s just not possible.
When I first moved into my house I set up the attic bedroom as my office. I cut a "window" in the partition wall to the roofspace and mounted my monitor behind it.
A long time ago we were televising something from a big London theatre. As various things were powered up and switched on, a cameraman (EMI 2001 for spotters, shows how long ago it was) called in and said his viewfinder was black, no picture. We looked at his camera and there was black on the main output as well. I trotted inside to troubleshoot and spotted the problem as I walked towards it. Phil, our professional cameraman and all round nice guy, had forgotten to remove the lens cap. It cost him a round at lunchtime.
Many many times I had to explain that Wifi/wireless didn't mean that they would get internet everywhere.
The idea of it requiring an access point within range was lost on many at least in the earlier days of wifi.
I had lots of stupid conversation with supposedly intelligent people, for whom the computer was a magical box that defied normal conventions.
Back in the good old days a customer called me and said that whenever they switch on their PC the date has gone back to 1st Jan 1980 and they have to correct it.
"Ah", I said. "It sounds like the clock battery has gone".
There was a brief pause, followed by an indignant "Well, who do you think would take something like that?".
Now obviously there are some rather stupid users out there now. But given we do now have wireless charging for various devices, and laptops that don't have "charging ports" as such anymore (just USB-C) and I haven't used a dedicated charger in about 5 years (it charges via docking monitor), I'm inclined to slightly forgive these sorts of stories now.
Someone I know asked me about a problem she had had with her work laptop.
Apparently it got fried when she just closed the lid and put it in the bag still running, causing it to overheat.
Her IT department were not amused.
She told me that she had seen someone doing it on a TV drama program!
I explained to her that a lot of things on TV aren't real especially the way IT stuff tends to be portrayed.
Given how many laptops come preconfigured to enter sleep/hibernation mode when the lid is closed whilst not docked/running on external power, and how many IT departments now ensure this is at the very least the default setup, if not the *only possible* setup, applied to the systems they're responsible for, is it really that unreasonable for an end user to do exactly as described here, if they haven't been warned not to do so by their IT team?
See also selecting 'update and shut down' before disconnecting a dock. Did this once, gave it ten minutes while packing everything else up to finish, then chucked it in the bag. Happened to put my hand in the bag for something on the train home and found it roasting. Happily, it survived - but mostly by luck.
The private school I worked at, moved over to W8 tablets.
Which had a excessively high rate of failure (*Compared to laptops) as the entitled little darlings frequently left them running when they put them into their school bags & would be brought into the IT Centre, dead & not booting or radiating heat to fry a egg on.
*Doing their homework on the bed coverings, blocking the vents.
"*Doing their homework on the bed coverings, blocking the vents."
Interestingly, not long after the first Covid lockdowns and WFH was exceedingly popular, one of the OEMs sent out a tech Bulletin asking techs to check with the user that they weren't using their laptops/tablets on "soft or fluffy surfaces" when the symptom was "overheating".
I picked up a ringing phone one day and was immediately bombarded with:
"Take a look at the nearest plug and tell me what it says on it..."
My thought was 'Rude fecker' so I reposnded:
"But this is a wireless office - we have no plugs!"
RF: "Oh...oh, ok..." ** hangs up **
A nice fat quote, comprised of quite a few separate PDFs. All duly emailed to the aggressive little arsehole who we'll term ALAn
In short order ALAn was on the phone, demanding to know, in no uncertain terms where the main proposal document was.
"ALAn", says I. "See the list of attachments?"
Snarl "yes"
"There's a scroll slider bar thingy beside it. Just scroll it a bit."
Snarl, mutter mutter. "Yes". >Click<
I got the better of the bugger in the end. He had a family bereavement - nothing too close but it still came down thru the grapevine. I met him in the corridor and, as lightly and pleasantly as I could, offered my sympathy and condolences.
What? Someone being NICE to him? He simply couldn't handle it and his demeanour took a definite mellowing shift from then on.
Happy times.
Ugh. My oldest bike has a huge fuel tank and 300+ mile range.
My newest bike is nearly empty after the 45 mile round trip to work, yet it's advertised as their "touring" model.
Worse, the damned fuel gauge has ONE segment for half-to-full, so you're tootling along and suddenly you go from full to half empty with no in between. How the everloving hell did that pass design review on a modern machine?
(So it's not any better than the bikes I grew up with no fuel gauge, just the reserve petcock, but with added complexity)
I worked broadband support for a few years.
THOUSANDS of people insisting the router had a power cable and that wasn't wireless and was fraud.
One woman said she was a barrister AND a solicitor. Everyone wondered if she took crown court cases on weekdays and slummed it as a solicitor on weekends!
Had SO MANY people say now they had a wireless router they'd 'converted' their keyboard and mouse to wireless by cutting the USB cables off with scissors and it was somehow MY fault, yes me..directly and personally that the keyboard/mouse didn't work anymore.
Every week during their childhood they'd been told that they weren't allowed to use the scissors. And now they hold you "in loco parentis"[1], as the lady barrister/solicitor would say, as you are clearly the only responsible adult in the vicinity, your obvious maturity being both a blessing and a curse; so now you are to blame for not telling them they are still not allowed to use the scissors.
[1] which means "I drove my parents totally loco, now it is your turn" "But I don't know your parents" - tssh boom.
Fairly new supervisor to the plant for some months now, supposedly a SAP expert (That's not what shes hired as).
HR Guy taps me, that she has a problem with Zoom calls on her laptop. So I go & see her, she explains she's been having meetings but nobody can hear her, I ask where her headphones are. She doesn't have any, so I get mine & run through the audio settings all good.
I remove mine & go back into the sound settings, there's no inbuilt mic, only a input jack showing (We have secure model Dell's without inbuilt mic's & since everybody else uses headphones I'd never needed to notice), how she had managed meetings the last 3 months I just don't know, we are a fairly secure enviroment, with online meetings & people wearing headphones at their desk is normal, broadcasting* the meetings she's attending to all & sundry most certainly isn't normal or desirable.
I tell her she will need to order up a set of headphones, she's about to do that, then remembers she has a set on order already
*Icon.
> somehow it took a *month* for the battery to run out.
In WWII, grandad Jack had to go away and make airplane parts while grandma Ann stayed home with the kids. They had bought an old Maxwell car when it was assumed Jack would do all the driving; now Ann got the 30 minute driver training as Jack was leaving. She didn't have a license so she drove only once a week for groceries.
SIX months later the car wouldn't work. Towed to the shop. Worry and fret about breaking Jack's car, and how much it would cost.
"When was the last time you put gas in it?" "Gas??" Lady, you gotta put gas in it SOMETIME!!" The garagemen thought this was very funny. Much later my grandma saw the humor and tole the story on herself.
I've been in the situation of that user, due to my own carelessness... sort of.
On a business trip to board a ship in Anchorage, Alaska, I had made the mistake to pack my laptop's power brick in my checked luggage. When said luggage inevitably did not make it to the US, I was in the unenviable situation of arriving at midnight on a Sunday morning and having to board by Sunday 1pm. The only remotely electronics-adjacent shop open on Sunday morning was W**t, and I was delighted that they could supply me with evrything I needed to complete the trip - clothing, toothbrush, and a 65W USB type C power supply.
I subsequently told the airline to ship the luggage right back to my home, as bringing it to the next port of calll would be pretty useless.
A few years ago I was staying in a remote cabin with my ex girlfriend and she wanted to use her laptop but there was no wifi. The phone signal was poor but even so I set it up as a wifi hotspot so she could get some minimal network access.
Naturally as all the data had to go down a almost noexistent 3G connection the speed was terrible but with the phone next to the laptop the wifi signal was strong. I spent about 5 minutes trying to explain why despite a full strength wifi signal the network speed is low but eventually gave up. She just could not grasp the weakest link principle between the laptop and the wider internet.
....especially a special unshielded one for this particular user.
You'd think that bullying people -- which is what this manager's doing -- would be classed as 'abusive' and potentially actionable but often people have to keep quiet and eat crow because they've got mouths to feed. I've fortunately only been exposed to this sort of thing a couple of times and my position was such that I was able to eventually exact terrible revenge on the person involved. (Its not really personal, its just that occasional really bad day aside this is a sign of poor management skills and general incompetence. Also, they're invariably equal opportunity -- they'll dump on anyone, especially colleagues who weren't in a position to push back, which ruins group coherence.)
Politeness costs nothing.
I had this happen to me at the tech department of office depot in the late 2000s. Someone tried to return a laptop without the box or power cord because they claimed it wasn't truly wireless. They had thrown away the power cord with the box. They expected wireless to mean a laptop that didn't need external power at all, not wireless networking. They blew up at myself and the store manager when it was explained that no such laptop exists in the world, and what the price of a replacement charger would be (50 to 100 USD at that time). They ended up leaving with the laptop since we couldn't take an incomplete return.
Heh.... users can have the most unreasonable expectations. Back in the day, I was a senior bench tech for a Gateway Country store. We had just opened our service center, and the very first client was an irate guy that wanted to return their computer as it didn't have what the sales rep said it could have. His issue: the sales rep said he could get pr0n on it, not knowing that one has to have an internet connection to get it. He actually thought that Gateway sold computers with pr0n pre installed. The store manager just shook his head and accepted the return just to get the irate guy out of the store while we techs were busting a gut laughing in the back of our shop.
Heh.... users can have the most unreasonable expectations. Back in the day, I was a senior bench tech for a Gateway Country store. We had just opened our service center, and the very first client was an irate guy that wanted to return their computer as it didn't have what the sales rep said it could have. His issue: the sales rep said he could get pr0n on it, not knowing that one has to have an internet connection to get it. He actually thought that Gateway sold computers with pr0n pre installed. The store manager just shook his head and accepted the return just to get the irate guy out of the store while we techs were busting a gut laughing in the back of our shop.
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