Soon: Trump as second mask...
Not this Halloween, but probably next... "Reveal who you are" "OK" "AAAAAGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHH! HE'S BACK FROM GRRAAVEE !!!!1!11!!11OneEleven!!!"
Actor couldn’t understand why computer didn’t work when the curtain came down
Happy Halloween, dear reader! The Register wishes you a wonderfully scary day. To kick things off, we’ve twisted On Call, our weekly reader-contributed column about keeping computers alive despite the best efforts of zombie coworkers and demonic bosses, to bring tales of times tech support turned spooky. Our first story comes …
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Monday 3rd November 2025 08:41 GMT Martin an gof
Re: Soon: Trump as second mask...
Entertaining shooting-related anecdote involving someone who was invited to their first shoot at Balmoral, with the (late) Queen (and her intimidating personal guard) in attendance, incompetence and an owl on Route Masters yesterday, towards the end of the programme if you can't be bothered to listen to it all.
M.
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Friday 31st October 2025 12:49 GMT Anonymous Coward
Paraphrasing but it boiled down to "Hi, our unsupported externally hosted business critical data collection application which allows us to bill xxMillion PA has stopped working, nobody can access it"
Drills down and discovers the application was a web based POS that was hosted on a cloud service for which the ownership had never been transferred when the previous owner and maintainer had been off boarded six months ago.
The increasingly urgent emails to their manager about the need to transfer it and the upcoming cancellation of service had been ignored so the app and all data was now irretrievably deleted.
Yet somehow it was still the fault of the IT team...
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Friday 31st October 2025 09:39 GMT Jellied Eel
Re: As it was written, so shall it be.
Hi Azure support, Copilot said it had found some problems with DNS performance and offered to fix them. Now I just see a flashing cursor.
This is expected behaviour-
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halloween_documents
In discussing ways of competing with open source, Document I suggests that one reason that open source projects had been able to enter the server market is the market's use of standardized protocols. The document then suggests that this can be stopped by "extending these protocols and developing new protocols" and "de-commoditiz[ing] protocols & applications". This policy has been internally nicknamed "embrace, extend, extinguish"
Yesterday's outage was Microsoft simply testing the 'extinguish' phase..
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Friday 31st October 2025 09:50 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: "The Register wishes you a wonderfully scary day"
Meant to get a multi-million release to a customer today except the internal tool, that my team around the world use to communicate, decided that I (the Technical Lead) was person non-grata yesterday and there is no response in 24 hours from the email address we have to report problems to!
IT support claim not know who (hopefully a group) is at the other end of the email address and I have to hope that it is not one/some of the masses of long term employees who just left the company!
Anon, but also in the hope that my boss (who is conveniently for them, off ill today) doesn't read this.
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Friday 31st October 2025 16:14 GMT PB90210
Most of the supermarkets have sold hot cross buns year round for many years... now we have TV channels showing Xmas films from the begining of Sept!
The real pisser is that I use an internet station called Smoothjazz to get to sleep at night because it is almost 100% non-descript Muzak, few ads, few lyrics, so next to no earworms, but heading up to Xmas they start throwing in jazzed-up Xmas tunes and that suddenly jerks me out of my stupor!
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Friday 31st October 2025 23:19 GMT Outski
now we have TV channels showing Xmas films from the begining of Sept!
Hallmark Channel run a "Christmas in July" season in the UK.
It's painful. Career woman suffers personal or professional loss, goes back to hometown to lick her wounds/comfort family/bury dead dog, stays, meets high school tormentor/crush/sweetheart, who's now a widower/teacher/spoon-whittler... you know the rest
Please give me a rusty spoon to stabby stabby stab my eyes
or copious --->
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Monday 3rd November 2025 20:10 GMT David Hicklin
> You still have a Post Office? My nearest one is now a trendy Pilates place.
We still have one and they are thinking of installing a cash machine.
We used to have loads in our town but now all the banks and even building societies have been reduced down to 1 & 1 respectively trying to find a working one with cash in it when you need it is becoming a trial....
So it can't come to soon!
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Friday 31st October 2025 21:55 GMT that one in the corner
Re: Core memory ?
No unicorns?
Brother, you are not reading the True Translation of the Good Book.
If you truly seek guidance be sure to study the illustration titled "Time for a bath".
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Saturday 1st November 2025 07:33 GMT that one in the corner
Re: Core memory ?
Ah, you forget that, for Unicornists such as "Answers in Genesis" and other KJV-only people, the target of a term like "bible sceptic" is NOT atheists; it is all the other Abrahamic sects that don't cleave to a literalist interpretation of one translation (especially as the AiG and others - *cough* Trump Bible *cough* - don't want you to read the foreword & disclaimer on the original KJV: "this translation is still merely a flawed work of Man, although they tried pretty hard and didn't put undue stress on the bits that made James look good, honest"[1]).
When they want to, AiG et al are more than eager to use "atheist" - usually conflated with "evolutionist" or, worst of all, Roman Catholic! Hsssss. Why they don't use the word "heretic" more is a mystery to me.
[1] I may be paraphrasing a bit
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Saturday 1st November 2025 14:55 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Core memory ?
Fun fact: among paintings hanged in Gdansk (Poland) historic town hall (IIRC), there's a room-long series about the Great flood. And among animals marching uniformly towards the Ark, there's a couple of unicorns jogging away into the meadow.
A very similar setting was in Terry Prachett based show The Omens... "Oh well", and they are no more ;)
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Friday 31st October 2025 08:20 GMT Michael H.F. Wilkinson
Our research group once did an unannounced Halloween prank by all coming dressed (in)appropriately to our university. Some students, and colleagues from other groups were somewhat befuddled when they saw me sweeping through the corridors, clad in a long black hooded robe, skull ring and black staff as John Hix, Professor of Post-Mortem Communications (definitely NOT necromancy!!).
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Friday 31st October 2025 17:56 GMT DoctorPaul
We didn't dress up but back in the early 70s we had the real thing - the Department of Parapsychology was an official part of the University of Sussex ("The only brothel with a government charter" Baroness Summerskill) and as "interdisciplinary" was the buzzword us science students had to write an arts/science dissertation.
I did mine on the subject of "Coloured Magic", leading to an oblique reference in the Times Educational Supplement to the effect that Sussex was "the only university where you could do a degree in engineering and witchcraft".
Interesting times, wouldn't be who I am today if I hadn't been there, done that. Remember a talk by Michael Bentine, famed Goon of this parish - "It's OK to do drugs, it's OK to do magic, but please don't do them at the same time". As Lemmy so perfectly put it, "The summer of 71 was the best time of my life. I can't remember any of it but it was the best time of my life". Amen to that.
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Friday 31st October 2025 09:14 GMT Flightmode
A friend told me many years ago about when he was printing out a report to turn in at university. He got that undefinable feeling when printing that something went wrong with the printout - somehow his spidey sense told him that it'd printed seven pages instead of the six he expected... He checked the printout and sure enough, five words from page four had been omitted and left a gap in the text. The same five words were printed on an otherwise blank page five, in the right position and all. The five words? "The ghost in the machine".
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Friday 31st October 2025 10:19 GMT An_Old_Dog
Ghost in the Machine
I had two old Toshiba Tecra laptops which had an odd symptom: when they went into power-saving mode, a medium-brightness, white, gauzy, ghostly ball would fade into existance onto the otherwise all-black screen.
Touching the Shift key would remove the ball and restore the expect screen contents.
I was running OpenBSD on them, as one had 128 MB RAM, and the other one had 192 MB RAM.
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Saturday 1st November 2025 01:13 GMT Gene Cash
Re: Ghost in the Machine
Sounds like it turned off the focusing coils which started losing power, but the electron gun still had a bit of charge, leading to a beam that gradually funnels down.
I had one that would leave the gun on high power for a while, so it would have a very bright spot in the center (and corresponding burn-in)
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Friday 31st October 2025 10:17 GMT breakfast
I once had a colleague who became increasingly suspicious that his computer was haunted. Words would start appearing on his screen when he wasn't typing, but the creepy thing was they would be relevant to what he was doing, as though whatever was creating them knew what he was doing. He'd take a phone call and something relevant to the topic of the call would appear on screen, chat about his holidays and then find the name of his destination had inserted itself into his word document.
There wasn't a clear pattern, it happened inconsistently but often enough to freak him out. It took a surprisingly long time to realise that he had somehow accidentally enabled speech-to-text on his laptop.
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Friday 31st October 2025 10:59 GMT MiguelC
Is it time for a haunted office?
In a previous job I usually worked long hours, oftentimes almost alone, in an old building.
One night I started hearing faint footsteps, they seemed to be real near me, but I was unable to pinpoint where the sound was coming from and was sure no one was around (I got up to check several times).
It finally dawned on me that something was off: they were too regular. The light-bulb moment came when I raised my eyes to the new clock that had been installed in the hallway, just across my desk. Yes, the pointers moved to the sound of the footsteps I had heard until that moment...
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Friday 31st October 2025 14:38 GMT John Brown (no body)
Re: Is it time for a haunted office?
The main clock in our living room has just started making noises. Only noticeable at night when I'm alone and the TV is off just before heading to bed. The ticking is normally silent, except just as the second hand moves past the 12 and continues till it reach 15 seconds at the three and goes silent again. That took me a while to figure out as it's barely perceptible and hard to locate a direction of the source :-)
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Friday 31st October 2025 17:07 GMT The Oncoming Scorn
Re: Is it time for a haunted office?
Remember reading years (60's or 70's) ago about a man convicted of his girlfriend or wife's murder.
His sole albi was that he was on a railway station travelling somewhere at the approximate time of the murder & he recalled a definite "TICK" as the minute hand moved as he left the station.
In that time before trial the station clock had gotten replaced & Plod being Plod set him up for the crime & he was convicted, he spent two years or so appealing his innocence & his defence team finally they got hold of a member of the station staff who stated that in cold weather that the old clock would make a very audible TICK.
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Friday 31st October 2025 15:50 GMT Stuart Castle
I used to support a Uni computer lab. Just off the lab, we had a small Audio/Video studio that I also supported.
This studio had a powerful (for the time) PC that as well as doing any AV capturing also controlled the Audio mixer via MIDI. The mixer had, however, analog sliders that were powered by motors. As such, if you sent a Midi command to increase the level of a certain channel, the slider for that channel moved up, apparenly under it's own power.
Because it was a sealed off room, that could be booked freely by students, it frequently got booked by students for purposes other than AV work. Us techs could see this because it was covered well by a couple of CCTV cameras. As a couple of students found out, covering these CCTV cameras was a good way to get thrown out of the lab and have your login account suspended for a few days.
For support reasons, I had, long before, installed a VNC server on the machine, which I generally used if there was a problem on the machine.
One day, I noticed a bunch of students, sitting in a circle. I did not know what they were doing, but it clearly wasn't anything that needed the facilities of the studio. They weren't, strictly speaking, breaking any rules, but they were taking up a resource other students likely needed to use, so I decided to have a little fun with them.
I logged on to the computer remotely and fired up an application that could control the mixer. I set all the channels to their maxium level, then to their minium. I knew that when each slider reached the maximum of minimum level, it would hit the casing of the mixer and make a quiet click. 24 of them doing it nearly simultaneously would make a fairly noticable bang. When I was sure the students were looking, I started setting the channels to random levels. This scared the students and they packed up their stuff and left. I don't think I saw any of them again.
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Monday 3rd November 2025 16:01 GMT PeteS46
Xmas call-out story.
Long before I became an IT minion I was a TV repair mechanic, working for a TV rental company. I was often the home visit bod so I had a company van complete with big logos selling the company.
Early on the Christmas Day morning in question there was a ring on the doorbell. It was an elderly couple, neighbours from across the street. Their TV was dead "the picture valve has blown". They were distraught having no entertainment at Christmas, could I please, please help? No it wasn't one of 'our' rentals, it was their own. I was persuaded to 'just have a look anyway'? The shops were all shut, I was their only chance.
The TV was ancient, all valve, not a transistor to be seen. And it seemed that this was the one-in-a-thousand when it really was the 'picture valve' at fault.
This valve was an obsolete rectifier diode for the EHT (Extreme High Tension ~ 17kV) supply to the CRT anode, so was vital. I didn't have one in the van, there probably wasn't one in stock back in the shop. I did have some solid-state 'trippler' rectifiers but they would generate ~50kV, much too high and very dangerous. A bit of surgery with a sharp knife and soldering iron and I isolated a single section of the trippler, wired it hanging in space for insulation.
By Christmas, it worked! I gave strong advice to have it replaced with a proper repair and quickly escaped home for my dinner. The doorbell seemed to have a sudden unexplained failure, too.
Happy Holidays!
Bernard.
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Friday 7th November 2025 02:41 GMT Not Yb
This year's non-profit haunted house, I was in a completely dark room (dark enough that one guest poked the 'prop' in the room to see if it was real, and jumped back about 2 feet when it (me) started the minute-long monologue by saying "They told us we were the lucky ones.") This was NOT the intended lighting, but the number of jump scares I got just from saying "They" made it worth it.
We have group tracking devices in each room, several of which were tested or improved by me, but they don't do any controlling of effects. I think they're still working up to that, and many of our effects do need humans in the loop for safety. (Pneumatic cannons that shoot thickened fake blood are fairly safe, but we don't want the 'guides' getting hit with fake blood because they have to go back through more than once a night.)
We've had some fairly neat microcontrolled effects, but 'small touchscreens in every room' are beyond the budget. We've donated around $50K to the local breast cancer resource charity the last few years.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
