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.

You type faster than I do; have a beer (it is Friday after all) --->

"I turned off the suffering machine, took a nail file out of my handbag, and pried the ENTER key out of the keyboard frame"

Looks like Harriet nailed it

I'll file that. It might come in useful later.

It could be key.

Not a bastard of a job then?

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.

I might have been tempted to reply that I could see it on the office CCTV...

> “couldn't hear the beeps”

It’s amazing how many people are completely unaware (or in denial) of how bad their hearing is...

Icon - photo of an ear :)

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...

> 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).

I wonder if the two things are linked

Pardon?

High pitched? Dude must've been almost deaf, the beeps aren't all that high pitched. They're below 1 kHz.

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.

The usual one was a USB A cable in the RJ45 socket. It fits just well enough to convince the non-IT person that it is the right place.

Yep - and a right pain when you have to plug one in when the connectors are adjacent and the back of the machine can't be accessed!

And if you're unlucky it wrecks the RJ45 contacts

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.

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.

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!