This could have come from the BOFH excuse calendar.

It reminds me a bit of the time a conductor complained about the excessive echo in a particular concert hall, claiming he could not have his orchestra perform this way. He asked the sound tech what could be done, and the sound tech with a complete poker face suggested replacing the red stage curtains with another colour (in this case blue). It was exactly the same fabric, with exactly the same acoustic properties, but the conductor was totally happy with the resulting "change".

The stage curtains could have ended up draped a little bit more closed, which can have a big effect on the echoing.

Any decent sound engineer will have at least one slider on the mixing desk which is not connected to anything. When an artist demands an unnecessary change to the engineer's carefully adjusted output settings, this slider can be moved up or down to "fix" the issue. :)

That reminds me of Leland Sklar's "producer" switch. Leland is a bass guitar player who has played with all the greats.

“I call it my producer’s switch,” explains Leland. “If I’m on a session and the producer asks me to get a different sound, I make sure he sees me flip this switch and then I just change my hand position a bit. There are no wires of anything that go to this switch. It's a placebo, but it’s saved me a lot of grief in the studio.”

I actually did use the excuse calandar once, solar flares being a great excuse for the crappy windows installation constantly crashing, I apologised to the user that managament was in no way going to shell out for expensive anti flare cases for anyone.

Some faults and crashes are actually due to cosmic rays. Bit flips happen far more often than people think.

Don't forget that red placebo pills are more effective than blue ones (or is it the other way around)

The bassist Leland Sklar famously has a "producer knob" on his instruments. When the producer asks for a slightly different sound, he'll adjust the producer knob and record another take, resulting in a happy producer. Of course the producer knob isn't connected to anything.

... making on of them paperclip chains comes natural if you are bored in the office. This gives an excuse to make one on company time :)

This will be the real reason why.

A lot of people find making paperclip chains a relaxing and enjoyable break from either endless tedium, or a long and difficult task. So an excuse to make them is often welcome.

What happened after the solstice, next time someone needed to deguass?

Shame on Fred - the office looked to him as the source of all IT wisdom, and he took advantage of their faith in him.

One might categorise him as not a nice human being.

Emily??? Is that you?

I always found the deguassing button rather entertaining myself. A good monitor would make a sort of "boing" noise when you pressed it and the screen would go all wibbly wobbly before coming back a bit clearer. It was much more satisfying than a paperclip could ever be. So, I agree, Emily should have been told the correct solution.

I worked in a building that had a thermocouple poking through the ceiling tiles of every room, so the AC system could monitor temperatures and attempt to keep things comfortable. These were in the form of a little black cylinder about 15mm long.

Naturally someone invented the rumour that they were microphones. Two years later this was still getting told to new starters, evidently some people very much believed this was true!

Working in a building full of engineers also has opportunities for mild mischief.

When we got a decent 3D printer someone made himself a fidget toy to keep his hands occupied during long meetings.

When he left, the contents of his desk were dumped outside my lab in a box. I left the fidget toy on the desk of one of the more eccentric engineers, knowing eventually he would get annoyed with himself for playing with it and toss it to one side.

Four years later it is still making its way around the engineering desks in the office....!

Years ago a senior staff member with a wicked sense of humour, or just plain wicked, advised his colleagues that the system administrator was required to read all incoming and outgoing email.

This was just after my telling him that the volume of email was overwhelming our servers so he was clearly aware that no person could possibly read all the outgoing email let alone the deluge of incoming email.

After one or two enquires it was obvious any denials were pointless as the inquirers were certain that Mandy Rice·Davies applied.

Office gossip supplied the meat and bones as to what the contents of their email that might be of concern. Tawdry affairs and petty misdemeanors mostly.

My advice was and remains: "" Don't put anything in an email that you wouldn't write on the corridor wall. If you must, encrypt and sign it (pgp.)"

There was a Microvitec monitor where occasionally a short would develop to the metal case - nothing serious but it would disturb the picture and no amount of degaussing would help.

The proper fix would be to remove the monitor case* and ensure an adequate gap but often a bit of percussive maintenance was sufficient.

One one occasion I had a user complaining about her monitor so I said I might have a quick fix but this needed careful training and should only be carried out by an expert, then Bang - I hit both sides of the monitor which would cause the top to move up slightly. The user jumped about 2 foot into the air but her monitor was fixed!

*Which you did very carefully as there were scary voltages inside those devices.

Anyone else notice that the anode cap on a CRT is exactly where your thumb lands when you pick one up?

P.S. I started out working in Radio and TV servicing.

"Anyone else notice that the anode cap on a CRT is exactly where your thumb lands when you pick one up?"

YES!!! Another ex-TV engineer here.

Did you ever replace an old CRT and not check that the connection to the scan coils was fully home? The horizontal burn line across the brand new CRT was quite spectacular and necessitated its immediate replacement with a second brand new CRT. I did it only once - you don't make that kind of mistake twice (well, not if you want to keep your job).

So did I, and I never got a zap in 15 years. If the tube was inside or outside the chassis, I'd pick it up by the metal corner brackets with the bolt holes. The need to avoid dropping/implosion/shock led to very specific methods,

This only works with metal paper clips. The coloured, plastic, insulated ones in the picture would have the opposite effect.

In the days of CRTs, I don't think they had coloured plastic ones. I may be wrong though.

We had the plastic ones (hard rubber, actually, like a comb) before the teletypes mostly disappeared.

I'm pretty certain I remember them back in the very early 1960s.

Yeah, the coloured plastic of those types plays havoc with the RGB convergence of the CRT!

I will pay this one as the literal truth.

You can tell them anything… and they'll believe you.

What always got me was those with a more technical background were the most gullible picking up absolute nonsense and retailing it.

I soon learnt that logic and reason don't come into it and desisted from contradiction.

Sexytaries tended to be more sceptical but if it wasn't too outlandish or a moderate distraction from the workplace tedium, like paperclip chains, they went along with it.

The rituals involved in printing might be an exception but printers generally do require infernel invocations and blood sacrifice and even more so back then.

It depends on how you mean 'back then'.

My recollections of the late '70s and '80s, when printers were centrally managed resources were that they 'just worked'. And if they didn't, it was usually something physical.

It was during the PC era, when printer configurations had to be maintained on individual PCs, and worse, individual applications on each PC that things went downhill.

Yes, they "just worked" back then ... unless you had a manager who fancied himself a bit of a computer whizz.

It must have been close on 50 years ago now that I was in a shop - can't recall what shop. The store girls were chatting as I approached the counter. I heard one name saw which girl it applied.

It was the same lass that walked to the till to serve me.

At the end of proceedings, instead of just saying thanks. I told her I was a tiny bit psychic and told her to concentrate on her name for a moment.

Do instead of saying just thanks, I added her name.

Gullible or what? She was dumbfounded and I simply couldn't persuade her any different.

I've used the assistants name when saying "thank you" a few times - once last summer in a caving region about 100 miles from home. I forgot my wife was with me and she accused of having an affair as I 'knew' the pretty young assistant's name! (Doubly not amused when I said that I took the accusation that I could have an affair as a compliment!)

Not able to do it too often these days as many shop workers wear name tags. And my super hearing is becoming decidedly less so as I get older!

I'm sure everyone who has ever worked in IT support has invented some form of placebo fix. I know I have and very likely many times, I kept these solutions in the same pocket as the magic screwdriver that fixed issues when you walked into the room.

Ok, actuall saw it years ago in Warsaw, Poland and thought it's made out of boredom or so ( accountancy, big employer). Jeez...

Wont someone think of the children the Stationary Cupboard monitor.

I mean all of those paper clips being used to protect the monitors! What if someone desperately needed to use a paper clip for connecting a TRS Form to a PBT Form????? The chaos that could ensure due to improper documentation collation. I mean someone might end up putting them together with a *shudder* Staple! These things are just not done...

Told it before but:

Teacher in a school said that their computer was slower than everyone else's. Kept complaining and complaining and complaining.

We kept testing and timing it and it was exactly the same all the time. Identical to all the others. And there's a reason for that... it was identical hardware purchased at exactly the same time as everything else, with identical specs throughout the site, with identical imaging from a WDS installation image that was identical for all machines. It was reimaged at the same time as all the others with the same image as all the others. It even had an identical "maintenance" regime for when we cleaned it, etc.

But, honestly, no different to any other computer. Was happy to believe that maybe environment, or user, or random quirk, or component failure or whatever was making a difference... but we couldn't measure any difference.

At one point, we even went around every single computer on site (all identical) and benchmarked them one after the one... time to boot, time from login "Enter" key to loaded desktop with no disk activity, time to load a given (real) user's profile, as well as all the official benchmarks, etc. etc.

It came to a head after this teacher kept complaining, for probably a year or so, and raised it repeatedly to... the head. And obviously at that point I, the IT manager, "had to do something".

So I did. I walked over. I told them I'd handle this "personally." I disconnected the machine myself. I brought it to the IT department myself. I dismantled it myself.

And then I waited. Said teacher eventually visited to check on progress (as she had no machine) and saw what was clearly their machine (numbers, stickers, etc.) in pieces on our worktop. That's what I was waiting for.

Then I left it there for another day or so. Then recombobled it. The exact same components, connected in the exact same way in the exact same machine.

Gave it a bit of an external clean (nothing that would make any difference, just removed her stickers).

Benchmarked it (always have a paper trail!) and guess what... identical to before. Identical to last month. Identical to last year.

Then I made a big fuss of taking it back to the room and cabling it back up to the exact same cables in the exact same location in the exact same way.

They WOULD NOT SHUT UP about how great it was to have a "new" machine that "worked properly". How "fast it is". How much it had removed stress from their teaching. How wonderful it was. How my intervention had made such a difference. etc. etc. etc.

This went on for - I kid you not - years. She kept thanking me for her "new machine" every time I met her in the staffroom or the dining hall. Constantly.

It even became a problem because by then she had told other teachers who all wanted new machines for themselves too. Why should she get special treatment? Etc. The ones we could trust, we told them what we'd done. And they laughed and apologised and said "No worries, just thought we were being left out". The ones we couldn't trust we either made excuses or (if they were nice) gave them the EXACT SAME treatment as we had this teacher. Yes, we took their machine, applied the special "placebo" patch and, as if by magic, they "ran faster" (with the exact same benchmark numbers). Same login times (to the second!). Same performance metrics. Same everything. But apparently, by some mysterious homeopathic avenue, they were "better".

When that teacher left several years later, she still mentioned how great her machine was and how she was grateful for my intervention. As an IT department, we were PISSING ourselves trying not to laugh.

Placebo is strong in IT, don't let anyone tell you otherwise. Users absolutely CANNOT be trusted to gauge performance of a machine.

Does anyone else remember that there was a rash of tech outlets (Radio Shack and Maplins come to mind) who for a time were selling what I can only describe as "saddlebags" which you could hang over your CRT monitor, which had pockets in them to hold all you most precious 3.5" floppies draped down the side of the monitor. The ideal environment for all your data.