Das reboot: That's the only thing to do when the screenshot, er, freezes
- Reference: 1590132367
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/05/22/on_call/
- Source link:
Todays teutonic tale comes from "Ben" and concerns that most dreaded of all On Call incidents: the one where someone spots you and ushers you over to help. Escape is sadly rarely an option.
Ben's story takes place some 15 years ago, when he was a mere IT apprentice at a German IT company. The company in question, he recalled, "had come into being when a group of regional banks outsourced their IT departments into a co-owned company."
The team responsible were in thrall to the misguided but fashionable belief that costs would be reduced by such a move. For Ben, it involved a six-week stint at one of the banks. "The idea," he said, "was to foster an understanding for the peculiarities of our customer's business in order to improve service."
The branch where Ben worked was a monument to the brutalist architectural movement of the 20th century and the interior design choices favoured by 1970s fashionistas. The arrival of ATMs had swept away all but one of the old cash counters, staffed by a human, and left the rest of the cavernous hall as a "general service area."
On the day in question, Ben noted something unusual. Rather than the odd elderly customer or two shuffling toward the cash counter, a substantial line had formed and was not moving. Before he was able to scarper in true PFY style, the inevitable happened. Someone called him over.
"I know we are supposed to call the help desk," worried a manager, "but the computer for the cash dispenser keeps crashing and the customers are getting impatient. Could you take a quick look, please?"
Ben arrived at the cash counter to find the teller, who was only slightly younger than his usual clientele, exasperated and close to outright panic. The web application responsible for turning numbers into cash had apparently enjoyed an update overnight and the computer was now freezing when he tried to use it.
"I've had to reset it three times already and you know how long it takes to boot these things up again!" the old man blubbered.
Ever helpful, Ben asked the user to reproduce the issue.
"I expected him to launch straight into the application," said Ben, "Instead he launched Lotus Notes while telling me that 'the boss' had sent him the new application before heading out for lunch."
Ben smelled something fishy. Sure enough, the panicked teller opened up the latest email from his boss, which was titled 'New version of Bankomatic 9000 will be released later this week.'
The teller skipped through the text that announced the new version, the release notes and advice and instead went directly to the attachment. Which was a screenshot showing a Windows desktop with the updated app running in IE on a development server.
"See? It crashed again!", he shrieked, clicking madly around the obviously unresponsive screenshot.
"I can’t even close it or reboot the machine!", he wailed as he desperately tried to click the close button and then the start button, again on the screenshot, but to no avail.
"Now I have to reset it again...", he said in a sobby voice and reached for the machine's reset button.
Ben should have stopped him there, saved him from the reboot, "but mostly I was busy biting down on my own tongue and desperately trying not to burst into laughter in front of everyone."
Having composed himself while the computer ground back into life, Ben explained to the teller that he had actually been clicking on a screenshot.
"He didn't get it."
Ben then tried to explain what a screenshot actually was.
"Again, he failed to get it."
As patiently as he could, Ben dredged out some tortured metaphors to get the message through, explaining to the teller "If your mate buys a fancy sports car, sends you a letter with a coloured picture of it and invites you for a test drive, you can’t just put the picture on the street, sit on it and drive off. You still have to visit your mate and get into the real car.
"Now, your boss sent you a nice coloured picture of the new app..."
As Ben continued to stretch metaphors past breaking point, the teller's expression changed as understanding dawned. Processing of the queue was restored.
And Ben's reward for his impromptu in-person call-out? The look on the teller's face "as well as the gratitude everyone showed afterwards were almost worth the pain I was still feeling from my tongue."
Ever had to resort to words of two syllables or less to get the message through to a user? Or had the clearest of instructions ignored when there is a picture attachment involved? We've all taken those calls – share yours with an email to [2]On Call . ®
[1] https://www.theregister.co.uk/Tag/on-call
[2] mailto:oncall@theregister.co.uk
Re: Funny that
That's a hoary old one, points deducted for lack of originality. Up there with plugging their mouse into a different machine, but still on their desk.
Re: Funny that
Other old ones:
Swap mouse buttons
Remap mouse buttons to different functions (requires custom mouse application)
Small amount of tape on the optical sensor
Removing the battery of a wireless mouse
Swapping wireless mice between desks
Swapping wireless mouse dongles between systems
Re: Funny that
Or setting someone's VMS prompt to "Help ?" and seeing how long they persevere trying to get out of "Help".
Re: Funny that
Or the old ctrl+alt+arrow keys to rotate the screen...
Re: Funny that
"Or the old ctrl+alt+arrow keys to rotate the screen..."
Those of us with cats who sit on the laptop keyboard for warmth when said laptop is streaming something to the TV are still intimately familiar with that one.
Re: Funny that
I hated that keyboard shortcut. I always hit it accidentally.
Re: Funny that
I just remove it
NMNMN
Don't forget levering out the 'N' and 'M' keys and swapping them over.
All fun and games until you roll in at 9:45 and discover that the victim had one of those characters in their password...
Re: Funny that
Other old ones:
Swap mouse buttons
Remap mouse buttons to different functions (requires custom mouse application)
Small amount of tape on the optical sensor
Removing the battery of a wireless mouse
Swapping wireless mice between desks
Swapping wireless mouse dongles between systems
Swapping the mouse and keyboard outputs on a KVM switch. A colleague of mine did this by accident and spent a good few minutes trying to work out why everything had stopped working. He had a degree in engineering which made it all the funnier when he had IT support round to fix this.
Re: Funny that
Or using your IR wireless IBM PCjr keyboard to control another jr in class.
Re: Funny that
Switching the language on unlocked mobile phones left on the desk to Greek, Russian or some other non-Lating langauge.
I quickly learnt how to change the language without having to look at the display. The first thing I did, once my new handset could be locked was to set a PIN, that stopped the problem.
Re: Funny that
I've was in a mobile phone store years ago when a customer came in complaining that their phone wasn't working. The sales assistant listened whilst the nice bloke explained his problem in detail. His new phone he'd bought from them earlier in the day isn't working correctly. The "top" display has frozen and only the one underneath it works. Everybody where he works thinks it's laugh out loud funny that his new phone has gone wrong. He produces the offending feature phone and it becomes obvious what the problem is. There is a plastic scratch protector on the screen that has a copy of the phone menu printed on it icons, text etc.
The sales assistant I could see was finding this extremely funny but trying to be professional at the same time. She peeled off the protector and said it would now work fine. Realisation dawns on the bloke that he's not been the sharpest tool in the box and taking his phone quickly leaves. Whereupon the three of us left in the shop started laughing.
Re: Funny that
Now try doing that with a non-GUI command line interface... No self respecting PFY... caught dead... mouse...
As well as hiding the menu bar you should dock it to the top or right edge of the screen so any inadvertent edge bounce at the bottom doesn't pop it up.
Re: Funny that
That pretty much was one of the SOPs for unlocked and unattended computers. Others were rotating the screen or sending out invitations for after-work drinks or even the odd date. Thinking of it, I'll have to re-implement some in our office...
User education
So basically the user was befuddled by a colour picture.
Good grief. One wonders if black and white would have startled him less?
Re: User education
" One wonders if black and white would have startled him less?
No, that would have just generated a second "symptom".
"When I click on it, it not only freezes but it also drains all the colour from my monitor"
Black and white
A little off topic but you've reminded me of an observation from my oldest grand kiddie.
He was 8 when we'd taken him to the Amberley Museum. We had reached the exhibit about television and radio history. There were loads of elderly CRT sets, wheezing their last, entertaining the punters with generated historical test cards and sundry content. Some if it was in colour but an awful lot of sets were, naturally, monochrome.
Laddie looked thoughtful as we came away. Eventually he asked "When did they invent colour?"
We were some way from the exhibit by then, so his question was a bit out of context. We gently probed to work out what he was really asking.
It turns out he'd seen the monochrome TVs and understood that the pictures were old. He had put two and two together and come to the conclusion that the "Real World" (TM) had once all been monochrome.
Gentle explanation followed. Sweet kid.
Re: Black and white
Reminds me of this absolute classic Calvin & Hobbes strip!
https://i.imgur.com/4rPGp.jpg
Re: Black and white
Italo Calvino, Cosmicomics, Without Colours, http://www.ruanyifeng.com/calvino/2007/07/ch_5_without_colors.html
(A small number of the Cosmicomics stories are collected as "The Distance of the Moon", for the outrageous price of £1 https://www.hive.co.uk/Product/Italo-Calvino/The-Distance-of-the-Moon/21523008 or here's the whole lot https://www.hive.co.uk/Product/Italo-Calvino/The-Complete-Cosmicomics/11397953 )
Seriously though...
Whenever I include a screenshot in an email I always make sure that it's edited somehow to make it obvious that it's a screenshot - resized, borders, cropped, anything it needs so it doesn't appear to be "real"
Re: Seriously though...
funny, we, in the office, were just talking about making attachments that fit the screen perfectly ;-} No scroll bars on the sides or bottom!
Re: Seriously though...
I suspect you've been in this game a similar amount of time to me.
I've taken to darkening most of the image, just leaving the target item bright. so instructions that say 'click this button' will highlight the button and dull the context.
Users really are dumb sometimes.
Re: Seriously though...
Annotation, I use rather easily visible drawn shapes, but does the same thing
Yes, Daily, or even hourly!
Ever had to resort to words of two syllables or less? Computer have become just a gadget, users rarely RTFM or RTFS. I wish I had a beer for every screen shot of an error emailed to me asking for the solution... RTFS?
Re: Yes, Daily, or even hourly!
"I wish I had a beer for every screen shot of an error emailed to me asking for the solution... RTFS?"
the funniest ones are where someone has taken a photo of the screen and sent it
Re: Yes, Daily, or even hourly!
I used to deal with a user who regularly sent me scanned copies of printed PDF documents generated by the application they used, even after I showed them the "send as attachment" option...
(we need an icon for "not the sharpest tool...")
Re: Yes, Daily, or even hourly!
Sometimes this might be your only option though, particularly if capturing startup messages. I guess some hypervisors will have logging features for this stuff, but desktops don't, and sometimes a video is handy for catching very fast scrolling text. At one point I found the high speed camera in my phone useful to check whether a very hard to see fan was actually running or not.
Re: Yes, Daily, or even hourly!
RTFS?
I received an email today with an attachment showing a Catalina error message which pops-up when trying to run my 32-bit app ...
"The developer of this app needs to update it to work with this version of macOS. Contact the developer for more information".
I sent my reply - "The error message is incorrect. Apple needs to update macOS so your app will work exactly as it used to. It is only not working because Apple will not allow it to work. Contact Apple for more information".
ID10T error
These types of error are sometimes the hardest to solve especially if you wish to minimise embarrassment (in the work place this can be essential for long term success) . It is though an opportunity to be creative - nodding sagely, muttering about broken links in emails and showing a way around the problem would probably have been quicker than trying to explain the concepts of static images versus GUI. Ignorance is forgivable - will-full stupidity, not so much.
Ever had to resort to words of two syllables or less to get the message through to a user?
Every single time I talk to upper management about how what they want me to create will take 6 months, not 6 days.
Re: Ever had to resort to words of two syllables or less to get the message through to a user?
In my experience, upper manglement generally require the 2-syllable words to be printed on something like a baseball bat or a length of 2-by-4...
Must be a lack of oxygen up there?
RTFM
On a similar note, I once gave a relative of mine explicit instructions how to get to my new home. I told him to drive to a certain town, then follow a numbered road in the direction of another named town, and after about four miles, turn left at XXX village onto a B road, then stop and call me for more instructions for the last half mile. Some time later, I received a phone call from him, he had arrived at the second named town, and couldn't find the B road mentioned. I asked him "What happened to 'turn left after about four miles at XXX village'?" "Oh, I forgot about that". He had driven an extra 12 miles past the village, and now had to drive 12 miles back again to find the village and turn (now right) onto the B road.
Re: RTFM
I'm lost! What's your phone number?
Been There Done that
My reward for carefully guiding someone through the perils of... ummm, 'guey' interfaces, while studiously not noticing their embarrassment, was lifelong loyalty.
P.S. 'guey' because the little pictures stick where you put them and remember what they did last time.
Check your background
I recently saw a document which some marketing guy had developed, and was about to publish to the world. It was meant to look really modern. The diagram had a white background, and had off-white lines linking boxes. The diagram made no sense. If you tilted your screen a certain way you could faintly see the lines. When I changed the background to a different background, it was obvious (and still made no sense).
I also asked what the thatched cottage and museum icons meant, and suggested they have hover text to explain what the items were, but have not heard back from him.
Funny that
Once upon a time a colleague who will remain nameless to protect the guilty took a screen shot / copy of the desktop and saved it as the background to the desktop. He then moved all the shortcuts off the desktop and hid the menu bar. When our PFY returned was clicking on "icon" trying shortcuts menus getting more and more frustrated. Nothing would happen, rebooting no good. For some reason his distrust of the team guided him to enlightenment.
Good days