Ouch! When the IT equipment is sound, but the setup is hole-y inappropriate
- Reference: 1624606208
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2021/06/25/on_call/
- Source link:
Today's tale takes us back to when we worked in offices and the concept of "hot desking" was a fashionable thing that did not require the attention of hazmat-clad workers between sessions.
"Ben," for that is not his name, regularly travelled from city to city as part of his job and, being a conscientious type, popped into company offices along the route to deal with any callouts. He and a colleague would arrive early in the morning to diagnose complaints and deal with IT issues faced by staff.
[2]
There is little like the delight of arriving at one's desk to discover the good IT fairy has already been round and dealt with that broken printer. Unlike the bad IT fairy who insists on shovelling Microsoft's occasionally iffy updates down the Ethernet.
[3]
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"The workers," said Ben, "were mobile and the laptops were all of the same model which made it convenient for them to stop by any of our office branches and plug into a docking station to work.
"The docking station was hooked up to a large monitor, along with keyboard and mouse for their convenience."
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All very familiar. This hack well remembers one large company that invested hugely in docking stations from a certain manufacturer in order to allow staff to hop from desk to desk. It all went a bit wrong when the laptop fleet received an upgrade and the discovery was made that the manufacturer had dropped the original dock connector in favour of USB. A handy skip was soon filled with expensively redundant slabs of metal and plastic.
Ben was preparing for his next epic road trip when he received the inevitable call. One of the docking stations was not working. The keyboard and mouse were dead. The monitor was receiving no signal. The light on the docking station was dark.
[6]A hotline to His Billness? Or a guard having a bit of a giggle?
[7]We don't know why it's there, we don't know what it does – all we know is that the button makes everything OK again
[8]Today I shall explain how dual monitors work using the medium of interpretive dance
[9]The server is down, money is not being made, and you want me to fix what?
Ben tried the obvious – was the dock actually attached to power? The answer was swift: of course it was. He then had the user attach the monitor directly to the laptop, and the screen obediently lit up. The employee could continue working more or less as usual, but the dead dock was a bit of a mystery and Ben resolved to attend to it personally the following morning.
Upon arrival at the stricken device, Ben spotted the issue. Yes, it was indeed plugged into a power outlet, and yes, power was indeed flowing....
Except it was flowing into the cable lock. Somebody had managed to jam the power lead into the hole reserved for securing the laptop dock from light-fingered users.
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Ben popped the power lead into the correct socket – you know, the one marked "Power" – and things fired up as normal.
He didn't tell us how the user reacted to the magical fix but did discreetly get the training documentation updated "with pictures and instructions on the correct way to plug the power cord into a docking station."
We knew an Accident and Emergency worker who delighted in sharing tales about all manner of things being inserted into all manner of orifices. Shoving a power cable into a security slot was, we hope, toward the more innocent end of the scale.
Ever been called out to sort something stuck somewhere it shouldn't? Share your tale with an email to [11]On Call . ®
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[1] https://www.theregister.com/Tag/on-call
[2] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/personaltech&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2YNWpOh6N3ozAld7CYm9sogAAAEY&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0
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[6] https://www.theregister.com/2021/06/18/on_call/
[7] https://www.theregister.com/2021/06/11/on_call/
[8] https://www.theregister.com/2021/06/04/on_call/
[9] https://www.theregister.com/2021/05/28/on_call/
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It's not just with docking stations with Dell, it can happen with PSUs plugged directly into the laptop not being recognised. In one case, and I don't know how, the user had managed to bend the centre pin of the power connector so the laptop refused to charge.
Which orifice??
With the modern slim power jacks from some manufacturers, it's perfectly possible to fit them into the audio jack socket... Believe me, I have resolved a couple of non-charging laptop issues with this one already!!
I had a similar one way back when. I friend of mine, an elderly scholar, was baffled as to why his wired USB mouse refused to work. Looking at the back of the machine, he'd managed to jam the USB plug into the machine's Ethernet socket.
He wasn't a stupid man. He had three degrees and was working towards his fourth (all just out of his own interest), but he had a bit of a blind spot for technology.
Happens to me as well (though ethernet and USB is a bit too tight a fit). I use different laptops privately and for work and projects and....
... and of course they are all very different concerning the placement of different sockets. One has the ethernet socket where others have a USB one - thankfully the USB pugs are a tad too wide to be crammed in, though maybe I could manage using excessive force. The USB plug fits into the display port socket though, and stubbornly refuses to work there.
Re: He had three degrees
I've met plenty of blithering idiots with degrees.
A degree means you have knowledge. It does not mean you have intelligence.
Laptops are good for this
Top marks to laptop designers for coming up with such a wide range of ports to hammer a USB cable into. HDMI, Displayport, Ethernet (mentioned above), Kensington (as in the article), power, even the air-exhaust vents, it's possible to wedge a USB cable into all of them if you smash them hard enough. These days the MicroUSB/MicroHDMI/USB-C ports are excellent targets. Removing all the labels "as they interfere with the design aesthetic" is a particularly lovely touch.
Re: Laptops are good for this
Removing all the labels? They're embossed in the underside of the casing, don't you know...
Matching power leads
Many many years ago I worked at a large consultancy. Some mobile staff had IBM ThinkPad 240s (the REALLY small ones). And we also offered them USB CD drives as often these were needed "in the field". Great.
Except that they both used the same power plug. And the CD drive was 5V, but the laptop was 12V (or something else higher than 5V).
At least it was that way round as better fried CD drives than fried laptops!
SVGA cable screwed...
Customer excuse: "It didn't fit tight enough so I used a screwdriver to tighten the screws that held it in place." Except the monitor still reported no signal, so I unscrewed the plug to test the cable. That's when I noticed that all the pins had been crushed into a mangled & tangled heap in the bottom of the plug. Funny how that tends to happen when it's not an SVGA port you're screwing it into... *Sigh*
Re: SVGA cable screwed...
Lemmeguess: D-SUB HD22 (3 rows / VGA) into D-SUB HD20 (2 rows / old serial mouse)?
An easy enough mistake since the outer connector shells look almost identical.
...and the pins of a HD22 can indeed easily be crushed.
Losing my mother's marbles
I realised that my mother's mental capacity was going when she complained that her laptop would not open. She was trying to open the hinges.
Her screen saver was an animated fish tank full of fish. I came in one day when she was waving a watering can over the laptop, looking for a hole "to top up the fish tank" because she hadn't done it for a while, and every one knows fish tanks need to be topped up.
The beginning of the end.
Re: Losing my mother's marbles
That's very sad. Unfortunately many of us are destined for similar outcomes.
Meltdown...
A few years back, the place I was working in at the time was transitioning from desktops to laptops. The process was being done in stages so when I joined, about a third of the department had laptops and docks - let's call these "batch A". About a year later, "batch B" arrived, taking us up to two-thirds laptop & dock. Why the delay? I'm guessing budget constraints.
Anyway, what nobody had considered were the different power requirements between the laptops in batches A and B - a problem that became apparent when one poor soul with a low power requirement "batch A" laptop moved onto the desk of someone with a high power delivery "batch B" dock...
Let's just say that on this day, the chap in question was quite literally "hot desking"... after which, the idea of moving desks was shelved.
I remember the common one with the Dell E-Docks was that if the power cable was a bit loose, the dock would work, the laptop would report that it had power, but it would refuse to charge. I had that one a few times. Unfortunately as soon as you mention the power cable, people get defensive because it *looks* as if it is plugged in fine. So it became more a case of "unplug the dock, then plug it back in". It fixed the issue and avoided the arguments.