I'm pleased they got a handle on the door problem...

The whole problem hinged on that simple fact.

The project would have been as dead as a doormouse without it...

Once I stopped by a PFY trying to fix an user's Access application that had stopped generating email reports. He was at wit's end, having tried for hours everything he thought might possibly solve the problem. I nonchalantly asked the user if IT had done any upgrade that day. "Hm yes, they installed new printer drivers".

Ah.

After changing the default printer to PDF, the emails started once again being generated. It seems Access (at least the old version in this case) needs the printer driver to generate reports, even if they're not being actually sent to be printed.

It wasn't just Access. Excel didn't like it if it couldn't find the default printer to get the current settings; this was an issue with network printers being in the office and the user working from home,

Fix was much the same, use PDF as the default.

Back in the old days there was no PDF driver

When I first got a PC at home, it wasn't connected to a printer - paperless office...

Well, my office might have been paperless, but Microsoft Office insisted on a dummy printer being installed! That was before the days of PDF printer drivers.

We were developing some military kit. Hardware dev. in UK, s/w in US. The US had a mock-up rig of the h/w so that they could debug. In the UK we were always having problems which the US couldn't replicate - startup fails, BSOD, etc. They blamed us, of course, and things were getting rancorous. In the end they sent some SW engineers team over to find the problem. After a fair bit of work they found that the SW configuration of our kit was different from the mock-up in the US. We'd obviously been messing round with it, which wasn't allowed, and heads were going to roll.

The US team had a support contract with a UK company to maintain/repair the servers, processors, printers, etc. Turns out that when the support company sent someone to check or repair something they also did a scan of the system and updated any drivers that were out of date. The support contract had no means of ensuring that changes like these were either authorised by the US or mirrored in the test rig. Since the US company was responsible for the contract it was their fault. US heads never rolled and the Yanks never apologised.

We had some cellular image processing software which would write out details for each object (eg cell or nucleus) it found to CSV. It worked fine on the Linux workstations but when we tried to get it running on the HPC cluster it wouldn't write anything out and the scientists were getting a bit grumbly...

It turns out that the software required the MySQL client to write out CSV files, oddly enough the client wasn't in the cluster's image...

Not entirely true. They count on the paper the HR drone looks at.

Someone with a decade or more experience in the field will always know the incidental things that no university course can possibly teach (since the teachers do not go on client site), and will therefor be able to evaluate the total environment of the problem to find the real solution.

My grandfather used to create foundations for buildings. This often meant pumping out the water from the holes in the ground.

A Newly Qualified Engineer connected a pipe to the pump, and nothing happened.

My grandfather said turn the pipe round - end to end.

NQE: No - it can make no difference

Grandad - just do it.

NQE: It works!

There was a lining to the pipe, and which had got detached at one end. If you pumped the right way, the lining became smooth and lined the pipe. If you pumped the wrong way, the lining collapsed and caused a blockage.

As Grandad said "teaching new dog old tricks!"

Clearly the NQE had never heard of a Tesla Valve

We must also remember that a novice view on a problem can be embarrassingly accurate. We had a very large gearbox where the oil pressure-sensors indicated a major problem and the control system correctly prevented start-up. Blocked filter? Faulty pump? Pipes wrongly configured? Sensors faulty? Control fault?Wrong oil? Missing components? With the whole assembly in pieces several times, components replaced, reassembled and much scratching of heads, the new graduate asked if the by-pass valve might be incorrectly configured. After all, the handle could be placed in two ways...... "Don't be daft. Cup of tea would be good". They must have found the real problem whilst I fetched the tea because the system was up and running when I got back.

The point of the story, I guess, is that every PFY needs a BOFH; but your comment highlights the other universal truth that every BOFH needs a PFY. Especially if he can take credit for the PFY's work.

Where I used to work there was a microscope that connected via optic fibre to some hugely expensive card in the back of the PC. To make it work you had to connect in the wrong way round to the markings on the card. I have no idea who it was who worked that one out...

A tiny radio studio in South America - no more than a basic room in a shared, largely residential, block of flats had problems with an upstairs neighbour stomping around in hobnailed boots and generally being a bit noisy.

They asked me to look at the sound-proofing, as the normal solution (acoustic box-within-a-box) would have been both expensive and would have significantly shrunk the available space. My solution? Buy the neighbour a nice thick rug... cheap, worked a treat, and he though the studio was wonderful and sang their praises.

We had a technical person who was great at solving problems. He had a photo on the desk next to him, (I think it was of his dog). Before you could ask the person a question you had to ask the photo of the dog - it was said to have an 80% success rate!

The conversation went a bit like

"Hello Dog, this feels really stupid, but I have a problem where... ah I know the answer". Score +1 to the dog.

This was because if you had to explain the problem in simple terms and get your thoughts in order, you often could solve the problem yourself.

I read an article where it described if you are looking for something, ask yourself the question aloud "Where is the ..." this causes a different part of the brain to be used, and bypasses the temporary blindness

Sounding board... I've been the one to listen to the users issue, and ask them to walk me through their issue, only to have the coin drop and resolve the issue themselves! That's a Win-Win!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubber_duck_debugging

Although, with me, it's not a rubber duck I talk to but a non-programmer. I've lost count of the number of times I'd be explaining a knotty coding issue to someone when they'd notice the light coming on behind my eyes. "Gotta go!"

I'm a PM with a technical background but definitely not a developer. I always encourage devs who are struggling with a thorny issue to describe the problem to me, If they spend the time to describe what they are doing in terms I can understand then they almost always have the answer before they have finished talking.

If they get all the way through and we don't have an answer they have enough detain for us to get the team together and we'll walk through it until we find a solution.

Invariably they will have uncovered something during our discussion that will give someone else an insight that leads to a fix, often a quick chat between two developers leaves a lot of assumptions about what's been done, sometimes we do need to go down into the detail, even walking g through the code to get a resolution

The opposite.

Two guys in a team were having a technical discussion and could not resolve which of two solutions to use. They went to their manager. They had a meeting to discuss it, and after a while the boss said, I think you've made some progress, go away and work on it. Come back in 2 days.

The same thing happened, and again.

I heard the two guys complaining that their manager was useless - he didn't decide which solution to use. Totally useless etc. .

Eventually they came to a decision.

The manager said you are both experts in this field, how did you expect me,who only knows the concept to make a technical decision. My job was to get you guys to resolve it.

Afterwards (this was down the pub) the two techies said "he's right. he should not have been asked to make the decision. His job was to make us decide. Perhaps he is a good manager after all"

Ah, yes. I used to refer to that as "Teddy Bear debugging" ...

... until the fateful day when I turned to my colleague, explained the problem, worked out the issue and then, while he continued to remain silent and with no further context, I announced "You are my Teddy Bear".

I briefly considered exiting via the window.

I think "you are my rubber duck" would have been better, but still weird

I do that with crossword clues. The act of reading the clue out loud makes you hear it as well as read it, and a different part of the brain thinks about it and bam you have the answer, often before you've finished reading the clue out, which annoys/frustrates everyone who's listening.

"Yes, I talk to myself, it's the only way to get an intelligent conversation around here!"

That would be ""electronvolt""

$ units -1 "electronvolt" "joule"

* 1.6021766e-19

Many years ago when I worked for the local power company we checked clearances from the >100kV power lines to ground with a laser survey. Turns out there were quite a few places where the stringing calculations done in the 1950s to 1970s weren't so good and the mandatory clearances weren't there, so there was a big program to fix it up, and to get more clearance (and hence more power capacity) for critical spans. All costly especially as the power couldn't be turned off until other lines had been upgraded.

One of the property offices had the realisation that the reason the clearance on one site wasn't good enough wasn't helped by a farmer building an illegal dam on the transmission easement. The farmer was 'encouraged' to remove the dam, and then to remove a bit more of the hill. Just shows that line clearance can be achieved by raising lines or lowering ground.

You cannot convert an electron to joules. You can convert electron-volts to Joule, though.

Throw a positron at it. :-)

One of my previous employers had a server room in one end of the warehouse (think warehouse large enough to have 2 lorry loading docks) - loads of dust, variable temps and then we get to the access for the room..

Gap underneath, a mag lock (that could be opened with a hard drive magnet) and a door made of the finest in bottom of bargain basement plywood that flexed significantly when opening or closing it.

About as fireproof as a PFY'S underpants and as secure as locking a bike up with a paperclip...

Oh and their PABX was behind a network switch server rack and required squeezing past enough cabling to freak out a certain Dr. Jones with cries of "why is it always snakes?". Didn't help when age finally started to kill the cards.

I worked in one building where one server room was completely off limits. It was in a Victorian building and over the time the weight of the racks had increased to the point that one of the floor beams had cracked.

This had been the original server room when the company started but as it grew additional rooms were build in other buildings.

All the kit in that room was all approaching end of life and so if it failed it was replaced in a rack in another server room.

It was in that condition for a couple of years until they moved to new premises.

During decommissioning the kit was taken out 1 server at a time with only one person being allowed in the room at any point. Only the two youngest (and lightest) engineers were allowed in.

"Youngest (and lightest) engineers."

Because they'd yet to succumb to the effects of years of Friday liquid lunches?

The "Option" range could by hit by a nuclear bomb and still keep working.

The 81 was the most reliable kit I ever worked on. You counted outages in times per decade, not per year (or month as seems to be the case for "cloud")

Did Norton go bust because their stuff was so reliable their customers didn't need to buy anything?