Shocks from a hairy jumper crashed a PC, but the boss wouldn't believe it
- Reference: 1682666887
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2023/04/28/on_call/
- Source link:
This week, meet a reader we'll Regomize as "Monty" because in the 1990s he worked as a computer tech British Columbia – lumberjack country.
"The company had a pulp mill in the town of Prince George and several sawmills around Northern BC," Monty told us. Its HQ was in Prince George, capital of BC, which was where Monty went about his business.
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"One cold winter week, we started to get calls from the vice president of Forestry that his computer was acting up," he told On-Call. "It would randomly restart. And at one point, his keyboard completely failed, and had to be replaced."
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Bosses are bosses, even when they work in small towns. So the VP of Forestry Monty was trying to help had a shiny new '386 machine while the rest of the company made do with a 286.
The more recent machine's unreliability was therefore a puzzler.
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Monty made several trips to the boss's office to check things out and, of course, "as a VP, he was too important to just sit there and watch me try to troubleshoot things, so he always had me come up when he was out of his office," Monty recalled. "I was really puzzled because I just could not find anything that could be causing the problem, and the computer really was very new."
The veep was good humored about the mystery, but one day his machine crashed for the umpteenth time, and he decided it was time to let the tech team interrupt his busy schedule.
Monty strode into his office and immediately spotted the problem.
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"Northern British Columbia gets very dry in the middle of winter, and there draped over the back of his chair was a beautiful – and probably very expensive – mohair sweater," Monty told On Call.
That jumper was positioned exactly where the boss would rub his back against it.
At this point readers will probably have had a spark of understanding. Very dry air, very long fibers, lots of rubbing – a perfect scenario to generate static electricity!
Monty's hypothesis was that merely by sitting on his chair, rubbing against mohair, and typing, the veep could be discharging a decent quantity of Coulombs into his keyboard.
[6]Thanks for fixing the computer lab. Now tell us why we shouldn’t expel you?
[7]Automation is great. Until it breaks and nobody gets paid
[8]Techie called out to customer ASAP, then: Do nothing
[9]Errors logged as 'nut loose on the keyboard' were – ahem – not a hardware problem
The veep scoffed at the suggestion his furry garment could be causing PC problems.
So Monty performed a demo.
"I asked him if I could sit down, then vigorously rubbed my back on his sweater, reached for the keyboard, and a huge static ZZzzzzap! went from my hand to the keyboard, immediately causing his computer to shut down."
Vindication.
"He was very sheepish about it," Monty said – presumably because there isn't a goat-related metaphor to describe the situation. "And he vowed to never wear that sweater to work again. We parted on the best of terms."
Have the forces of nature ever caused crashes you were called upon to correct? C'mon you lot – [10]click here to send On-Call an email so we can feature your story here on a future Friday. The On Call mailbag is a little threadbare so we could use your stories. ®
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[6] https://www.theregister.com/2023/04/21/on_call/
[7] https://www.theregister.com/2023/04/14/on_call/
[8] https://www.theregister.com/2023/04/07/on_call/
[9] https://www.theregister.com/2023/03/24/on_call/
[10] mailto:oncall@theregister.com
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Shocked I am! Shocked that you felt it necessary to say that!
Or was it a static back-grind (sic) analysis?
You're a bright spark, so you are...
Volt amp you all twittering on about? Just go ohm, all of you
I'm sorry, capacity induced a charge
I have seen photophobic mice before. When the afternoon sun came round the building and lit up the Boss's desk desk the mouse would become non-responsive.
Option 1 was to open up the mouse and paint the inside of the paper thin shell to block the sunlight, or option 2, to swap the mice with those used by the poor mole rats that occupied a windowless office elsewhere in the building. I think you can probably guess the option selected by the lazy Helldesk PFY that I was at the time!
When I were a lad...
Well, maybe not quite a lad.
When I was a student, our computer labs were on the 10th and higher floors in a city centre building, which then got sunlight (hey - it was Scotland, so it only happened occasionally). We had a lab of Sun Workstations. You know, the ones which needed a metal mousemat painted with dots to work. Had exactly the same problem so you could have 20 or 30 machines at a time suddenly not in mouse mode.
"the ones which needed a metal mousemat painted with dots to work"
Not dots. A grid of grey and blue lines. Made by Mouse Systems Corporation. I've got an original, attached to an orange logo Sun 1 ... 40+ years old, and still going strong. They don't make 'em like they used to.
No Goat related metaphor?
Your kidding!
Re: No Goat related metaphor?
Naaaaah!
Re: No Goat related metaphor?
Don't try and milk it...
Re: No Goat related metaphor?
Enough with the cheesy comments already...
Re: No Goat related metaphor?
There's never enough cheese.
Re: No Goat related metaphor?
Don't play the goat
"Hairy jumper"
I must admit the first thing that came to mind for me was some kind of spider had taken up residence inside the PC!
But then I quickly realised it wasn't an Australian-based story. :-)
Re: "Hairy jumper"
Pray tell.
Fried spider?
Re: "Hairy jumper"
Jumper spider surely
Re: "Hairy jumper"
You don't fry the spider ... you use the spider to remove food from the oil after it's cooked.
Re: "Hairy jumper"
Hairy Jumper had me thinking the HDD was covered in lint, and causing the jumper issues... perhaps connecting to 4 pins instead of 2?
Re: "Hairy jumper"
Note to my fellow Yanks: A "jumper" is to the Brits (and hangers-on) what we would call a sweater.
Re: "Hairy jumper"
The tarantulas are making their presence known here in Northern California, now that it's finally Spring. I don't think they live as far north as BC, though.
Not quite the same
I once watched an engineer remove a brand new master board for a Sony DXC3000 camera from it's antistatic packaging.
As he did so he spotted a static discharge from his index finger. All I heard was a sotto voce "Oh Shit" as he realised he had forgotten his anti-static band.
Board not functioning on receipt read the return paperwork....
Re: Not quite the same
At my old uni they replaced the carpet in the corridor to the computer lab and during the first warm dry weather you'd get a lovely crack as you started to type in the door code. The code lock didn't last too long after that. It took a couple of replacements before they figured out the actual cause and replaced the carpet.
Static
This story reminds me of an event many years ago. I was performing some routine maintenance on multiple 486 machines running Windows 3.1. Walking back and forth across the carpet a few times was enough to build sufficient a static charge in me that when I reached for the mouse of one machine, I felt the zap of the escaping 'angry pixies' and watched as the machines hdd led came on and stayed on. I had fried a vital component of the multi-io board (remember them?) and the box was now totally unresponsive and unable to boot.
While awaiting the delivery of a replacement multi-io board, I placed a note on the monitor which read "Under treatment". I kept tropical fish as a hobby at the time. One of the other staff members added "Nil by mouse" to it. Amused by this I agreed she could submit it to The Readers Digest. They published it in one of their end of article fillers and we shared the spoils.
Re: Static
Yep had a colleague in my banking days who could do the self same thing to the mainframe terminals
Re: Static
Remember the anti-static mousepads they used to sell? The ones with a snap in one corner for attaching a ground wire?
They weren't for grounding the mouse. They were there to ground the user.
The "What if ... ?" aspect of destructive testing was one of my favorite games for several years. I've measured 115,000V after running a standard vacuum cleaner over the floor of a SillyConValley shipping & receiving department. Lots of very small particles moving quickly through a plastic tube caused the static buildup. The next stop on the cleaner's schedule was the stockroom, with shelves & shelves full of static sensitive parts. Much hilarity ensued.
I once measured 61,750ish volts on an empty, unused Styrofoam coffee cup set down on an isolated table after a colleague walked across a nylon carpet wearing Nikes ... Was an example, just to prove the point.
In other news, the average secretary can generate upwards of 85KV walking down the hall to get a cuppa, but myself walking alongside her came up static free. Seems my unmentionables were made of cotton, hers were made of silk and petrochemicals. Her heels were leather, my soles were high-carbon rubber.
No, the above isn't sexist, it's observed reality ... and she volunteered to take part in the experiment. She also managed to drag another 21 of her female cow orkers into "the game" (as she called it), giving us some real data to make recommendations. Interesting couple of months, that.
capital of BC
Prince George!!!????? Try Victoria.
Re: capital of BC
Capital of Canada? Washington DC surely...
Re: capital of BC
Not the capitol of Canada. The capitol of BC.
Re: capital of BC
Surely the capital of Canada is C?
Van De Graaff Computers filed for bankruptcy
How does The Emperor in Star Wars operate his keyboard?
So "Monty" performed static analysis...