As any Englishman would know, all the techy needed to do was to tell the operator that the weather back home was a bit dull ..... And the power of the Yorkshire man's "Tha's nowt ...." reply would soon have had a torrential downpour across the entire site!

No sun! Problem solved by cloudy computing!

----------> No cloud icon, so I had to Fail the solution instead!

...about mouse balls here.

I once had to troubleshoot a hyperactive interactive screen. This screen had been in a classroom for a few years with no problems. Cue a new school year, and there's a new instructor in the room, really a great user of technology, he was smart and cheerful, most of the time. Once this hyperactive screen started disrupting his lessons, he wasn't so happy.

It only took us a couple of days to figure out that the sun was hitting the sensors around the bezel. When we proposed a solution to the facilities group, they said no way! We wanted window shades in to be put up, but being a newer building, they had to run it by the architect, which was shot down because it would lessen the aesthetics of the room. So, we put cardboard blinders in the spots on the bezel where the sun interrupted the interactive signal, that looked oh so much nicer that proper shades on the windows...

Hate that sort of answer. But then I am a function rather than form sort of person.

If the damn thing doesn't work then it doesn't matter what it looks like.

We were due to be moved to a new, purpose-built office, designed for the modern Data Processing* development practices of the early 1990s. Rather than a regular office full of desks with terminals and PCs on, this was to be a development space. There was a presentation in which we were introduced to the ideas that drove the design - flow! flexible partitioning with Nightingale boards! communal spaces! break-out rooms! configurable powerpoints and networking! smoking rooms! (it was the 90s). Much was made of the lighting. There were no ceiling lights, rather, "the use of a coffered ceiling and uplighters releases us from the fenestrated perimeter and allows flexible provision of general and task lighting". What this meant was that outside of the lit corridors everyone wandered around in semi-gloom like confused mole rats.

* IT hadn't fully become IT yet, it was still DP, but not for long

We had the same situation where the open-plan office had windows on three sides with lots of dappled light filtering in through the trees on the outskirts of the plot..... This light severely interfered with viewing on the CAD terminals and being an open-plan office with no real barriers, the sunshine caused a lot of irritation, especially between autumn and spring. Adjustable blinds were forbidden (mostly by the 'senior' wallahs who occupied the best locations which had a view...).

Now draughtsmen/women are very clever and artistic...... They created light-barriers on delicate, hanging threads, so they seemed to just perch in mid air. Carefully placed for optimum shielding at various times of day they used to wave gently as people walked between groups. I always thought it resembled a bazaar. But it was bizarre.....

When I was a lowly PFY, we were told that we were going to have to go to network printers around the office.

Most people didn't have a problem with that and just went with it.

One old guy HAD to have his local printer for printing his spreadsheets (no Idea whey he kept printing the damn things out).

The IT Manager said get rid of it..

The use said No

Stalemate...

Cue one evening working late when his office was unoccupied..

a bit of black insulating tape over the laser of the printer and retreat.

It could not have been placed better! It took one perfect column out of his spreadsheet.

He called up to have it fixed, so we had to take it away to be "Fixed"

He never saw it again.

We had a user who complained that her local printer (on the desk opposite hers) was too far away, and she'd hurt her back stretching to get printouts from it. So Health and Safety asked me to have a look at it (knowing that I was a curmudgeon)... I duly went to the office, inspected the printer and the layout of the office, and noting that there was a huge networked MFD in the same room, I removed the local printer so that she would have to stand up and walk to the other one, thus preventing her injuring herself further.

In a previous job, one summer our team moved offices and then my mouse would start playing up but only in the mornings, but not everyday. Took a few days to work out the sun was shining into the office window into the mouse. A judicious relocation of the right-hand speaker to cast a shadow over the mouse soon sorted things.

very common issue with old optical mice. Old style CFL light bulbs can play havoc with remote controls as well. Took me a while to workout it was a CFL bulb in a bedside lamp that was interfering with our Sky remote control in our bedroom. Bit annoying when you want to put on babestation whilst in bed.......

I once had sort of the opposite problem:

I was a a clients office, fixing various desktop issues, and I was asked to fix something (email related?) for a particular user, who wasn't at their desk. I sat down and started to troubleshoot, but there was something wrong with the mouse. I flipped it over and found someone had taped a two pence coin to the bottom. Once I'd removed that it worked fine, and I got to work fixing whatever the problem was.

After a bit the user came back into the office, phone practically glued to their ear. Once they'd got off the phone, I showed them the fixed computer, and mentioned that I'd had to remove the 2p and they replied: "I stuck that there, it's to protect me from the electromagnetic radiation ".

As I was at a clients office, I restrained myself from going full BOFH, and just said "Have you tried closing your window blinds?" and left.

After all, the sun really is a source of harmful EM radiation, as anyone who's had sun-burn can attest.

shitttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttt they walk among us

In a previous life I maintained professional video recorders, from two inch reel-to-reel down to the half inch cassette machines. Turns out those cassette machines have a lot of mechanics in them for lacing and unlacing the tape to stop things turning into a horrible tangled mess. And those mechanics were controlled by a small microcontroller keeping an eye on lots and lots of leds and opto-detectors.

Oh the joy of 'helping' some inexperienced colleague by bringing a desk lamp along and 'oh, let's get a bit of light on the subject so you can see what you're doing in there...'

A long time ago I worked for an IBM reseller who counted a local council as one of their customers. The Service Department took a call from a user at a newly opened office, complaining about a spurious letter “m” that kept popping up every few seconds in the middle of their terminal emulator session. An Engineer was duly dispatched and confirmed the problem. Checking the IRMA config, drivers and Token Ring cable didn’t solve the problem. A replacement PC was ordered and installed – no improvement. The senior Engineer was called in who repeated all the tests, with identical results. While sitting at the problem PC, staring through the window and pondering his next move, he noticed that across the field behind the office, he could see the radar tower of the nearby airport. After a few seconds he realised that the appearance of the rogue screen character coincided with the rotating radar dish facing the office. Some lateral thinking later, a metal sheet was procured from somewhere and placed between the system unit and the monitor. Problem fixed.

"the mouse cursor on one of the machines became intermittently 'frisky' and jumped uncontrollably around the screen"

A colleague of mine once had this problem. But in his case it was because I had plugged a second mouse into the back of his machine...

Fun times...