What's brown and sticky and broke this PC?
- Reference: 1711096265
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2024/03/22/on_call/
- Source link:
This week, meet a reader we'll Regomize as "Giuseppe" who told us about a quiet morning on the help desk in the early 1990s.
As his thoughts turned to lunch, one of Giuseppe's colleagues popped into the IT department seeking assistance as her PC wasn't working.
[1]
"Has anything happened to it recently?" Giuseppe asked, and was told that it had just stopped working.
[2]
[3]
He retrieved the machine – a slimline desktop that despite its modest size was still too large for the stricken worker's desk and had therefore been placed on the floor with its ventilation slots pointing skywards.
Giuseppe cracked it open, and was immediately surprised to find its interior was sticky and smelled rather sweet.
[4]
So he asked again: had anything happened to the PC to create this state of affairs?
At which point he was told that his colleague had spilled a mug of hot chocolate on her desk that very morning – some of which had presumably trickled into those upwards-facing vents.
Giuseppe's colleague allowed that this scenario could maybe, just maybe, have led to her PC's problems.
[5]
While this confession meant Giuseppe understood the PC's immediate issue, he didn’t understand why his colleague had initially told him no incident had occurred.
"Well, nothing had happened to it since first thing this morning when I knocked my hot chocolate off the desk ," he was told. "It kept on working so I didn't mention it."
Until it didn't, so they did.
[6]Ad agency boss owned two Ferraris but wouldn't buy a real server
[7]Job interview descended into sweary shouting match, candidate got the gig anyway
[8]They call me 'Growler'. I don't like you. Let's discuss your pay cut
[9]Work for you? Again? After you lied about the job and stole my stuff? No thanks
Our hero took two positives from this incident.
One was a lesson that help desk operatives need to ask very specific questions.
The other was that this PC – a Compaq – was admirably resilient. Not only did it survive its encounter with a hot chocolate, it bounced back after his work to fix it.
"We disassembled it, washed it in the sink, dried it all, reassembled it, and the only thing that never recovered was the BIOS battery," Giuseppe told On Call.
The user was left to set the time on her PC every day – fair punishment for her failure to 'fess up the first time.
Have your users failed to disclose the true cause of a problem and made a sticky situation worse? If so, [10]click here to send On Call an email to share your story and we may give it a run on a future Friday. ®
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[6] https://www.theregister.com/2024/03/15/on_call/
[7] https://www.theregister.com/2024/03/08/on_call/
[8] https://www.theregister.com/2024/03/01/on_call/
[9] https://www.theregister.com/2024/02/23/on_call/
[10] mailto:oncall@theregister.com
[11] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
Re: House's Law
It's recursive too: Everybody lies about the lies they made.
Except me of course (that might be a lie).
Re: House's Law
Everybody lies! But those with Manglement potential also manage to make it your fault.
Ahhh the joys
Call one morning from a know err... Challenging user.
Phone not working. Apparently it just stopped and the LCD display went black.
I head down and visual inspection confirms blackness of display.
"Anything happen before it died?" Says I.
"No," says user.
I pick up phone and get half a cup of cold coffee down my arm...
"Oh yeah, I did spill that earlier."
Cue much head Vs wall action..
Re: Ahhh the joys
Whose head?
Re: Ahhh the joys
The user's I hope. This way they may remember not to make the same mistake again.
(icon because it is appropriate)
Off topic
I've just come off call at 09:00 whilst reading this story. Happy Days . No one rang -even better . Thats it for another 6 weeks
Oddly a sticky brownian motion producer in the works is the one thing I never came across in my unusually long tenure in the trenches
Used to have that with keyboards - a lot. The caller was always surprised with the question "did it have sugar in it ?" before telling them to go and rinse it while we got a spare out.
most spares had been through the rinse and dry many times.
Wyse terminals were also quite prone as they were small so often buried under crap on the desks and often in the line of fire from liquids. Not quite so well built as keyboards
Keyboard jammed
"Help, my keyboard's jammed"
Only to find literal jam in it, from a jam doughnut.
The user was left to set the time on her PC every day
Cruel and unusual punishment, surely.
Re: The user was left to set the time on her PC every day
We had an old Solaris box at my previous work that was the mail server and it just kept working, but eventually its 10 year on-board battery failed and was not user replaceable (soldered in FFS!) so on the rare occasion it had to be rebooted, it was not the time that was the big problem (got that from NTP shortly after booting anyway, so other than bizarre uptime figures from 1990s BIOS date not a big deal) but that it forgot the SCSI boot disks, so a paper note was left with it telling you what needed to be entered at the boot prompt for it to proceed. Eventually it was retired, but I think it was almost 20 years of use.
Re: The user was left to set the time on her PC every day
If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
Oh wait...
Re: The user was left to set the time on her PC every day
This might bios the user's feelings towards IT...
Re: The user was left to set the time on her PC every day
My first PC didn't have a battery backed RTC. Upon every boot I was prompted for time and date. Mostly it was just 00:00, Jan 1 1980 (IIRC) becase I didn't care.
Re: The user was left to set the time on her PC every day
"Mostly it was just 00:00, Jan 1 1980 (IIRC) becase I didn't care"
Until the logs are checked to see who gets the big promotion: "okay, you were really productive once, but seem to have been coasting in all the years after"
It could be worse
Knowing what some users do with their laptops when they think people aren't looking, the spillage could have been worse...
Spiky horror
I was once asked to fix a home computer that "stopped working occasionally", it looked suspiciously hastily cleaned with traces of a wet wipe on the exterior. Inside was an unthinkable horror, the terrifying kind of spiky, hairy black mould which took to the air as I opened the case.
It turned out that it had taken a full cup of very sweet, milky tea a year ago and then lived in a damp room. The thermal mass must have caused condensation that fuelled the mould. I ended up flooding my workshop with ozone and going over every surface with the strongest disinfectant each respective surface could handle. I shudder to think about people in the same room as that thing when it was actually turned on.
When I saw the title . . .
. . . I was expecting something vaguely Fawlty-esque, geddit ;)
I think the most unbelievable one I've had was soup in a laptop, and not just thin watery Cup-a-Soup type but full on chunky home made vegetable. It turned out the user had put their laptop and pot of soup in their laptop bag together (!) and the container lid had fallen off.
It was quite interesting, the laptop actually still worked but the bottom half of the screen was obscured by bits of vegetable floating around! He was fortunate, it cost us for a replacement screen panel but that's all, the remainder was easily cleaned.
"help desk"
It's Service Desk actually, if you want to be ITIL® compliant.
House's Law
Everybody lies!