Time for a cracker joke: What's got one ball and buttons in the wrong place? How many sleeps 'till Christmas? We don't care, because here at El Reg, we count in On Calls, and we can tell you there are plenty to come, so fret not. This week's On Call column of tech problems solved with panache stars not one, but two basic user errors that took very little thought to fix. Just the kind of thing the IT …
We had a training center at one site. There were a bunch of PCs in there and the manager sat in a separate room.
He was visiting another site and decided to take his desktop with him. Instead of asking, he just unplugged it from the network and left... And suddenly the whole training room stopped working (remote booted DOS PCs from a central server, with all applications on the server).
Did I forget to say, that those were the days of thinwire Ethernet?
Yep, the manager hat disconnected his PC and taken it with him T-connector and all, leaving two open ends of Ethernet in the middle of his desk. A quick search around my toolkit for a spare T-connector quickly sorted the problem.
Those were the days! When networking was just a coax cable strung around the office ... I set that up at home years and years ago, eventually upgraded to Twisted Pair, and last week switched to Fibre optic but I've still got a MicroVAX on the network. It's connected via a DECnet adapter, to a coax to 10BaseT switch, to a FO adapter - what fun!
"my Boss managed to force a serial 25 plug into a centronics printer socket"
I've seen someone succeed at plugging that same 25 pin D plug in UPSIDE DOWN! Unfortunately the cable was hardwired and meant the kit he was plugging in had to be sent for repair.
headline immediately reminded me of that very old crack^H^Hpper joke: what's the difference between snowmen and snowladies?...
"Matthew, thanks for the replacement but there seems to be something wrong… When I try to go up, it goes down, and when I try to go left it goes right. The buttons are also in a weird place."
Um. If you turn a mouse over and try to use it as a trackball, then either up/down will be wrong with left/right correct, or left/right wrong with up/down correct, depending on which way you've turned it over (pivoting around the tail/wire or longwise so that the wire is pointing towards you). But not both.
"One also assumes that it is a ball mouse - something unheard of nowadays. (The younger among us will be confused by this story)"
And now that you mention it, all the ball mice I ever used wouldn't work upside down. The ball would drop to the "top" and the friction of that contact would stop it working as a trackball. Probably poor contact with the internal wheels/rollers too,
Heard a rumor that with the first gen Logitech and Microsoft rodents - you know, back when rodents really had balls - used shaft encoders that connected to the PCB through a small four-wire IDC connector. Swap two wires and you invert the affected axis. Just need a small phillips to open the rodent and a paperclip to unlatch wires from the IDC. It's loads of fun watching software guys try to fix a HW problem in SW. Or so I'm told.
Back in the ball mouse days there was online info on how to clean the ball by removing, spitting on (the evil ones suggested put it in your mouth) and wiping it clean. So workers walked into his office and he said "Hang on, I've got mouse ball in my mouth"... The laughter could be hear across the floor.
Back in the ball mouse days there was online info on how to clean the ball by removing, spitting on (the evil ones suggested put it in your mouth) and wiping it clean.
Even better was the fake (presumably) IBM memo about field-replacement mouse balls (too hard to explain, you'd have to read it here: https://justjohnboy.com/2013/11/14/the-original-ibm-mouse-balls-email/)
My wife was a school teacher and taught the computer lab, she had a problem with the kids nicking the balls from the mice at the end of class - she put an end to it by telling everyone to turn their mice over at the end of the hour so that "she could could inspect their balls".
These days she'd probably get prosecuted for saying that - it's a good job the technology has moved on!
"the evil ones"
That would be evil indeed.
Mouse balls ran over everything on the user's desk for months and years - dried sugary coffee cup rings, lunch remnants, dead skin particles, hair, all manner of dust and dirt - over time resulting in very sticky dirty balls and accumulations of the aforementioned filth behind the balls.
Mouse first-aid was always to remove the seizing ball, wash it with soap and water (never, God forbid, in your mouth - YUCK!), and replacing it after picking out the dust bunnies from inside the ball sockets. If that didn't fix it, it went into the bin. Balls would frequently be salvaged and kept as desktop novelty items (relatively heavy for their size - good for fidgeting) and were often used for fun and games to relieve boredom during night Ops shifts.
Evesham Micros Tech Support circa 1998.
Customer rang in to say his trackball wasn't working.
Evesham included a mouse as standard. After some questioning, the tech found out the customer had turned the mouse upside down, stuck it to his desk with superglue and was trying to frob the ball.
I had the privilege of DOAing for my boss as he was on holiday. I had to attend the SLT meeting and witness the ineptitude of the hallowed management.
I can’t remember what was discussed, but witnessed one manager struggling to wipe a whiteboard. After a few seconds it became apparent she was using her cordless mouse.
Partly because, for a user, when stuff goes wrong the first instinct is to panic. And the less they feel confident with the nitty gritty of IT the more they're likely to call for help instead of looking to see if there's anything that stands out as wrong. Or to want to touch anything that does looks wrong for fear of making it worse.
When I used to train users in basic IT skills one of the opening lines was "Don't worry. You're not going to wreck the computer". Because they often worried that one wrong move would indeed break the machine.
"Because they often worried that one wrong move would indeed break the machine."
Probably because in the early days of £10000+ PC computers bought on the capital budget, the non-IT managers were aware of the value and warned users to never do anything that might damage the shiny new capital investment. Remember, those were the days when eating or drinking near the PC was a severe offence and a £1000 was a LOT of money.
That makes sense. It was usually older ( in those days I wasn't one of the olders) staff. And some of them had bosses that were even worse. And they tended to be quite nervous of authority, when it was in IT.
Similarly. Not too many years ago I had a boss who was terrified of us sending long emails because the corporate IT big boss had declared that longer emails had to be written as attachments. Likewise, she was really bothered if we used the word "thousand". We had to write in multiples of "K". As in "The item will cost 3K". Again because of some corporate bollocks. This is not that many years ago (15 maybe).
"And the less they feel confident with the nitty gritty of IT the more they're likely to call for help instead of looking to see if there's anything that stands out as wrong."
I prefer those users. You can reassure them and sort things fairly quickly.
The ones who plough on regardless and REALLY screw things up before calling you are invariably utterly pissed off and require hours of untangling Gordian knots.
My Dad (now in his 90's) had a laptop with a USB printer. When it died, he got a replacement and shortly after phoned me to say he had trouble printing. I used TeamViewer and could not see the printer, but he assured me it was plugged in properly. Nothing I tried worked, but I was visiting a couple of weeks later....
….that was when I realised that a USB plug would fit perfectly into an Ethernet port.
A little bluetac and stickytape later and the problem should never recur
I am posting this anon because the lady in question may read this site & I'd like not to get my ass kicked. =-)p
I was working at a temp agency assigned to a small office in a strip mall, tasked to do data entry for hours at a time. Boring, tedious, mind numbing, but it paid the bills.
One day it's getting close to lunch, the office is right next door to a grocery store with a deli, so we all decide to head over to buy our lunches. I get a sandwhich, a granola bar, & a passion fruit flavored Bawls energy drink. Back to the office, into the break room, munch munch munch. One of the ladies notices my energy drink, says she likes passion fruit, but has never had it from that particular brand. She points a finger to my drink & asks in a total deadpan "Can I taste your Bawls?"
The room went utterly silent, she realized what she had just said, & suddenly turned SUCH a bright shade of red that I was afraid she'd die from lack of blood to the brain. I turned a pretty shade of pink around the ears (I thought she was attractive but didn't dare say so), coughed to cover my initial comment, then simply handed her my drink. She turned it down, left the room at a run, & hid in the bathroom for over an hour.
Double entendres can be SO much fun! =-D
One of the ladies notices my energy drink, says she likes passion fruit, but has never had it from that particular brand. She points a finger to my drink & asks in a total deadpan "Can I taste your Bawls?"
Or there was the time a group of WWII reenactors were looking over their M1941 Johnson rifles, and one lady says "so you guys are comparing your Johnsons?" Immediately she realized what she had said to great personal embarrassment.
(Anon so someone doesn't happen to find this on a generic search, and the folks involved are not IT people. But if she *does* see this, I'm in trouble)
A German friend once told me how she had gone to the US as a teenager on a holiday or exchange trip. A group had gone to the beach for the day and were putting on sun cream when she noticed that one of the boys had dropped a blob onto his trunks.
In her best school-level English, she said: "Hey, Johnny, I see you've creamed your shorts."
It was 5 minutes before they stopped laughing enough to explain it to her. Then she went red for 5 minutes.
I'm not a trekkie, but my favourite moment from one of the movies is when they are on Earth around our time and Scotty is trying to talk to the computer to use it. Someone tells him to use the mouse, so he picks it up and says "Hello Computer" into it.
If you don't know what it is, you don't know what it is.
I hate I.T cnuts who think they are so clever, they get off the phone to a customer and say "Man that guys a dumbass, he has no clue, doesn't even know what an MX record is, the twat".
That guy could have been anybody, say he was a Doctor and this type of I.T guy turned up at his clinic, would he expect the Doctor to laugh at him and call him thick for not knowing what a UTI is?
I had to get out of I.T for a break, arseholes everywhere, it was starting to make me really angry. I'm heading back to "it" now, just hope I end up in a job with less of those arseholes about.
A home user had to move her computer and didn't want to bother anyone, so she 'disconnected' all the cables herself. She ran into a problem removing the VGA cable from the computer. However, she pulled until it came free. She didn't realize it had screws to help keep it in place. She managed to pull the screw connectors that had been 'riveted' into place on the motherboard bracket. Fortunately, the motherboard wasn't damaged and the cable still worked, once the retainers were unscrewed from the cable. The cable is now held in place just by friction.
I got a new job and my start date ended up being Tuesday 4th January 2000.
So I spent the last few months of my old job coordinating getting the Novell Netware upgraded to a Y2K compliant version and all the other hardware & systems patched and upgraded.
It being a local Council office the place was shut to the public on Monday 03/01, so my manager and I went in early on the Monday, ran through our checklist and testing to ensure everything was OK, and were in the pub by 12 noon for a final Millennium Bug project sign-off and a farewell drink or several.
Tuesday 04/01, I turn up to my new job at another council ... and the email system wasn't up for nearly a fortnight because of a Y2K issue.
I should have known then; the place never did improve technologically and I moved on as soon as was decent ...
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
