Software update turned my display and mouse upside-down, says user Welcome again to On-Call, The Register's weekly wander through readers' recollections of tech support traumas. This week, meet “Alan” who once had a gig as “both sysadmin and developer in charge of an image analysis system linked to microscopes for analysis of bacteria in a University hospital.” “These systems consisted of a …
I installed a GPS re-radiator (a device for taking external GPS signals and re-broadcasting them indoors) in our office a couple of weeks ago. A few days after I installed it, one of the salesmen complained that the GPS kit he was working on wasn't able to get a satellite fix- he instantly moved to blaming the re-radiator even though I pointed out to him that the error message he was getting was nothing to do with the GPS signals. So he went and stood outside in the rain for half an hour. Eventually came back in swearing and saying that he still wasn't able to get a fix and it was all the re-radiators fault. I pointed out to him that the error message he was getting indicated that he had not set up the internet connection*. Cue dim light bulb above his head.
* Yes, I could have pointed this out to him before he went and stood in the rain, but he needed to learn a lesson.
There is a Latin phrase, post hoc, ergo propter hoc -- after it, so because of it.
I like the thought that this means blaming the person who was last to touch something for whatever may be wrong with it is a tradition that goes all the way back to the Ancient Romans .....
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This was the same computer room where the on-site engineer once saw a workman on a stepladder drilling holes in the concrete ceiling. The mainframe operators were apparently unconcerned that this was taking place by the active exchangeable disk drives - whose lids were now covered in debris.
A colleague of mine had a similar story, with the difference that the workman was standing on the glass lid of one of the drives. Several microseconds after being spotted, said workman was flat on his back on the floor, as Jamie had grabbed his belt and yanked him backwards. "Any pain and damage from that will be far less than that from having your legs chopped up by broken platters mixed with glass splinters spinning at 3600rpm."
In fact we have a person here on the team who uses the mouse "upside-down". That's how they were told to do many, many years ago and can't use it any other way. That's a bit weird to witness but they do seem to manage.
Also, the rotated camera is a classic. Formerly in charge of the imaging pool of a lab, that's something I witnessed too many times to count. Heck, that's even a trick I (and others) have used repeteadly to avoid (some) image post-processing. When you have a preferred orientation in mind and the imaged object seems to have a different idea in mind, rotating the camera so that all images are oriented the same way is often the best solution.
" When you have a preferred orientation in mind and the imaged object seems to have a different idea in mind, rotating the camera so that all images are oriented the same way is often the best solution."
A microscope normally inverts the image compared. This means that when you move the specimen on the stage the image moves in the opposite direction. It's not difficult to get used to this, especially when using a mechanical stage. (I'm surprised the microscopist in the story had a problem with this.)
Cue using a microfiche reader. The lens is rotatable and has the same effect as rotating the camera in the story. If you put the fiche in the wrong way round so the text appears upside down you can just rotate the lens but then you have to move the fiche in the opposite direction to the way you want to move the image. Again, it's not difficult to adapt, at least I never found it so. But if the fiche was photographed to the writing is sideways on you have to rotate the lens a quarter turn; that fixes the image orientation but then sliding the fiche on one axis moves the image in the same direction whilst sliding it on the other axis moves it in the opposite direction.
I have a client who holds the mouse like that.
Also I sometimes have to tell clients to do that when they have inadvertently rotated the screen using whatever arcane keyboard shortcut Intel's awful GPU tray app uses, so they can open the app and rotate it back to normal.
I do believe it as, a long time ago (while in uni), I used to teach IT introduction courses to secretaries and the like who would, for the most, be using a computer for the first time in that course. Well, lo and behold, once one of the trainees had _exactly_ the same problem with using the mouse. I didn't laugh though, as so many novice mistakes were made there that it was just par for the course (no pun intended). And it was for being patient that I got to be well regarded by trainees and asked to do several such courses.
"I used to teach IT introduction courses to secretaries and the like who would, for the most, be using a computer for the first time in that course."
A former acquaintance got a job working for the Civil Service back in the day of floppies and was sent on a "computer course". The instructor began by saying "Now this is mouth A and this is mouth B"...at which she held up her hand and announced "My husband is a computer scientist, can I go home and do this without the baby talk?"
In all my time I've never heard this one before. Yay for Fridays.
It's perfectly natural. Maybe more so with some mice than others.
When I first took delivery of a mouse[1], I wondered why things moved the wrong way. Had I hooked it up wrong, or missed a setting? Oh, right, I'm supposed to hold it the other way round.
[1] From memory, 1987, with an Acorn Archimedes. None of the machines I used at work had yet acquired mice.
""rotated the mouse 180 degrees, so the 'tail' could point away from her"
In all my time I've never heard this one before. Yay for Fridays."
I sort of have in that I encountered someone who decided that the mouse lead going towards the back of the desk was impractical. If it came towards the front, she figured she could take the mouse off the desk and put it on top of the PC (that was underneath) when not in use.
I pointed out to her how the mouse would work if she did that - but she only finally accepted what I said when she actually tried it, and promptly put it back how it was before.
I think I've posted before about one of our sales staff who went to do some in-house training for some of the software we produce.
She sat with one young lady who had a wireless mouse and keyboard, and consistently, over the duration of the training period, the client would grab her mouse upside down, and then try moving it, and clicking it, and then whinge about how "she's told IT about her mouse being broken loads of times, but they never fix it".
Our salesperson said she had to hold herself back from just snatching the mouse from the client and showing her how to use it, all through the training session. She said afterwards she was rehearsing in her mind the old question: "do you still have the box your PC came in?"
do these people have five thumbs and one opposable finger?
There's always some people like this. But as a variation on the upside down screen, you can do that with many laptops (even when they are on a docking station with a proper keyboard and external monitor). CTRL ALT <down arrow> often flips the screen image through 180 degrees. An absolute joy when you find a machine somebody has walked away from without locking, if they don't know how to undo that.
"with many laptops [...] CTRL ALT <down arrow> often flips the screen image through 180 degrees"
That's a 'feature' of Intel graphics drivers back in the day across a whole different bunch of machines, desktops included. While I appreciate the functionality of being able to easily rotate the output, I wonder why they decided to have the hotkeys enabled by default because it's just easy enough to trigger that users can do it accidentally but never work out how to change it back.
The "good news" is that if you connect to the PC/laptop remotely, the image is the right way up on your screen so easy to resolve- and then disable the hotkey.
I mention this, because even though you tell them over the phone what keys you need to press to resolve it, it "doesn't work, still upside down"
Ah yes, the Intel hotkeys. I had a setting in group policy to disable the entire hotkeys/tray icon thing on classroom PCs, of course, but didn't think it was necessary to do it on staff laptops... Until one senior teacher came in one Monday morning during the school holidays with his laptop screen turned through 90° by one of his tween/early-teen sons (who, to be fair, had probably done it by accident while playing a game or something - they were nice boys and would have fixed it for him had they known what to do) and had been struggling with using it that way since Friday evening!
On a similar note, I used to leave A3000 computers at school with negative mouse-speed settings... That, of course, simply inverted it and couldn't be saved to NVRAM (although you could save a ridiculously-fast setting).
Also called the "not my problem, we have a guy for that" syndrome where people seem to actively forget how to even open a window if they reckon there might be someone they can goad into doing it for them. Often observed not only in office settings but also in households with at least one elderly relative.
"not my problem, we have a guy for that" - oh how I can agree with that. The school I work at had an intake of new teachers at the start of September, most newly qualified & straight out of uni. One of them decided that the IT support dept (me) was there to do everything concerning IT. The classic was 'I need file 'x' moving from the Maths dept folder to the Temporary network folder by 2pm today (this was at 1:45). When I phoned him and asked what his problem was (I was thinking lost network connection on the laptop or mebbe the wireless was down???) I was told that 'moving files is IT's job, I'm a teacher so I teach, you're IT so do IT stuff!'
Needless to say the file got 'lost' in the move
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Also called the "not my problem, we have a guy for that" syndrome where people seem to actively forget how to even open a window if they reckon there might be someone they can goad into doing it for them.
Or they can't be arsed to do it. The wife is like that, I'll be seated with my laptop, she'll be up and wandering about (closer to the kitchen than I am), and she'll head towards the bedroom and ask if I could get her a glass of icewater...
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