My PC is broken, said user typing in white on a white background Welcome again to On-Call, The Register's free therapy session for those who perform tech support chores and need to get the worst ones off their chest. This week, meet "George" who in 2002 worked in "a metal service center in Athens" that had just acquired its very first PCs to replace dumb terminals slaved to an AIX server. …
Probably they've been bribed to buy some, but then those went to the homes of the company execs, I guess. Also, it's much easier to alter a paper trail for "business reasons".
There are reasons if Greece put itself in a dead end - and not all them are because of the "evil EU".
It isn't just Greece, there are still companies in the UK, Germany, Poland, Hungary and points in-between that still don't use computers today. It is becoming rarer, but they still exist.
As I said in the other post, we were still getting new customers in 2015/2016 in Germany that were getting their first PCs, because of changes in the law that required all livestock and food product movements be electronically recorded and transmitted to a central agency.
I was working for a company providing hardware, software and services to the meat industry and we were still encountering customers in 2015 that had never used a computer. It was only the changes forcing the electronic trace-ability of livestock and meat through the supply and production chains that forced many of them to get computers at all.
Many were still writing everything in paper ledgers and saw no reason for these "new fangled" computers, it just made their job more complicated and expensive.
I've had lots of fun with the white on white problem, other such fun can be had with taking a print screen of the desktop, hiding all the icons then setting it as the desktop background. Another jolly jape is on certain intel graphics chipsets and drivers that allow you to rotate the screen with ctrl + alt + arrow key, a quick tap as you walk past someones desk is all you need, the look of confusion and the attempts to turn the monitor the right way round can be quite funny. My name? Oh yes, It's Mr B*stard.
well , aside from windups ( we confine them to IT staff * ) We've had a few users manage to turn their own screens around with the Intel keys. Its fun to pretend not to believe them. Its really hard to see how even the dumbest users could accidentally go white on white.
* I can remotely turn peoples screens over using a combination of psexec and vbs sendkeys command :)
I didn't see it myself but a former colleague said he'd seen a user with an upside down screen. They had a laptop connected to a monitor on a desktop stand. The user had an issue with some software and had requested IT pay a visit. When he got there he spotted she'd turned the monitor upside down. This wasn't a trivial thing to do as it required unscrewing the VESA plate on the stand. The reason was she'd accidentally used the key combination to turn the screen upside down. Thinking she'd broken it and would be in trouble hadn't mentioned it to anyone. She'd had to use the mouse upside down but was so worried about being yelled at had kept quiet. Once it was explained to her that this could be corrected without fuss she apologised and things were put back the right way up. An email then went to all employees explaining that IT support were here for a reason and like the name suggested to support them. Please let us know of any issues rather than suffer in silence.
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She'd had to use the mouse upside down but was so worried about being yelled at had kept quiet.
...
No, if she had turned the monitor upside down the mouse would work normally.
No, it wouldn't. If you move the mouse from right to left, it goes from left to right on the upside-down screen. And if you move the mouse up, it goes down on the upside-down screen.
Turn the mouse over too, and all works OK. Though how you press the buttons is an interesting question in itself.
"Its really hard to see how even the dumbest users could accidentally go white on white."
Don't.
When my mother uses a word processor or browser, she has a uniquely special talent of discovering functions and keypresses nobody knew existed. One time she had Firefox displaying English text back to front (as if Hebrew). I just restarted it, too much brain ache to try to work out what the hell just happened...
"she has a uniquely special talent of discovering functions and keypresses nobody knew existed."
Did she ever find the key combo to turn on shift lock on a PC keyboard? It was so long ago now, I can't remember if it was a keyboard thing, a DOS thing or a Windows thing. I remember it happening to me a few times and have a vague memory that I might have unplugged/replugged they keyboard to "fix" it, which implied it was a keyboard issue. I never found what they key combo was.
They do it by not understanding what the implications of clicking on something are or what the buttons do, or how to reverse this. BUT, it's a flaw in an OS that allows foreground colour and background colour to be set as the same by a user. ANY action that creates an accidental ( as in unconscious) or non-reversible immobilisation should be made very very hard.
It often was not clear on your 16 color screen. . . The stupid thing is that a program wou;d let you set your fg and background the same. The hard part was typing blind to get it back. Thimk bumping the wrong language on an old android and trying to figure out which setting in chinese says language or whatever. Only worse.
For Mr Bastard you need to turn to autocorrect.
In your spell checker of choice simply set an autocorrect rule to change the users surname to a suitable superlative.
I found this out on my dads copy of MS Word in the mid 90's, he went from Mr Rage to Mr Old Git. Thing is I forgot and he didn't notice for a really long time. Apparently his new accountant questioned it, I'm guessing at least 9 months after I made the change.
As a mischievous student at college, some peers and I found if you pulled the paper out during a print of a particular model of thermal laser printer the colleges had, the letters would peel off the paper and stick to the print rollers. Subsequent print jobs would then come out with extra letters or words scattered liberally across them.
For the life of me I don't recall now which type of printer suffered this odd printing issue, but the hilarity to be had watching the confusion on people's faces as they proof read their prints to find unexplainable additional text on their documents was brilliant.
As a more mature dev now, aside from the occasional easter egg in code, I'm only prone to swapping keyboards and mice around on back-to-back facing PC's now.
Pity the poor Scots with MS Word auto correct. During dealings I had with the Scottish Office many moons ago one of the senior mandarins had a first name of Angus. Just about every report emanating from his office had the autocorrect kick in and we received many letters signed "Anus [surname]"
"I've had lots of fun with the white on white problem"
It was not fun fixing in the win95 days. It was memorise the keystrokes, and they could change depeding on the grapics driver. no nice VGA boot option, or offline registry tools. Keystrokes or reinstall.
Where I was working didn't do interdepartmental billing at that stage. I would have loved to do a full reinstall and have the cheeky bastards who pulled the stunt explain the bill to their boss.
"Or when someone thinks they have REDACTED a sensitive bit of information"
There was a PDF linked from this site a few years back. Something to do with smart meters IIRC. Lots of redacted content.
Yeah. ^A then ^C then switch to a word processor and ^V. There you go, all the text.
"Where I was working didn't do interdepartmental billing at that stage. I would have loved to do a full reinstall and have the cheeky bastards who pulled the stunt explain the bill to their boss."
I did contract hardware maintenance back then. There were a few call-outs to none working screens which turned out to be that some wag had turned the brightness and contrast controls all the way down. Sadly for them, that's not covered by the annual service contract fee so they get a none-contract call-out charge.
Take screenshot of desktop, turn it upside-down, and set as background image. Hide icons. Move menu bar to top of screen. THEN turn screen upside down...
My employer requires us to lock our computers (Win-L) when we step away. I've been known to tamper with the machines of co-workers who fail to do so as a "reminder" of proper computer security. In one case, I changed the 'incoming email' sound to a rather loud sheep bleating. He laughed when he figured out what happened, and then kept it that way - which was HILARIOUS when it went off while he was presenting during a meeting. It was so loud everybody in the room jumped, then burst out laughing.
Support fail, rather than user based.
Last week someone rang to say " Mouse not working on important PC on reception. Have tried other mouses" . The call is logged one severity point higher than normal as its important (ie only) reception pc.
Our support super hero springs into action and orders a new mouse from stores and then stops the clock while mouse is procured (somehow thats allowed) .
Unfortunately, that's quite common at a lot of places. Tickets are often allowed to be "pended" and hence have the SLA counter paused if you're either waiting on the user for something (more info required and they're not answering phone/e-mails), or waiting on a third party (ie, order to arrive, PC supplier to come and fix the PC, etc). Given that a lot of larger companies grade their support personnel by their SLA metrics, finding feasible and justifiable ways to pause the SLA counter on tickets is quite common.
On a different note, my favourite one was from a few years back - made all the more amusing that the user that showed up at my desk previously worked for general IT support (before moving over to providing ERP support). Anyway, the user handed me a faulty mouse and asked for a replacement. I calmly turned the mouse upside-down and pointed out the strip of gaffer tape that one of their colleagues had applied to the sensor for a laugh. Cue a red-faced user making a hasty retreat!
"either waiting on the user for something (more info required and they're not answering phone/e-mails), or waiting on a third party (ie, order to arrive, PC supplier to come and fix the PC"
Yeah - waiting for the user is a definite clock stopper , but the all the other examples come down to what was agreed in the contract i guess - even if its a internal contract between departments.
If the users say they will provide their own spares for example, then its a clock stopper when thats needed , but if they only really pay for the bare minimum in SLAs/ parts supply / support hours etc etc it ends up with you not being able to provide a credible support service , which makes us look bad and is incredibly frustrating for the end users - who think its our fault.
Example A - I worked at a company that provided wifi for other small companies who never paid for enough coverage for their sites - just enough to tell their customers ( the public) they had wifi.
This resulted in a helpline who could do little more than sympathise the user, or say things like "Have wonder around waving your ipad in the air and look for a mast thingy"
"I calmly turned the mouse upside-down and pointed out the strip of gaffer tape that one of their colleagues had applied to the sensor for a laugh. "
I once saw a user destroy a telephone because someone had done this to the hookswitch and they couldn't figure out how to answer incoming calls.
I work in an "agile" work space with docks and large screens on each desk. I had a user complaining the other day that the screen wasn't working. I knew the screen had been working the previous day. I suggested they change desks but they were insistent that I look at the issue. Amazing what happens when you press the "On" button on the screen. The old help desk check list that started with "Is it plugged in?" closely followed by "Is it switched on?" should be second nature.
The number of users that have inadvertently rotated (or flipped) their screens and not been able to get it back to the correct view is amazing. Now I show them how to turn off the "Hot key".
It is always fun to switch the buttons on a person's mouse to "Left handed" mode.
Who remembers the "Good old days" when you could steal the ball from someone's mouse...
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