Grad sends warning to manager: Be nice to our kit and it'll be nice to you Friday has come around once more, which means we at El Reg get to regale you, dear reader, with tech support tales of the great and good in our weekly On-Call column. This time, we travel back to the start of the decade with “Mike”, then a fresh-faced grad holding a keen belief in good manners, and a taste for the mischievous …
Don't forget that No Means No. It's a right pain in the arse if your computer slaps you with a restraining order.
*Cough*
Not that I've ever had that happen to me personally. NopeA NopeA Nope. NeverEver NeverEver Never. It happened, ahhhh..., to a friend. Yeah! A friend! That's it!
I'll get my coat, it's the one with the pockets full of ASBO notices...
Well, speaking as one who actually has had to fly from London to Helsinki with 30 minutes' notice to replace a cartridge in a laser printer ("HM Ambassador needs the placeholders printed out tonight, if this does not happen it will be YOU whom I blame and it will be in writing. Get .. it .. done"), I can testify that sometimes all you need to do is to:
1) Switch off the printer
2) Take out the laser cartridge.
3) Whisper gently to the printer .. "Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet" works well.
4) Put the cartridge back into the printer.
5) Restart printer
Cost to HMG of 1 business class return London to Helsinki? Over £3000
The look on the idiot's face when his ambassador got the bill sent to him: Priceless
"Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet"
I'm reminded of the Spitting Image sketch where Pope John Paul II has to read someone the Last Rites, which goes something like "Spiritus Sanctum, de-dum, de-dum... I don't know the rest but hey, no-one ever comes back to complain !!!"
We have a wonderfully cheap xerox printer, who when handled gently, produces excellent results. The build quality is appalling, being made mostly of brittle plastic.
A colleague would vent his frustration about paper jams (paper not loaded neatly) by slamming the cassette shut. Cue taking out trays, reseating / replacing rollers etc.
When asked if he would treat a hasselblad or sinar in the same way, of course not.
As a finishing stage, the printer is stroked, and spoken kindly to. Then it works.
I’m now no longer certain that I’ve not been unaware of micro switches.
At the opposite end of the scale was a large rogue Laser printer in one of our offices. We had many of these devices and most were loaded by users successfully, having trained them to be gentle, careful about engaging toner cartridges in the right slots etc. The exact same model in one office would only respond to extreme force. Follow the guidance properly and the damned thing would throw errors on every tray, ask you to check for non existent paper jams and insist on the whole rigmarole of opening and closing doors and trays in its preferred sequence before condescending to print anything. The only way to guaranteed instant performance was to shove the toner cartridge in with force, this seemed to cow the thing into good behaviour.
it never once misbehaved when an engineer attended and even an internal investigation failed to reveal any issues. It became the one printer in the building which required a service desk visit to change the cartridge. I assume the annoyance of having to walk 300 yards to slam in a toner cartridge resulted in the appropriate force being generated. Just as well it was in the HQ offices and not at the other end of the county.
I'm sure I've posted this tale before, but it bears repeating:
A colleague of mine was working on a desktop machine which steadfastly refused to boot cleanly.
All the component parts, (motherboard, CPU, Fan, RAM, PSU, Video card, network card, etc) had been tested in other machines and were known to work, but put them all together in one case and it wouldn't work.
Finally, in exasperation, my colleague picked the whole thing up and threw it out of an (open) second-floor window.
When he had trudged downstairs and retrieved it from the flowerbed it was occupying, he emptied out the soil and plugged it in, and it worked first time.
...
On the workbench in the comms room here we have the skeletal remains of a Dell PE860 with a large screwdriver embedded in its mainboard. It is left there as a salutary lesson to all the servers in the racks...
This post has been deleted by its author
"Never underestimate the power of CHRIS especially if he owns an impressive selection of hammers."
This Chris was given a baseball bat as a leaving present from his last job. "We heard you've got more clients in the new job, so we thought this might come in handy - you'll have to add your own razor blades and rusty nails though !"
I have even used it in anger on one occasion - nobody was injured but it made a hell of a racket when I smashed it against a table to break up a fight in my office. Peacekeeping Through Superior Firepower, you could say.
@Alister
I think that I have posted this before as well, but it is, hopefully, relevant. Back in the days when I was responsible for a few hundred computers in a very large public utility we had a standard “fix” for our standard original IBM XT and AT PCs - Any that misbehaved were switched off and carefully raised ~2cm above the desk by lifting them with a hand on each side, then dropped. Usually they started working after they were switched back on. We had several theories as to why, including the sudden deceleration reseated loose chips and cards, or that it acted as a veiled threat to the machine that the next drop would be further...
"a standard “fix” for our standard original IBM XT and AT PCs - Any that misbehaved were switched off and carefully raised ~2cm above the desk by lifting them with a hand on each side, then dropped"
XT's were notorious for dry joints, so that explains that one.
ATs and others with that horrible ceramic 286 had problems with the socket fingers losing spring tension over time due to the heat of the processor (I left a burned on fingerprnt on one as a momento once) and there was a reasonable amount of thermal creep due to heating/cooling cycles. Shocking them was the best was of making sure you had a good electro-mechanical contact.
The best mod you could do to an AT was a heatsink and fan.
Back when I used to work for Radio Shack (the US equivalent of what in Britain? Curry's? PCWorld?), we were shipped nifty little 10 (maybe 20) MB external HDDs to run the store POS ("Point Of Sale," not the obvious acronym) systems on. There was pretty much company-wide failure of the devices to boot or otherwise operate as designed (Total Inability to Support Usual Performance) when coming up from a powered off state. I came up with the ingenious solution of lifting the front of the units by around 2cm, then letting them falll on to the desktop that they were supported by during boot. This apparently unshipped the heads on the drives, allowing them to operate properly from there on - at least until until powered down the following night as mandated by corporate.
All was well until I received a call from the CIO "asking" that I cease recommending that particular solution in our region as a way to get the (g*ddamn) systems to come up every day. That call was shortly followed by a firmware patch that unshipped the heads properly...
About 12 years ago there was a break in in an office where I worked and my computer was stolen, But as the thieves were disturbed it was thrown out of a first floor window into the flower beds below before they legged it . To my great surprise it started up fine even though it was left outside for a couple of days in the rain until found by a gardener. But I DID get a new one as there had been put manure on the flowerbed and when it got warm the fans wafted 'the smell of a stable' around the office.
"But I DID get a new one as there had been put manure on the flowerbed and when it got warm the fans wafted 'the smell of a stable' around the office."
I hope you donated the old one to a riding stables nearby, so it could waft the smell of an office around the stables.
Absolutely. I remember having Motorola mobiles thrust on us because (working for an airline) at the time they were the only quad-band ones available. One of the guys going home for the weekend complained his was not working and he was supposed to be on-call. After several minutes of his moaning, I grabbed it off him and chucked it on the (carpeted) floor. Worked perfectly after that.
A little trick I had only discovered in frustration having chucked mine into the car passenger footwell.
It became the "standard" fix for these Motorola phones. (None of this "turn it off and on again" nonsense!)
*Nodding happily* YupYupYupYupYUP!
I used to brandish a large BallPeenHammer in one hand & cackle sadisticly "Behave or I'll reprogram your ass with !A HAMMER!"
Cue the computer equiv of a cowering, simpering, meek little mouse trapped in the corner by a large, hungry, Evil Cat.
If the machine tried to bite I'd simply pound on the internal chassis struts to remind it that I wasn't kidding.
I'm a Creatively Vindictive Evil Bastard, yesindeedydo! =-D
*Scampers away laughing maniacally & swinging a hammer*
-Just remember, violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. The rest of us don't wait until it's the only option. (an old ASR sig)
Maxim 6: If violence isn't your last resort, you didn't resort to enough of it.
-The Seventy Maxims of Maximally Effective Mercenaries.
" It became the one printer in the building which required a service desk visit to change the cartridge."
It should have become the one printer in the building to become a doorstop.
Honestly, life is too short to deal with a single misbehaving printer. if you can't fix it, then junk it.
"Honestly, life is too short to deal with a single misbehaving printer. if you can't fix it, then junk it."
He did say they were big printers. If they are worth upwards of a few thousand, what's a 5 minute trip out of the office every week or three in the great scheme of things? Especially for service desk staff who either are out and about regularly anyway, or if not, might be pleased with the chance to get out of the office and go for a walk once in a while.
"I assume the annoyance of having to walk 300 yards to slam in a toner cartridge resulted in the appropriate force being generated."
Most likely one of the wavy flag sensors being lifted out of place by removing the carts and then not dropping back into place when the carts are installed gently. Forcefully replacing the carts, or just a general thump will usually fix that as a workaround. The proper fix is to find it and clean it, though that is sometimes far more expensive than just working around it because sometimes those flags are deep in the bowels where even the most hardened printer engineers are afraid of going (ie an almost total strip-down to get there)
And its antonym...
In my role as unpaid "tech guy" for family and friends I have frequently had the phone ring ten minutes after fixing something only for the voice on the end to say "it's not working again". So either I exude a technological fixing aura or the poor IT equipment is subject to abuse from the less technically literate and simply gives up.....
Mayhap courses in technological sympathy at school would help alleviate this Industrial 4.0 disease.
"They've evolved to the point where they can recognise a tech' who actually knows what they are doing, so behave properly in fear of being molested."
This can even happen remotely. Only this week SWMBO's sister rang to say could I come and look at her laptop on Thursday afternoon and described a catalogue of woes leading me to wonder if it was malware (quietly wondering what sites her husband might have visited if he'd borrowed it). Oh, no, it was the cat that had walked across the keys.
On Thursday morning she rung to say it had "fixed itself". Probably fear of being molested by somebody who didn't know what they were doing (it runs Windows) and might have taken the step of installing Linux.
At one company I was the "computer guy": network, software development, DBA, helpdesk, "and crew of the captain's gig." We had one user who was always having some kind of problem with his computer.
One day the boss said to him, "Why is your computer always doing that? It never does that when [my name] is around." He replied, "It wouldn't dare!"
"They've evolved to the point where they can recognise a tech' who actually knows what they are doing, so behave properly in fear of being molested."
Known in the industry as a "faulty technician sensor". I never did find out if it was the technician or the sensor that is considered faulty. I believe other industries have similar terms. Or perhaps that's "Fawlty technician sensor". I have seen it in action many times, recalcitrant computer gear that suddenly starts to work if even the threat of having me poke at it is mentioned within earshot of the device.
"I keep a variety of hammers in plain view of all our printing devices."
http://goodomenslexicon.org/articles/crowleys-houseplants/
"Every once in a while, Crowley picks a plant that is not growing too well and carries it around the flat to the other plants, telling them “‘Say goodbye to your friend. He just couldn’t cut it…'”. He then takes the plant out of the flat, and brings home “a large, empty flower pot” which he “leave[s] somewhere conspicuously around the flat”. Because of this, his plants are “the most luxurious, verdant, and beautiful in London”, but “also the most terrified”."
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