High Jinx - Post-It Note Fun
Sometimes the best "jokes" can be those ones
done in complete innocence.
You do something that you have done numerous
times in the past and it is the other person that brings things
on themselves.
One such time involved something as innocent as a
Post-It note and caused another technical support person a good
two hours of work that really they didn't need to do.
I was actually the "innocent instigator" here and
to protect people from embarrassment I shall call the other
technical support engineer "John". That is a false name just on
the off chance people who know me put two and two together and
happen to still work with the person in question.
It was day like any other in Technical
Support. We'd taken our usual mix of "silly enquiries" and those
of a more serious nature. Two of our department were "off-site"
fixing machines leaving just two of us to man the phones and to
deal with the seemingly never-ending pile of machines on our in-shelf.
I remember taking one call and the person I
was speaking to immediately asked to speak to "John".
"John" was one of the technicians out "off-site"
so I asked if I could help. A few minutes later it became
apparent that the problem was out of my area of expertise, at
the time I had no knowledge of Novell systems and I was really
going to have to get "John" to call this customer back.
I innocently wrote the customers details on a
Post-It note with a very brief description of what the problem
was and then, so as he wouldn't miss the message, I stuck the
Post-It note in the middle of "John's" monitor.
Around lunchtime John returned. He saw the
note on his screen as I remember him asking me more questions
about the problem, answers I was really unable to give him. I
heard him sit down and power his PC up, in those days they were
a lot nosier than they are today and soon all the fans and hard
drives in his system started to spin-up.
There were soon some noises of distress coming
from "John". His PC was powered up however he was being greeted
with a totally blank screen. This was not good, there were no
error beeps coming from his machine but after three reboots all
he was getting was a black screen even though everything sounded
like it should be working.
John went down to Stock Control and booked out
a replacement Graphics Card. This seemed a good place to start,
no display could mean a faulty graphics card. So he started to
take the case off his system, removed the old card and inserted
the new one and powered his machine back up.
He was greeted with exactly the same error, his
PC made all the right noises, the beep at "post" but still he
was getting nothing more than a black screen. "John" could do
nothing until he had his machine working. Anybody who has ever
worked in Technical Support will know that talking a customer
through something without having that something in front of you
is near impossible.
"John" returned to Stock Control and this time
booked himself out some new memory modules. Again this seemed
fair enough, something had gone very wrong with his system,
something had fried and memory seemed like a good guess. While
down there he also booked himself out a replacement CPU - it had
to be one of the other.
More time passed.
"John" had tried the memory without success
and the CPU was making no difference either, he was fast running
out of ideas. As a last ditch attempt he returned to Stock
Control and booked himself out a replacement monitor. It was a
long shot but maybe this was the faulty component and that is
why he was getting a black screen.
It was after the replacement of the monitor that
he discovered the horrible truth and we all saw what had been
done in pure innocence had caused poor "John" a lot of work.
The replacement monitor indeed had helped
things out, suddenly "John" was seeing things on his screen and
we had a "fix" although not quite the fix he wanted.
There across the centre of this monitor were
the words "Please enter password".
"John" was the only one of us that used a BIOS
level password, one of those that meant the machine couldn't be
booted up until the password had been entered. By a total fluke
when I had placed the Post-It note on "John's" monitor I had
placed it exactly where the "Please enter password" words would
appear before the machine would boot.
Nearly two hours later "John" had a PC that
would boot and all he needed to do was remove the Post-It note I
had placed innocently on his monitor.
Of course by now after entering his password the
BIOS was complaining about a "New Processor" and "Invalid Memory
Size" but at least he had something that was now booting as it
should do!
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