Many, many years ago I took an A+ certification course because it was provided free by the state. And a fat lot of good it did me, but it was amusing for a while all the same. (I tried to opt to just take the stupid exam, but no, you have to sit through the course.)
We were given various old office PCs to fiddle with, and would use them throughout the course for all of the electronic learning materials. In order to instill in us a sense of the Troubleshooting Spirit, I suppose, the course’s instructor would deliberately fuck with everyone’s machine overnight so you’d have to track down what he did in order to get yours working again. Naturally this resulted in much wailing and gnashing of teeth, whining, sulking, and impressive displays of learned helplessness from the class which was always amusing to watch.
For me, anyway. I was the only person there with any computer chops and at the place I’d worked at prior to this I was the only IT person simply by default. I’ve been plugging computers together since I was big enough to hold a screwdriver. Have you ever smoked a motherboard by failing to put the two AT power plugs in with the black wires in the middle, relative to each other? Ever made your own cable select IDE ribbon by carefully chopping out pin 28’s wire with a razor blade? No? Then I don’t want to hear it.
It didn’t take long before I was forbidden to help other people with their troubleshooting stuff. Fine, I’ll sit here and play Doom until everyone’s finally ready.
I tried, and failed, to convey the notion that messing with my PC was a futile effort. Short of outright stealing some vital component from it, you weren’t going to keep me down for more than about a minute.
Anyway, the moral of the story is that most of the problems deliberately instilled in people’s machines involved unplugging some cable or another, and motherfuckers never figured this out. It’s truly astonishing how resistant people will be to considering the most obvious of solutions and starting there. Mind you, this was basically the entire point of the class so I didn’t hold out much hope for the future IT careers of my peers, to put it mildly.
One day I found that the instructor had backed my network cable out slightly but left it hanging in the socket, unclipped, just enough to look still plugged in but not make contact. Obviously the lack of blinkenlights on the jack was a major clue, but this stumped quite a few of our recruits. I must have given him a sarcastic look or something when I clicked it back in, because the next day he got clever and covered the contacts on the end of the plug with a piece of clear tape and fully plugged it back in. That was devious. Not only can you not trust the user to lie to you, but now we have to contend with active sabotage!
I got him back, though. I got into his presentation computer one day and discovered there was an unused USB header on the motherboard. One header-to-port breakout cable later and I plugged the receiver for my wireless mouse and keyboard into his machine inside the case and started messing with his cursor surreptitiously. What goes around comes around, Mr. funny guy.
I’ve heard variations of that as well, things like “could you check if the contacts are bent?” or “plug it out, wait ten seconds for any static to drain, then plug it back in firmly”.
If it works, just shrug it off as “sometimes cables are fiddly” so the user doesn’t feel like you’re blaming them for anything. Odds are they’ll realise it’s not seated properly and be glad they got away with their error.
I billed 6 hours for troubleshooting something that was broken because the cable was not plugged in despite them saying it was.
I got him to recheck the cable by telling him to pull it out and clean the contact surfaces.
Many, many years ago I took an A+ certification course because it was provided free by the state. And a fat lot of good it did me, but it was amusing for a while all the same. (I tried to opt to just take the stupid exam, but no, you have to sit through the course.)
We were given various old office PCs to fiddle with, and would use them throughout the course for all of the electronic learning materials. In order to instill in us a sense of the Troubleshooting Spirit, I suppose, the course’s instructor would deliberately fuck with everyone’s machine overnight so you’d have to track down what he did in order to get yours working again. Naturally this resulted in much wailing and gnashing of teeth, whining, sulking, and impressive displays of learned helplessness from the class which was always amusing to watch.
For me, anyway. I was the only person there with any computer chops and at the place I’d worked at prior to this I was the only IT person simply by default. I’ve been plugging computers together since I was big enough to hold a screwdriver. Have you ever smoked a motherboard by failing to put the two AT power plugs in with the black wires in the middle, relative to each other? Ever made your own cable select IDE ribbon by carefully chopping out pin 28’s wire with a razor blade? No? Then I don’t want to hear it.
It didn’t take long before I was forbidden to help other people with their troubleshooting stuff. Fine, I’ll sit here and play Doom until everyone’s finally ready.
I tried, and failed, to convey the notion that messing with my PC was a futile effort. Short of outright stealing some vital component from it, you weren’t going to keep me down for more than about a minute.
Anyway, the moral of the story is that most of the problems deliberately instilled in people’s machines involved unplugging some cable or another, and motherfuckers never figured this out. It’s truly astonishing how resistant people will be to considering the most obvious of solutions and starting there. Mind you, this was basically the entire point of the class so I didn’t hold out much hope for the future IT careers of my peers, to put it mildly.
One day I found that the instructor had backed my network cable out slightly but left it hanging in the socket, unclipped, just enough to look still plugged in but not make contact. Obviously the lack of blinkenlights on the jack was a major clue, but this stumped quite a few of our recruits. I must have given him a sarcastic look or something when I clicked it back in, because the next day he got clever and covered the contacts on the end of the plug with a piece of clear tape and fully plugged it back in. That was devious. Not only can you not trust the user to lie to you, but now we have to contend with active sabotage!
I got him back, though. I got into his presentation computer one day and discovered there was an unused USB header on the motherboard. One header-to-port breakout cable later and I plugged the receiver for my wireless mouse and keyboard into his machine inside the case and started messing with his cursor surreptitiously. What goes around comes around, Mr. funny guy.
Tell them to swap ends, then you know both ends were reseated at minimum
I’ve heard variations of that as well, things like “could you check if the contacts are bent?” or “plug it out, wait ten seconds for any static to drain, then plug it back in firmly”.
If it works, just shrug it off as “sometimes cables are fiddly” so the user doesn’t feel like you’re blaming them for anything. Odds are they’ll realise it’s not seated properly and be glad they got away with their error.