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Midimusic.org.uk Computer Humour, Hardware

2.3 Monitors

You'd think people would realize that a monitor is similar to a TV. It receives a signal that represents an image, then displays said image.

A new technician was sent into the field to install a new video card. About the time they began to wonder if something was wrong, the technician called in. "I have the monitor apart, I just can't figure out where to install the video card."

I had a very irate user call me:

I told him I would come down and look at it. When I examined the terminal, I found that the fuse holder in the back had worked loose, and the cap had fallen off and gotten lost. The fuse would slowly slide out from the vibrations on the desk, and the terminal would shut down. The user would reach around the terminal and push on the bare fuse with his finger.

You'd think one or two of those shocks would have been enough.

I received a call from a medical facility. They were trying to get a 286 with an amber screen working. They brought it in saying that the screen wasn't showing the prompt and several of the menu options. We turned on the machine and sure enough, some stuff was missing. Me and my tech partner contemplated trying a different monitor, to see if the card was still good. Suddenly, on impulse, I reached back and turned the contrast knob up. Suddenly, there were the missing menu options and the prompt. We put "contrastual adjustment" on the bill.

Last week, I installed a computer for a co-worker. It was the very first computer she had ever used. She called me early the next morning and said her monitor was fuzzy looking and wanted to know if she needed to buy an antenna for it.

I told her no, it was cable ready.

I work with second and third line support in a bank in Norway. We have about 600 users, but we have one that I actively try to avoid.

The first time she called and said her monitor didn't work. I got up there, and it looked fine. I tried to explain that there was probably something wrong with the software, but she insisted it was the monitor, so I changed it just to make her shut up. The next day she called and said it happened again. The new monitor, she said, didn't work either. I went up to see. The monitor was fine; she had just exited Windows somehow and was at the MS-DOS prompt. Before I could explain this to her, she said:

A few weeks later I had to check how much memory the computers on that floor had.

For a while, my monitor at home had been acting up, and unbeknownst to me, my father had went and bought a reformatting disk which he believed would fix the monitor. One day, I got home and found that the monitor had given out, and he had put in his 'repair disk' to 'save' our hard drive. He fumbled through the program without any display, and the end result was the deletion of everything on the hard drive.

When my son turned on his new computer for the first time, the following message box appeared:

Received at our help desk:

The computer won't boot. User replaced the monitor, plugged it in, and the computer still won't boot. Need assistance ASAP.

A user called to ask us if we had any nuclear radiation shielding screens in stock. (All he wanted was an anti-glare screen for his monitor.)

The proper response to this, of course, is:

The Assistant Manager over engineering called to say that her PC had suddenly started acting up, the words she was typing were bouncing all over the place. Fellow tech went to check on her PC and discovered that she'd moved her electric fan from her desk to the top of her monitor.

I ran the computer department for a collection company and one day a user walked up to me and told me she had received a payment in that day, but her screen wasn't flashing to notify her (the right corner of the screen normally would reverse color and flash 'Payment Received'). Then she went on to tell me that she was pretty sure the bulb was just burned out and needed to be replaced.

One time, several employees complained about having green lettering when they wanted amber. One employee got mad at me because I "wouldn't" change the screen color -- because, after all, all I had to do was put in an "orange fuse."

This guy had a 14 inch monitor. As with most, the monitor cable's plug was missing a few unnecessary pins. I explained that this was normal and, in fact, a good thing.

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