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  3. Tech Support Humour
  4. Power

Midimusic.org.uk Computer Humour, Hardware

2.1 Power

Most people understand that electrical appliances require electrical power to work. But computers, with their surprisingly effective ability to eliminate rational thought, cause many people to forget completely that computers require electrical power.

I worked with an individual who plugged his power strip back into itself and for the life of him could not understand why his system would not turn on.

At my high school, a computer science class student was having trouble getting his computer to work. The computer was one of those were the monitor could plug into it for power instead of having the monitor plug directly into the wall. Well, this student's computer had the monitor plugged into the wall, and the computer plugged into itself.

So I plugged the computer in and turned it on. I showed him that it was working, then I turned it off.

He reached over and pressed the reset button repeatedly.

There was a fresh influx of new employees at my place of work, which used Sun workstations. These particular workstations had extremely well hidden power switches, so I was fielding questions about turning on the computers for a few weeks. Most were simply "Where's the stupid power switch?" but one was unique. A new employee came around and said she had a problem turning on her computer. I started to tell her where to find the power switch, but she interrupted me.

"Oh no," she said. "I found the switch, but I don't know which way to flip it."

A lady in our department bought a new computer but coudn't get it to work. I told her to bring it in, and I'd take a look at it. Next day she dropped it off, and I checked it out. All was fine. She took it home. Next day, she came in and said it still didn't work. I told her to bring the monitor in, thinking maybe it was dead. Next day, same story, no problem with the monitor. When I saw her later, I told her this and that she should take the monitor home and, if it still didn't work, bring everything in. Next day, she dropped by my office with all she had. I set it on the table, plugged everything in, flipped the CPU power switch, and she leaned in real close, wide-eyed. "Wait!!" she exclaimed. "What was that you just did?!?!?"

I do tech support at a computer parts vendor and system builder. I take calls from dealers and other technical professionals. Last week I had a call from a woman who began her call by giving me a long listing of her credentials, beginning with her four years at MIT, covering her ten plus years of service in the tech support departments of various technology corporations, and ending with her forming a successful computer consulting and repair service. Then she asked her question:

I visited a customer site. The problem was that the computer wasn't powering up.

I crawled under her desk. No power cord. I sat and turned around, and there she was holding the cord.

Duh! I plugged it in, powered it up, and spent a few minutes setting her computer up for our network and explaining how it works (not surprisingly, this took more time then the actual install). Then she informed me about another problem she was having.

And there she was, holding the power cord for the printer.

I worked in technical support at Silicon Graphics about a year ago, and I was part of the group that was first in line to handle problem calls. Oh, joy. Being only eighteen at the time, my experience in the field of technical support was somewhat limited, but I could still handle my own.

Now, as you may or may not know, SGI sells top of the line computers used in many different industries. On average, they're about three times as expensive as personal PCs and are meant to be used by professionals in the industries they're used in.

Anyway, the following call came in:

I roll my eyes as I continue to type.

At this point, I thought I should inquire a little more...but use a bit of tact to do so.

I heard a few muffled grunts as he crawled over his desk to see the back of the computer. He repeated the serial number from the sticker. I didn't bother to verify it.

Dead silence. I could just picture the man's face when he realized that the computer was never plugged in in the first place and that the "extra" power cord he was holding in his hand was for the computer. I didn't wait for a response from him. I thanked him for calling, hung up, and closed the case.

A long time ago, I worked as a helper in a college computer facility. On the first day of a class, the instructor told the students to turn on their machines. He dutifully explained that not only do you have to flip the big switch located at the rear right (these were old XT and AT machines) but also to turn the switch on the monitor. One intelligent-looking fellow followed the instructions to the letter. He flipped both switches but did not see the screen light up. He tried both switches again but still no luck. He tried this for 20 minutes to no avail. You're probably guessing the plug was out, or the contrast knob was turned all the way down. Nope. The computer was already on when he got there, but the monitor was off. He never managed to get both turned on at the same time.

We had just purchased a new Power Mac after having used a Performa series Mac for some time. We had been taking turns using the new computer all evening; around 10pm everyone started turning in -- everyone except for mom. She used the computer for a couple more hours and just before going to bed, a problem arose. She kept trying to solve it but to no avail -- so she called tech support for help.

Mom feels very embarrassed. In fact, if she needs any assistance from Apple any more, she has ME call them because she thinks that when she gives them her name they will see the word "idiot" next to her name on the screen. I try to tell her it's not as bad as she thinks, but she thinks it is the stupidest thing anyone has ever done.

One day, our Society Editor was typing away at her terminal. As I passed her desk, she asked me to turn up the brightness on the monitor, because it was too dark. As I leaned over to twist the brightness knob, I noticed that the power switch was in the off position. She had been typing her story on a deactivated computer and didn't even notice.

I installed a simple peer to peer network for a client with 2 PC's, and a printer. Everything was fine for a while until I got a panic call:

I work on the helpdesk for a very large hotel chain. One day, one of our hotels called in reporting that the system wouldn't power on. After going through the usual -- making sure that the correct power button is being pressed, checking to see that it's plugged in, checking the outlet, etc -- I had determined that the power supply had probably failed and needed to be replaced. Just as I was about to end the call and dispatch a technician, the desk clerk stated very matter-of-factly, "Oh, by the way, lightning hit our hotel last night. Do you think that might have something to do with it?"

A customer telephoned us. His PC had been struck by a power surge caused by lightning. We asked him why he didn't switch off the computer when the storm started. He replied, "I was going to, but it said, 'Please wait while Windows shuts down.'"

I am a computer teacher for our elementary school. I recently had a workshop where I was showing the teachers some educational uses for the Internet. Teachers are often the worst students, so I asked them to turn off their monitors so they would listen instead of playing on the computer. I showed them where the monitor button was located. However, when I asked them to turn the monitors back on to use the computer, at least half of them pushed the power button on the actual computer. I sometimes have this problem with my primary students (kindergarten through third grade) if they have never used a computer before. Just like their teachers I guess.

A customer walked in to the store and said that his radio was broken. So of course I ask if he's checked the batteries. "Yes," he replied, "I'm positive they are fine!"

As part of what I was trained to do, I had to check the batteries anyway. This made the customer rather irate, but I simply informed him that it was procedure to check the batteries. And guess what? The batteries were deader than a door. I politely pointed this out. He replied, "But the package says they are good until January 1998!"

I am a process consultant, but a client asked us to help them on a serious IT issue that no specialist could deal with (the freshman look). For weeks, their whole network crashed around 10am almost every day. The server and the PCs were connected to a secure power supply network which was relying on a big set of batteries. (It was a private bank.)

Electricians were unable to find out where the problem was. The PCs and the server were all fine, and no special device like a defective backup system was run at 10am.

I quickly found the source of the problem. Somewhere, the electicians messed up the installation, and a power socket in the private closet of one of the senior executives was mistakely connected to the secure network. Every day, the new secretary (a real beauty, by the way) went to the closet and refreshed her hairstyle with a 1200 watt heated curling brush...with a defective grounding.

The device acted as a short circuit, re-routing the power supply to the ground, causing the standard power supply safety to switch off, then empty the batteries so fast you could see the needles plummeting to empty.

The bank fixed the problem by giving the secretary a bonus for her to buy a new heated curling device. She was so pretty and so sad that nobody had the heart to fire her.

PC monitors used to all plug into the back of the tower for power. Most of them now plug into the outlet. I wanted to save and outlet and purchase an adaptor so I could plug my new monitor into my tower.

So I went to a small computer store and described what I wanted. The clerk pointed me to some ordinary wall cords -- I told him what I actually wanted was right next to those, then went and got one and brought it back up to the counter.

The clerk protested, saying that particular cord would cause my power supply to "burn out faster." Dumbfounded, I just stared at him and bought it anyway.

A friend of mine, who had been using for four years, would still switch the computer off by yanking out the power cord (without shutting down Windows first). Perhaps her professor was at fault. His idea of an exam was to draw, from memory, the appearance of Microsoft Word -- all toolbars, all icons, and so forth.

A laptop user complained that, while hooked up to a docking station in the office, his laptop worked flawlessly, but when he used it at home, it only worked for an hour or so and then died.

An office technician got a call from a user. The user told the tech that her computer was not working. She described the problem and the tech concluded that the computer needed to be brought in and serviced. He told her, "Unplug the power cord and bring it up here and I will fix it." About fifteen minutes later, she showed up at his door with the power cord.

I once instructed a user to power cycle his external modem. What he ended up doing was power cycling the UPS, which happened to have his computer and every terminal in the area plugged into it.

One time a guy phoned me to complain that Norton Utilities failed to recover his data after he had switched off the computer without saving his work.

A man came in in a panic. He had typed a document the day before and now it was all gone. After some investigation, it turned out that he had saved the document before he had started typing it and, when finished, simply switched the computer off.

  1. Index
  2. Literature
  3. Tech Support Humour
  4. Power