machine that goes PING
Disappointed there is no machine that goes PING or a least a photo of said machine
Welcome once again to On-Call, our regular look at the messes readers find themselves in when asked to go to help out their clients. This week, we've heard from an NHS IT guy who would like to keep his name anonymous. When a support request came in for our reader, it was hard to work out what was going on, we're told, because …
... ping, ping, ping, and so on, very fast.
Many years ago I worked in a place where IT support (of which I was not a part) received a call from a distressed office occupant because his desk top was making alarming "pinging" noises; he even held his telephone handset near the offending machine so that support could hear it.
On investigating it was discovered that his clipboard was resting on the keyboard with at least one key depressed, filling the buffer to beyond full.
I'm not sure he ever lived it down, but it provided some much - needed amusement for a lot of people. What made it worse was the fact that the IT support 'phone had not been attended, so the "offending report" was recorded for all to listen to at leisure.
This happens so often its untrue... I once nearly caused a riot, by making the guy who was complaining about the pinging wait 5 mins, then ringing him back and just telling him to shift the papers off his small enter key, then I fed him a load about how I'd had to dial onto the hidden security camera's so I could see what the problem was... They were a paranoid lot in that office :D...
I had one of these. One of our electrical engineers had just got home from site and was reading his mails.
His wife handed him his 6 month old son to hold while she searched for a fresh nappy. Aforesaid son exposed to cold air sprinkled all over the laptop.
When he phoned me I spent the first few minutes laughing, we arranged a spare to be shipped and he swapped the hard drive on his own.
This is a support call I recall to the best of my knowledge.
A call came through to the support centre and went like this.
Support: "Hello, how can I help ?"
User: "Hello, my screen has stopped working"
Support: "Is the green light on, on the front of the monitor ?"
User: "No."
Support: "Is the power cord plugged in properly at the back of the monitor ?"
User: "I will check"
Noise of fumbling can be heard.
User: "It seems like it is plugged in properly"
Support: "Are there any lights flashing on the front of the PC box ?"
User: "No they are all off"
Support: "Is the power plugged in properly to the PC ?"
User: "I will check"
More noise of fumbling around.
User "Yeah, it all seems OK"
Support "Hmmmm, can you describe the moments just before your Monitor and PC stopped working"
User "Well, I was working of this very big spread sheet, I have been working on it for days and I think it was just too much for the PC"
Support: "And ?"
User: "Well I had the calculation I was have a big problem with and then it went blank"
Support: "You mean it crashed ?"
User: "Well, not in the way I have seen PC's crash before, it just went blank !"
Support: "Hmmmm, Can you give me the number of the PC, its on a big label on the front starting with the capital letters PC and then some numbers ?"
User: "I can't read it !"
Support: "Oh, maybe it has it fallen off ?"
User: "No, I can just about see the label but can't read it !"
Support: "I don't understand"
User: "it's too dark to read the label"
Support: "Too dark ?"
User: "Yeah, that's what I said !"
Support: "Why is it too dark ?"
User: "We have a power cut, don't you know ?"
Support: "No.... I didn't know !"
Support person takes a deep breath.
Support: "OK sir, I will contact the power company to reactivate your PC"
User: "Great, I hope I haven't lost that spreadsheet I was working on !"
Support: "You will not have lost it Sir, but all updates from the last save will be lost"
User: "Last Save, I said I have been working on it for days, what do you mean last Save ?"
Support: "Well Sir, you should save your spreadsheet at least once an hour so you only lose an hours updates due to a Power cut or PC crash"
User: "I don't save a spreadsheet until I am finished and like I said I have been working on this for days !"
Support: "Well when you shut your PC down in the evening it will automatically save it then so I am afraid you have lost the updates what you have done today Sir !"
User: "I told you I have been working on it for days, I don't shutdown my PC while I am in the middle of a spreadsheet !"
Support: "Do you believe in God ?"
User: "Of course ?"
Support: "Then just pray Sir !"
User: "Ah, OK, thank you !"
User Hangs up the phone.
Support person is crying with laughter !
that sounds like a call that was published on a support website around ten years ago, can't remember its name now.
However I have had personal experience of such a call while working in the call centre of the muslin computer company midway between blackburn and burnley........yes, that one that went bust
Very very similar call, I was listening in on a Scots techie (doing a quality audit on him) when the caller rang with scanner problems. The call developed almost identically, with the difference that at the end our Scots lad told the caller he was a stupid effing idiot (or words to that effect). I pissed myself laughing, but I had to give the guy a low quality score for the abuse element of the call
I was blamed for a user losing about 4 hours work when her PC stopped working in the middle of some huge gantt chart. Her manager complained to my manager about my lack of sympathy (although I was certainly not rude).
My manager however called the other manager a "Total F*#kwit" which I thought was very funny.
Understaffed is all relative. The NHS, for instance, appears understaffed because all the serious work is outsourced so the people on site are just doing day to day admin. I've seen 1000 user sites with 30 IT staff who actually are understaffed because they do every little thing themselves so user numbers vs staff numbers is not a useful ratio. Also, each type of business has different types of user - a call centre for instance may only need one end user support bod because the fix is always to restart a generic session while a science lab working with big data on workstation class machines might need a few more. Anyone working with arty types will need an army of support :)
500 beds is not the only thing you get in a hospital. There is a lot of people coming in for physio, consultations, Xrays and to get their picture taken (endoscopy) for a start.
A 500 bed hospital does a lot more than look after 500 patients.
A 20 bed ward will have a minimum 4 computers, half a dozen handheld devices and various things that go ping. Each of those will have a computer in them. An operating theatre could have at least 3 computers. Even the lowly consulting room will have one. Your Xrays are no longer on those A0 sheets of plastic any more! and the consultant might want to look up the results of those blood tests too..
The number of beds a marker to compare the size of a hospital At night there may only be 500 patients but during the day there could be twice that many computers being used by anyone from the catering department, medical secretaries typing your invitation for that prostate exam to medical photography departments.
Yes, healthcare uses a c$%Ðload of computers!
It seems like that when there is any thing broken, it was done by a patient.
*Not had a keyboard, but a telephone that was pissed on by a drunk.
*Monitors broken
*Hand held devices thrown against walls
*(Cutlery) knife inside fax machine
Usually I get "Dunno, it was like that when I got here" that's if they could be bothered to report it in the first place. I just happened to be in a ward and was collared to look at a blood glucose meter that hasn't been working for weeks.
If I get a call that says "user has checked cables" can guarantee that it's unplugged
bloody keyboards....
a couple of years ago on an NHS Win7 rollout I had a problem where the domain admin password kept getting locked out. One day it amounted to 30 times.........I was calling my colleagues on other sites rude names, while they were cursing me (it was a NHS COIN network, one domain across the whole county, hence if one site was locked out, all were locked out)
Took us three days to realise the problem was a duff batch of keyboards on my site. They were HP keyboards, expensive ones with built-in card readers, but some of them had a moulding fault where the K and I keys were connected with thin piece of moulding flash......so when k was pressed (part of the domain password), so was i. Three attempts and the account locked.
Once I'd taken a scalpel from the surgery and cut all the flash on all the keyboards, normality resumed.
However I never told anyone the cause. I didn't want to look a prat, and I didn't want the local IT support to have anything to pin on us (we were a contract team)
"the domain admin password "
You meant to say "my password" or "bob's password" I hope. If not, please remove yourself from the industry forthwith. Shared passwords have not been acceptable for many years, and rolling out Windows 7 with an account in "Domain Admins" is unnecessary - why does the desktop monkey need to modify the corporate domain? You only need domain join permissions for desktop rollout, something included in "User Admins" I believe.
28 digit password, shared between two build rooms in two sites three hours apart & also used by three different sets of installers out in the field.
Enter it wrong once, as two others entered it wrong without someone else entering it correctly.....Well you can imagine how it worked Big Blue & a Banking Client on a daily basis is all I will say.
Lol I love faux security. Long password and low number of attempts - all that's achieved is more help desk calls. Meanwhile revocation of access is impossible because so many people know and need the password.
Amazing how many people do the things that seem a good idea and aren't and so few do the things that seem trivial but are effective. I've never seen someone salt their AD passwords for instance despite Rainbow tables making it necessary.
i remember people in the repair centre putting any dirty keyboard assembly under the tap and giving it a good scrub, the operators couldn't be bothered to clean them so they would put in a fault call to get a clean one
another sight that remains with me was a processor board that according to the ticket had somehow been inundated in cream, by the time it reached repair it had become a new blue cheese
i was so happy to move to r&d where the biohazard risk was lower
My first day at a job many years ago and I managed to upend my carton of orange juice all over my new keyboard. I turned it upside down and let it drain, then quietly mopped as best I could (I did not want to draw a lot of attention to myself), wiped the keys, but every day it stank worse of heated, elderly juice until I found a PC bundled up ready to be taken out of commission and swapped keyboards. Can't drink orange juice at work to this day.
My father used to own a computer company in the late 80s, early 90s, he supplied a lot of freight forwarders and the computers regularly had to come in for a clean. His guys established that with some minor modifications to the fan arrangements the machines would survive longer. But they still came in caked with oil and engine soot.
I will always treasure the smell of foam cleaner from RS.
When I was in college one of my tutors confessed that he used to leave his chilli hotdogs to heat up on a very expensive piece of equipment. After a while it ceased to work and when they took it apart they found that stray chili sauce had eaten through the PCB.
Many years ago, when I was the supervisor of network ops (and the help desk), the VP of Information Technology called me on my personal line and told me his brand new Memorex color mainframe terminal was down and he needed help ASAP. He was demonstrating it to our Senior VP at the time.
I strolled down the hallway into his office, turned the power switch on, turned around and went back to my desk. You could have heard a pin drop in the VP's office, although I did get a smile from the Sr VP. :-)
I miss those old terminals -- a lot simpler problems and they don't get viruses!
I worked for a few years in Papua New Guinea as an expat. The white ants there love eating silicon - don't know if that is true for all white ants. Scuba diving mask seals were their delicacy, but if none were available they'd happily munch through silicon circuit boards. Often came across broken computers which on being opened had components rattling around loose as their board had been munched. Have been paranoid every since whenever I hear mention of silicon chips.
> The white ants there love eating silicon - don't know if that is true for all white
> ants. Scuba diving mask seals were their delicacy
Scuba diving mask seals are *Silicone* (a flexible polymer of Silicon and Oxygen atoms) - not the same thing as silicon at all.
> but if none were available they'd happily munch through silicon circuit boards.
Printed Circuit Boards are not made of silicon, either. Fibreglass reinforced Epoxy resin is the usual PCB substrate.
Any actual silicon (in a transistor or integrated circuit) would have been encased in some sort of metal, ceramic or plastic packaging.
"As for the neglected, urine-soaked keyboard, our reader notes: "Doctors, nurses and other medical staff generally did not 'do IT'.""
Well, at the university hospital here, the staff would probably be PROHIBITED from switching out the keyboard, even if there was a spare in the room. Security, don'tcha know. (And I'm not sure that's excessive, given HIPPA rules IT would be expected to make sure there's not, say, a hardware keylogger in line with the keyboard as they switch it out, while you can't expect random staff to be taking that close a look at the keyboard plug as they plug it in.)
" medical staff generally did not 'do IT'"
But they probably 'did do it.' RE: the spilled urine.
Two doctors on two different occasions managed to spill a urine sample they'd requested from me all over their desks, so I wouldn't be surprised if there was not an empty sample container near that soaked keyboard and PC.
It said *did not do*. That is past tense.
Where they find it useful, many of them now do. That does include changing their own keyboards on occasion. If they can't wait and one comes to IT, we have been known to take the defunct device and give them a new one.
There are still some who feel that they did not sign up to do computers but they are not common.
Most of us did not sign up to wear rubber gloves. (They aren't latex now anyway.) We just do what we need to do. Nurses just do that with less coffee or bathroom breaks.
Back in the old days when I did hardware, I was working on noise measuring equipment. I was pre-warned by a client who brought in this particular unit which was parked adjacent to a pub to monitor music noise.
Being near a pub, you get a very high likelyhood of finding drunken bastards wandering around aimlessly in the bushes - presumably looking for a place to pee.
Well, they found one. And I was the poor bastard that had to clean it up and repair it to make it suitable for redeployment by guys were understandably unwilling to handle gear that required rubber gloves.
I watched a colleague do this once, when the "sluice" in question was the hot water stream from a kitchenette water boiler. The laptop keyboard in question instantly curled up, permanently ruined and completely warped to buggery.
I had considered warning him, but I figured (correctly) that it would be funnier not to.
"Doctors, nurses and other medical staff generally did not 'do IT'."
Emergency Medicine SpR doctor here. I speak Python, PHP (*cough*), MySQL, BASH, jQuery, HTML/CSS (if that counts). I've been tinkering with Ubuntu & Debian servers since 2008.
The clinical applications we have to put up with are unbelievably piss-poor. They make me wince. Written by people who have never seen a patient consultation, purchased by people who have never walked onto a ward, and installed according to implementation instructions from some Accenture lackey who has never run an IT project before. No doctors or nurses ever involved in the design / development / purchasing / implementation.
I'd suggest that doctors and nurses don't "do IT" because ignorance of how much better it could be is the only way to stay sane.
If I didn't want to keep my clinical job, I would enthusiastically piss all over the ward IT.
Dear AC,
You have a hobby. That hobby appears to be IT related. It doesn't mean you understand it to a deep professional level, or to a level that you could actually make money out of it.
I have hobbies too... Making cakes and breads, for one... Cycling, for another... I am not a professional and would be very limited in my abilty to keep living, if I were to do these things professionally...
I agree with the rest of your statement about inadequate acquisition processes. That's the bane of IT, though... Deals are made at the golf course, not so much because it makes sense to the people who have to deal with the acquired stuff.
Regards,
Guus
I was once sent out to inspect a XT PC at a Bus Engineering Depot (where they maintain & repair buses). Apparently the PC had problems printing and odd things happening on the screen. I opened it up and had a look and found it had a inch deep layer of oily dust covering the entire motherboard. I was surprised it was still working at all. As at that time XT's were obsolete, when asked if it was worth repairing I responded, "No, it will be cheaper just to replace it".
I work in healthcare IT and I'm getting a kick.
We were getting rid of an overstock of Lenovo USB keyboards and we have some fairly competent units in our hospital. Our rehab unit has animals that like to abuse the nursing office PC keyboards. The unit was happy to take 30+ keyboards off us and throw them in a spares closet because they know they kill a lot of keyboards.
Patient phones? The floors keep spares if they go missing and know how to plug in an RJ11 jack.
//1500 employees across two hospitals - 1 IT person at the smaller hospital, and 6 back at the big site. All 7 staff take calls for both hospitals in a call centre system, share a connected network and two domains, and everything... just works.
Child, lunch, vomit, keyboard is the approximate sequence of events.
Teacher:"Do you want the old one to take back with you?"
Me:"I think electronic waste disposal regs can take a hike on that one, plus I don't want to be carrying biologically hazardous material with me either or indeed stinking out my TR7 with kid spew!"
Teacher:"OK I'll stick it in the bin, didn't think you'd want it, but we kept it just in case!"