Non Self Service

I have always been amazed at the actions (or lack of)  of people when a problem occurs. They will moan and groan, and blame everyone under the sun, but will do nothing to help themselves. Is it because it happens with a computer in the room? That as soon as a crisis hits, they immediately switch to dumb mode until someone points out a simple solution and forces it upon them.

For instance, when an electrical fault occurs I am always perplexed at the mentality that causes these people to ignore simple safety or logic. There are several examples already posted on here and here is another.

A couple of weeks ago, the late shift upon me again, I get a phone call from a tutor. He informs me that a woman in his class had just received a rather severe electrical shock from a plug socket in one of the new classrooms.

The Id10t Migration Complication

It all started late on a Friday afternoon, as do most big, important projects. With our own move almost complete, it was now time to get the bean counters and the rest of the staff moved into the new building. Simples! Don't count on it!

It took two days hard labour to get every computer, monitor, printer, projector, TV, Sound system etc. disconnected, crated up and labelled. Not very exciting except for the huge battle of fighting through the stacks upon stacks of folder, boxes and other rubbish that the staff had kindly piled up around and on the computers themselves. And of course the game of cat and mouse we had to play in order to steal way the crates we needed to do the job. They were like gold dust and we had to use all our cunning and stealth to get enough containers to get it all done.

Switch it ON!

A colleague of mine told me about an incident the other day, where a guy in his department couldn't switch a PC on. The computer was connected up correctly and plugged in. Infact it was in the same state that it was in everyday at that time. Everyday that guy came in, switched it on in the same way and all was well.

This particular day he just couldn't get it to power on. My colleague took a quick glance at the plug socket and informed the man that it wasn't switched on at the plug.

Ten minutes later my colleague came back in to the room and the man was still staring confused at the dead computer.

"What's wrong?" My colleague asked.

"The computer won't switch on." He replied.

Pulling the Plug

It's that time of year again when our computer rooms have to be completely wiped and reconfigured. We do this by imaging all the computers in bulk, one room at a time from a preconfigured image on our server.

All we have to do is boot each computer in to WinPE, select the image and away they go. They take anywhere from 50 minutes to 2 hours depending on how big the image is. Once they are done we name them, add the printer and move on to the next room. Sounds easy...

One particular year we had been having a few problems with the imaging freezing and "bombing" out halfway through. It took us several days to sort the problems out, including many late evenings and early mornings. Needless to say we were running out of time and we still had over 1000 computers to be imaged.

Now our "temporary fix" was to have a portable server in the room we were imaging. This was considerably slower, but it did the job.

Health and Safety - Course 101

So I am sitting at my desk one day when the door opens and woman sheepishly creeps in to the room carrying an open laptop.

She stops and grins at me for about a minute then finally confesses that her "friend" had asked her come and see us because she (her friend) had spilt coffee all over her (the friend's) laptop. I asked who her friend was and if it was an accident, why she didn't bring it down herself if.

Answer: She was too scared we would tell her off.

The lady left and I took a look at the bedraggled, Nescafe flavoured laptop and I noticed that the screen was blank but the laptop was switched on and running.