Back in the late ’90s, I worked in the IT department at a MegaCorporation. The company had ten floors of a building in the Big City, and maybe a thousand employees working there. Our job was old-school IT — PC support. New PC comes in, you install it. Old PC dies, you fix it or take it away. Install software. Unbreak stuff that the user broke. Install hardware upgrades. You know the drill. Can’t count how many hours of my life I’ve wasted swapping floppy disks, and the three most dreaded words in the English language are “I can’t print.” I had a lot of crazy experiences back in those days, and thirty years later, I feel it’s time to share a couple of the best…
We got a call down one day that a lady was having trouble with her computer “not working.” I had a colleague, Pat, who got the ticket. The most Irish guy you ever met, blunt but friendly, and a great guy to work with. So he goes up to see her, about an hour after the ticket came in. Now we got all sorts of weird requests, but this was an all-time classic.
Pat gets to her desk, and she says again that her computer isn’t working right. So Pat, he goes up to it and he starts to take a look. He takes one good glance at it, shakes his head, curses under his breath, slides the trash can out from under her desk with his foot, picks up the keyboard, tilts it sideways, and a whole cup of coffee pours out.
That’d be bad enough, but before Pat can say another word, she points, excitedly. “Oh, there’s the problem!” she said. “It leaks!”
…
We got her a new keyboard, of course, and we told her to keep liquids away from it. But that keyboard sat on Pat’s desk in his cube for years afterward, brown and coffee-stained, and we often laughed about it, still shaking our heads in disbelief. Decades later, I still can’t decide if she had a wicked quick sense of humor, or if she was truly that dumb.
— and I genuinely don’t want to know which.
We had one secretary who used to call down every few months, and she always had “hard drive problems.” I got the ticket one of the first times she called, and every time after that she was My Customer. I’d go up to her computer, and start running disk diagnostics on it, and sure enough, she had lots of file corruption. I’d run all the tools, untangle bad FAT table entries, fix busted directories, recover lost files, reinstall software — heck, I think I even once rebuilt the partition table by hand. Delete temp files, defrag the disk, get everything all nice and working and clean.
And every time, just a month or two later, same problem.
So it surely was a hardware problem. We swapped out RAM, at first, in hopes that that was the cause. Swapped hard drives, copying all her data over. Eventually put in another computer, and used LapLink to copy every last file over. Every time I left her desk, the computer was clean. And just a few months later, it was busted again. We kept wondering if she was picking up viruses, or maybe even her desk was just cursed. And yet for something like three straight years this kept happening — every few months, busted again. Until one day…
One day I was walking past her desk on the way to another job, and I swear I nearly walked into the door frame of the office across from her desk when I saw it. All across the front of her computer, there were like a hundred friggin’ fruit and rainbow and pony and kitty decorative refrigerator magnets, stuck right onto the painted steel front of her computer. Nobody’d ever told her it was a bad idea. And she liked her desk to be “pretty.”
It turned out that every time I was due to come up there to fix her computer, she wanted her desk to be clean and neat for the IT team, so she’d quickly clear away everything — and that meant swiping those refrigerator magnets right off the front of the PC and shoving them into a drawer. As soon as I was gone, she’d pull everything back out, redecorate her desk, and that poor spinning disk platter, barely half an inch from those nice strong magnetic fields, would start getting zapped again as she carefully decorated and rearranged them while it spun.
We politely asked her to please, please stop doing that. And shocker: I only ever had to fix her computer one more time.
