Did you wave a dead chicken at it?
Kicking it might wake it up.
he should have used a Technology Without An Interesting Name to run his printer.
I'm retired now. Same to you.
RE-BOOT? works with mine . . . . kinda’ like it needs an enema.
No, but I have been the embarrassed one.
Nice to know I’m not the only person who uses this approach when dealing with technical difficulties.
I’m not in IT, but even I’ve solved a few doozies.
A couple techs were trying to send a particular file to a printer. NOTHING was working. Standard file format. Not very large. No weird fonts. Nothing complex in the file itself, like doubly embedded image files... So they call me.
“Have you tried changing the file name?”
“Change the file name???”
“There might be a character in it that the printer doesn’t like. Give it a super simple name, like ‘test’ with no caps.”
“Okay...”
File sails through.
...
Sometimes people wiill try to push a whole file through for an hour or so and get nothing without ever having tried to isolate the problem.
“The file won’t print!”
“Will it print _anything_ from the file?”
“No!”
“###... Okay, let me drive...”
I skim the document and see if there are simple pages to print. I do those to see if they’ll print. Then a batch of pages. Once I find the bum page, it’s usually something not built or set right. A bad font. A messed up table. a corrupt image file. An image that’s too complex... Making it right clears the log jam.
...
Fonts used to be a killer. One computer that crashing intermittently was set right by deleting forever a bad font from the user’s library...
“That’s one of my favorite fonts!”
“Replace it with the same thing from a reputable type foundry! This free knockoff you’re using will be the death of your computer!”
On my analysis I reasoned that the sensor that detected a jam for the paper path was stuck. So before I did anything, I explained that famous scene in that classic Bruce Willis sci-fi movie Armageddon where they got stuck on the space station and the computer refused to allow them to detach from it.
The Russian astronaut who was the sole member on the station, just totally went berserk and grabbed the biggest monkey wrench around (about 5 ft long) and yelled to Bruce "Well let me show you how we fix things in Russia!" and proceeded to whack the computer with blows from this huge wrench - the computer rebooted and allowed the spaceship to disembark!
So now as I'm faced with this malfunctioning printer, I proceeded to do the most unusual repair I've ever attempted in my 30yrs of fixing computers - I simply held it on both sides and banged it on the desk 3 times.
It beeped, whirled and did a internal reset and self-diagnostic. When it finished with its self-check, I just loaded some sheets of paper in the paper tray, and all was back to normal - as my friend look on in incredulity and her mouth dropped wide open!
Probably not voice-controlled. Try clicking “print.”
I used to be the sole IT guy for a gov’t agency as well. Most of the people I supported had PhD’s and were utterly brilliant, as it was a gov’t research lab. I have had the “my computer won’t wake up” when the power button solved the problem, to the most bizarre issue one time.
I had travelled back to home for xmas, and got a call from one of our remote sites, where they had critical life health safety systems which depended on these servers. I had created a “fail over” server, and mounted it on the same rack as the primary server. I also had two disks running disk duplicating software, where there was always a “fail over” hard drive as a spare within the primary server. I got a call from the IT guy from a gov’t installation that the server had “blue screened” and was toast. I asked him, to reboot and on the startup menu he could simply choose disk2 to go live, as it was completely seperate. The boot menu had not come up on reboot, but he did somewhat remember that they had needed an extra hard drive, some months back and had “requisitioned” the spare in the server, seeing as there was a backup server, wiped it clean, and used it in another pc on base.
So I asked him to fire up the fail over server, so I could connect remotely to it, and make sure it was configured properly. He then informed me that they had reorganized the emergency operations center about a month ago, and had taken the spare server out of the rack, and had put it in their office, and figured they could just swap it into the rack if there was ever a problem. The problem was that this being Christmas day, nobody could find the guy to ask him where he had placed the server. So, nobody knew where it was.
The long and short of the story was that I had to talk this somewhat computer savvy person how to download the “DoD’s gold master disk image” of whatever version of server software we had been running at the time, which took about 3 hours. Then, had him install a copy of the remote control software we used, and sent him an encryption key, and I logged in, and all in all, I spent about 14 hours that Christmas day, rebuilding that server.
My favorite of all time was the actual Microsoft “HOW TO” page, that was posted by some fedup Microsoft tech support guy. More commonly known as the “RTFM” page. This actual microsoft page told people how to “Read The F****ng Manual”, and was not censored. It was posted on the old MSDN website, and was really served by Microsoft servers for some time, though it’s been said the guy who wrote it’s career was not as long as the time the page lasted.
This reminds me of an incident I encountered in the 1970s when I worked for a computer time-sharing company. Got a support call from a very lovely but technically inept young lady one day, telling me that she couldn’t get connected to our network. After many minutes of making suggestions like turning off her terminal, making sure she had called the correct number, etc., she came back with a giggle and an answer for me. It turned out that the acoustic coupler (that’s how we rolled in those days) was unplugged. Once she plugged it in, all was fine.
For many years afterward, whenever I’d get a technical support question that seemed to defy logic, I would ask if everything was plugged in and turned on. I’d usually preface it with an “I know this may sound silly, but...”. Don’t laugh, I actually solved one or two questions with this technique.
In the rest of the office our reports sort of meandered around before arriving the next day with a hangover. And if you had entered the wrong perimeters then heaven help you.
But while accountants have strange and mystical powers even they are helpless before the power of THE CONSULTANT who apparently had a brother-in-law who could supply the office with new (well more sort of refurbished) computers.
And so he was forced to stand and watch while his beloved carefully modified computer was hauled off and a new (sort of, more refurbished) computer loaded with enough bloatware to float right off the desk was left.
But the cost accountant was a man with a plan. And a screwdriver. And a hard drive he had carefully removed.
And they lived happily ever after.
When computers were first installed at the business I worked. This happened in 1992. A woman started using the CD tray as a place for her coffee cup! This is not a hoax!!!! It really happened.
If someone wants to buy a chainsaw, the intelligent ask someone who uses them and visits a saw repair shop.
Same goes for a truck.
People who buy printers on the basis of advertisements or any other BS reason get what they deserve, including the incredibly large amount of money spent on ink which was as good as having been burned.
Free advice...
Be humble: Ask a professional (more than one is ACES). Not everyone is out to just make a commission, but the fact is that most people just don’t give a damn unless you ask for advice.
Punchline: In equipment and anything driven by firmware/software the percentage of problems resolved by a hard boot is not merely cliche’ like the answering machine in ‘The IT Crowd’.
Power cycling should rank right up there with personal finance for high schoolers, but we all know the reality.
True story: I had a 4 year-old side-by-side frostless refrigerator stop keeping cool. On the basis of evidence of a leak, I postulated that it might be refrigerant (refrigeration is NOT an area of my expertise).
I called a repair place and paid the “diagnosis fee” of $80, for which they told me that they could take it back to their shop and see what they could do, estimating that my total out of pocket might be a couple hundred more plus parts.
I balked. There was an appliance guy - former military and LEO - at my shop complex. I walked over and asked him about it one day. His response: Unplug it, let it set for 3 days minimum, see what happens.
I asked for advice and it paid off: I had that fridge for another trouble-free 8 years in my garage. In its case, it was physics, not software (frozen lines), but these days the same logic holds true for appliances (hard boot).
PC LOAD LETTER
ever made a service call to find the extension strip was plugged into itself?