The Case Files

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The Case Files

Real calls from my own help desk, with the names used by permission and the departments changed to protect the embarrassed. Every one of these came in as a haunting. Every one of them turned out to have an explanation. Almost.

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CASE 001 - The Noon Wobble

Reported by: Enrique, Underwriting
Symptom: Every day, right around lunch, the picture on his monitor starts to shimmy and wave like it's underwater. Enrique had started eating at his desk with one eye closed.
Diagnosis: At lunch, Enrique turns on the little desk fan he keeps right beside the monitor. Electric motors put out a magnetic field, and a regular picture-tube monitor does not like magnetic fields one bit.
Status: Fan moved two feet to the left. Wobble gone. Enrique's lunch much improved.

CASE 002 - The Phantom Typist

Reported by: Della, Claims
Symptom: Whenever she left her desk, she came back to find whole lines of jjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjj typed into her reports. She was ready to call a priest.
Diagnosis: When she slid her keyboard tray in, the edge of her stapler rested right on the J key.
Status: Stapler relocated. Della has asked that I stop calling it "the J-host."

CASE 003 - Seven O'Clock Shadow

Reported by: Robert, Accounting (new this spring)
Symptom: Whenever he stayed late, his computer shut itself off at about seven o'clock, taking his spreadsheet with it. Three nights in a row.
Diagnosis: The cleaning crew comes through at seven and needs an outlet for the vacuum. His was the closest one.
Status: Robert now saves every five minutes and has made friends with the cleaning crew, which is honestly the best thing a new employee can do.

CASE 004 - The Rainbow Stain

Reported by: Julie, Human Resources
Symptom: A blotch of purple and green appeared in one corner of her monitor and wouldn't go away. She said it looked like a bruise. She said it looked like it was spreading.
Diagnosis: She'd brought in a little stereo and set one of the speakers right next to the monitor. Speakers have magnets in them, and magnets smear the colors on a picture tube.
Status: Speaker moved. I pressed the degauss button on the monitor (it makes a loud BWONG noise, which did not help Julie's nerves) and the colors came right back.

CASE 005 - The Midnight Scrolls

Reported by: Marla, Legal
Symptom: She came in on a Monday to find forty pages in her printer tray covered in strange symbols. Nobody had been in the office all weekend.
Diagnosis: Somebody upstairs had sent a big job on Friday to the wrong printer, using the wrong printer driver. When a printer gets instructions meant for a different printer, you get pages of garbage. It sat in the queue until the printer woke up.
Status: Driver fixed. Marla kept one page and framed it. It's hanging in Legal. Visitors think it's a contract.

CASE 006 - The Gentleman in Claims

Reported by: A gentleman in Claims, who asked not to be named
Symptom: Keys sticking. Some keys typing twice. The space bar making "a sort of moaning sound." He told me it was cursed.
Diagnosis: Diet soda. A lot of it. Over the course of about a year.
Status: New keyboard. He wanted to know if he should have sprinkled holy water on the old one first. I told him the keyboard had already had enough liquid for one lifetime. This is why the warning is on the front page.

CASE 007 - UNSOLVED (sort of)

Reported by: the night security guard
Symptom: An old PC in the basement records room, which nobody uses and which sits on standby, wakes itself up at 3:00 a.m. The hard drive grinds for twenty minutes. Then it goes quiet.
Diagnosis: Almost certainly the Windows 98 Maintenance Wizard, which somebody set up last year to run ScanDisk and Defrag in the middle of the night.
Status: I could go down there and turn it off. I could. At 3:00 a.m. In the basement. By myself. I have decided the computer is entitled to its hobbies.

Got a case for the files? [email protected]
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Last updated Tuesday, September 21, 1999