Self-Mock

[dpaul007.livejournal.com]

(cross-posted to my own journal)

Background: I'm 38, I've been doing tech support since 1986 (before the INTARWEB!) and my first computer was a TRS-80 Model I -- in 1979. Ergo, I know my stuff.

So I get to work this morning, settle into my cube and power up the various machines so I can start the day.

My desktop machine halts after POST and tells me, "NTLDR not found. Press any key to restart." Uh oh. I press the "any" key (you call it a space bar) and get the same error. I repeat the process. Same error. Shit.

I run through some basic troubleshooting to no avail. I can't open the box to check on loose connections, so I dutifully report the outage to my team lead and hardware guru.

Then, I prepare myself for a day of hell since I'll be doing everything on my laptop -- I hate my laptop anyway, so this is going to be teh suck.

During my first call from a user, I'm waiting for her to finish a task, so I am staring at my desktop PC just wondering what else I can do to fix this. And a flash of pure, unadulterated SOOOPER-GEEENIUSSSS hits me.

I pulled the 3.5" disk out of the a: drive and rebooted.

Comments

[saintrigger.livejournal.com]

Heh... I've had those freak-out moments when I've left things in the drive too.. it's pretty normal.

[tsutton.livejournal.com]

Who use floppy??

[megpie71.livejournal.com]

Strange persons like my good self. I write for a hobby (and I've found the easiest way to move a file from one PC to another (given that our home nyetwork is currently somewhat flaky) is to copy the silly thing onto a floppy and move it via sneakernet. Works quite nicely for work as well - move file to be printed from lapdog (not connected to work network, and not eligible to be) onto floppy into PC connected to work network, print paper copy.

Before you ask, work has USB ports disabled by default. Our desktop design guys decided that it would probably be a good notion to minimise the number of ways our users could shoot themselves in the feet. The realisation that most of our users have access to a fsckin' huge database of information about the majority of persons in our country is another consideration - at least 1.44 MB isn't likely to contain the vast majority of it...

[zercool.livejournal.com]

The only thing that saves me from that on a regular basis is Norton yelling at me for leaving a floppy in the drive on shut-down... I absolutely feel your pain. :-)

[inahandbasket]

bwaaaaaaahahahaha!

I hate it when that happens. ^_^

[korenwolf.livejournal.com]

Been there, my one was spending hours doing eveything I could think of to resolve why my machine was running like a complete dog.

Naturally the solution was pressing the "turbo" button (hey, it was a cutting edge 486 at the time :)

[saintrigger.livejournal.com]

HA! Warhamster! SWEET!

[bdinger.livejournal.com]

Dude, that's nothing. NOTHING. I always blame this shit on a severe lack of sleep/caffeine.

My best, I think, was when a new server arrived. This was back in the summer, and it's an HP ProLiant. I'm getting ready to smoke-test it and burn it in, so I'm checking to make sure everything's installed. You know, obvious stuff.

So I power it up, goes through all the checks.. and finds no HDD's. Which is annoying because the hot-swap bay for the drives is on the front of the box, and i can see two x 74GB U320 modules staring me in the face. Keep rebooting, same thing.

I do this for like 20 minutes, never thinking to open the box up to check the cabling (it's a new box, right? Shouldn't matter, riiight??). So I go back to my office, and I'm going through the manuals looking for some bizzare thing I miss. Then, sitting on the desk, it's glaring at me.

The HP RAID controller I ordered with it, and the reason I told CDW not to cable up the drives.

Never has that story been told to any of my co-workers :)

[loosechanj.livejournal.com]

I'm 38, I've been doing tech support since 1986 (before the INTARWEB!) and my first computer was a TRS-80 Model I -- in 1979. Ergo, I know my stuff.

There's people who have 20 years of experience, and people who've got one year of experience 20 times.

[doctoreon.livejournal.com]

Ha! I think I work with a few of them. My ITS division is divided into two departments: Techservices and Infoservices. The former is full of youngish hacker-types, the latter is full of old school business mainframers. Most of them seem to be the sort of people who have one year of experience 20 times. Meetings are hell. Of course, if it were up to my department, we'd never have meetings - isn't that what e-mail is for?

There's people who have 20 years of experience, and people who've got one year of experience 20 time

[irishmasms.livejournal.com]

There's people who have 20 years of experience, and people who've got one year of experience 20 times.

well put!

[lovely-shan.livejournal.com]

Let me guess... The rememberance hit you after you had your coffee?

[valiskeogh.livejournal.com]

BWWAAHAHAHAAHHAHAHA

and i was all set to give you the fix for that, lol

[littlemskitten.livejournal.com]

that's classic, thanks for the smiles :)

My favorite

[linuxnut.livejournal.com]

I was installing an os. When I put the disk in the drive and booted up, it went directly to the hard drive. So I stop the computer, boot up into the bios, and instead of changing the boot order I just change the first boot device to CD. Install the os, then when it restarts it goes into the CD to boot, only I have since removed the CD, it yells at me about not finding an valid os/disk. I spend a good hour checking things, until I realize that the boot order is: CD,CD,USB,NETWORK.... no HD in the boot order and it wont boot from the HD!

[residentgeek.livejournal.com]

I did that just yesterday... a user's computer was booting and she had a floppy in the drive. It gave her some strange error (not NTLDR for some reason) and I couldn't figure out why it would be trying to boot to a floppy that wasn't bootable. Then I remembered floppies aren't like CDs, silly.

[chipb0i.livejournal.com]

I've done the floppy thing before myself. What really bugs me, is that when I'm testing a computer on my workbench (in the morning), I plug in the cables for the mouse, keyboard, and monitor, but for some reason, I forget the power cable. I don't know why. Then, I remember the cable, and I go get caffiene as well.

Thats my excuse, and I'm sticking to it. :)

[sunfell.livejournal.com]

*snortle*

I had a call today from a member saying that his machine was broken- when he booted it, it just sat there doing the blank-screen, blinky cursor thing. I hauled it downstairs thinking that maybe the HDD had blown up or something. When I booted it up, I heard the CD-ROM drive spin up, so I ejected it. Lo and behold- the laptop was trying to boot from a blank CD-ROM. Removed it, and the machine came up like nothing happened.

Buh.

Sunfell

[ximinez]

Sometimes we spend so much time on the big problems that we forget to check the little problems.

Last night, I couldn't sync my Palm. Just as I started rebooting, thinking that the USB kernel module got pooched, I looked over and noticed my flash drive plugged into the port.

Even us gods are only human. :)

PS. Disable floppy booting in the BIOS. ;)