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“My wife has complained that OpenOffice will never print on Tuesdays” (2009)

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Re: “My wife has complained that OpenOffice will never print on Tuesdays” (2009)

#131

Post by coleca »

chasd00 wrote: post #101

One of my favorite pieces of debug folklore was the story of a minicomputer or some other serious machine rebooting in the middle of the night. I can't remember exactly but it was in some university during the 70s/80s. An important server would spontaneously reboot in the middle of the night on some days but not all. Finally, someone sat up all night to watch what happens and observed a cleaning lady unplugging the m…

We had a similar one when I worked for a large supermarket chain. We had one store that their In-Store Processor (ISP), which was a big IBM 6F1 RS/6000 box (about the size and looks of a large mini-fridge) was plagued with all kinds of weird and sporadic errors. Code that works fine in the rest of the chain would only sometimes work there, all kinds of disk errors, slowness, etc. We sent technicians to the store multiple times and they could never figure out the issue, we even swapped out most of the hardware.

Eventually, we discovered that the young girl that was responsible for changing all the prices was using the server room as her makeshift office. She would stick all her magnetic clipboards with the upcoming price changes to the side of the server. When she heard the tech was coming she would clear out all her stuff since she knew no one was supposed to be in there. The magnets were wreaking havoc on the disks causing the errors. The store manager got her some proper office space and the errors went away.

Re: “My wife has complained that OpenOffice will never print on Tuesdays” (2009)

#132

Post by agumonkey »

DoubleGlazing wrote: post #63
hazeii wrote: post #36

Some years back I had a case where a co-worker complained his mouse didn't work in the afternoon. Eventually I went to have a look, and he demo'ed the issue; sure enough the mouse was completely unresponsive. Luckily I guessed the issue immediately and quicky demonstrated - with a shrug - that the mouse "works fine for me". Thing was I'd spotted there was strong sunlight through the window hitting the mouse; guessing…

I was an admin for a company that had lots of open plan offices. In one of these offices a specific row of computers kept failing. Although they were cheap (Compaq Evos with NT4), they were pretty damn reliable throughout the rest of the company. Lot of head scratching ensued about the fault. Nothing really made sense. Totally by chance we found out what was wrong. One Saturday when the office was empty and with no a…

Out of curiosity, what happened to her ?

Re: “My wife has complained that OpenOffice will never print on Tuesdays” (2009)

#133

Post by Pete_D »

DoubleGlazing wrote: post #63
hazeii wrote: post #36

Some years back I had a case where a co-worker complained his mouse didn't work in the afternoon. Eventually I went to have a look, and he demo'ed the issue; sure enough the mouse was completely unresponsive. Luckily I guessed the issue immediately and quicky demonstrated - with a shrug - that the mouse "works fine for me". Thing was I'd spotted there was strong sunlight through the window hitting the mouse; guessing…

I was an admin for a company that had lots of open plan offices. In one of these offices a specific row of computers kept failing. Although they were cheap (Compaq Evos with NT4), they were pretty damn reliable throughout the rest of the company. Lot of head scratching ensued about the fault. Nothing really made sense. Totally by chance we found out what was wrong. One Saturday when the office was empty and with no a…

I've seen a similar accidental case where some internal cable in the PSU had gotten dislodged and was partially in the path of the fan blades, with the repeated contact making a chainsaw-like noise. Luckily it was discovered before the fan cut through the casing on the wire.

Re: “My wife has complained that OpenOffice will never print on Tuesdays” (2009)

#134

Post by the_watcher »

geek_at wrote: post #9

I love bugs like this. As a developer or Sysadmin you'd think the users are crazy again but then you dig deeper until you lose all hope and already book flights to become a farmer in the midwest and then you find something like thís

Last Friday's xkcd happens to be very relevant! https://xkcd.com/2259/

Re: “My wife has complained that OpenOffice will never print on Tuesdays” (2009)

#135

Post by Phrenzy »

anovikov wrote: post #41
hazeii wrote: post #36

Some years back I had a case where a co-worker complained his mouse didn't work in the afternoon. Eventually I went to have a look, and he demo'ed the issue; sure enough the mouse was completely unresponsive. Luckily I guessed the issue immediately and quicky demonstrated - with a shrug - that the mouse "works fine for me". Thing was I'd spotted there was strong sunlight through the window hitting the mouse; guessing…

Remember exactly same thing happening to me some 18-19 years ago lol! It was in the time when mice still had balls, so the reading sensor got blinded by sunlight in at least one direction - sometimes mouse won't work at all, sometimes would but only on X or only on Y axis. Fix: install window shutters.

So... This would not happen with Linux?

Re: “My wife has complained that OpenOffice will never print on Tuesdays” (2009)

#136

Post by zoomablemind »

anovikov wrote: post #41
hazeii wrote: post #36

Some years back I had a case where a co-worker complained his mouse didn't work in the afternoon. Eventually I went to have a look, and he demo'ed the issue; sure enough the mouse was completely unresponsive. Luckily I guessed the issue immediately and quicky demonstrated - with a shrug - that the mouse "works fine for me". Thing was I'd spotted there was strong sunlight through the window hitting the mouse; guessing…

Remember exactly same thing happening to me some 18-19 years ago lol! It was in the time when mice still had balls, so the reading sensor got blinded by sunlight in at least one direction - sometimes mouse won't work at all, sometimes would but only on X or only on Y axis. Fix: install window shutters.

> ...It was in the time when mice still had balls,

Thinking of present times and times forgone: now mice lost not only balls, they lost their tails, and often find themselves devoid of any 3-dimensionality, being reduced to flat touchpads.

Using a mouse always felt to me as having a friedly handshake with the computer, something that touchpads can't emulate.

Re: “My wife has complained that OpenOffice will never print on Tuesdays” (2009)

#138

Post by rhacker »

It kinda pisses me off that the second line of the body became a sexist joke phrase title in hacker news.

If you're not clued in on sexism: The stereotype reinforcement that women are dumb with technology is the punchline. It doesn't matter that there was actually an issue with the pipeline from OpenOffice -> Cups, but the hacker news title was cleverly crafted to reinforce a stereotype.

I don't care that this will be downvoted to oblivion, but the seeds of sexism exist everywhere.

Re: “My wife has complained that OpenOffice will never print on Tuesdays” (2009)

#139

Post by GurnB »

LinuxBender wrote: post #130
hazeii wrote: post #36

Some years back I had a case where a co-worker complained his mouse didn't work in the afternoon. Eventually I went to have a look, and he demo'ed the issue; sure enough the mouse was completely unresponsive. Luckily I guessed the issue immediately and quicky demonstrated - with a shrug - that the mouse "works fine for me". Thing was I'd spotted there was strong sunlight through the window hitting the mouse; guessing…

Similar story in the USAF. We transitioned the academy from Banyon Vines to TCP/IP. An entire building wing went offline every day. A team was flown out with a network analyzer. Sure enough, same time every day, the entire wing of the building went offline. Turns out, the person buffing the floor needed a place to plug in the buffer and the only place they could find had this big box with lots of blinky LED's on it,…

The best part of this anecdote is that you mentioned Banyan Vines. Spent a handful of years installing/maintaining Banyan Vines network in the early 90's.

Re: “My wife has complained that OpenOffice will never print on Tuesdays” (2009)

#140

Post by nkrisc »

clmul wrote: post #68
numlock86 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't find it, but a while ago there was a post on some StackExchange page (SuperUser maybe?) and reddit that had the following problem: Whenever a specific person passed a specific cubicle, one of the monitors would turn black/lose signal and turned back on after the person was away again. I don't remember how it got resolved or rather what the problem was. Since it only happened on a specific person people were g…

I have a similar issue with my desktop computer: when I suspend or hibernate it, it sometimes wakes up again when I'm standing, getting up from my chair or leaving the room. This also occasionally happens (when hibernated) after I have physically switched off the power of the computer and switch it on again. The issue occurred first a few years after I bought it, but right now I have just given up debugging it, as I…

Depending on how it's configured to wake, my guess is it's your mouse. When you stand you move the desk just enough to cause the mouse to wake it. Happens to me all the time when I bump by desk when getting out of my chair.
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