[Wolves] Prize up for grabs!!

[sparkes]

Andy Wootton wrote:
> queue "Brute" function.
> 
>

A true classic in the glass hammer variety.  In fact I know a variation 
of the glass hammer from brierly hill where the glass hammer as indeed a 
tool of the glass industry and has several varients based on size (a big 
bloody gloass ommer, a gloass ommer and a lickle babby gloass ommer?) 
;-)  Once they got the newbie to believe the glass hammer was a real 
tool and when he/she had settled down in the job enough to believe they 
where safe they got sent for glass (insert bogus item here) because 
their guard was lowered by the existance of a *real* glass hammer they 
believed anything, for a couple of hours anyway ;-)  That window of 
opportunity must have been wonderful ;-)


now back to our schualed program and a true tech support story from 
myself when I was stupid enough to do such things.

I once worked in tech support where we had reports of a 'ghost machine' 
the bloke in question was convinced we had sold him a haunted machine 
because it was always turned on when he got up in the morning.

One night he slept in the same room as the machine and was woken in the 
middle of the night by the windows chimes.  He was so scared he 
unplugged it and refused to plug it back in until it was fixed.

When it came in in went to the monkey techs who reinstalled windows gave 
the case a polish and sent it back without fixing the manifestation.

two days later the call was passed to me to deal with (and I hate 
talking on the phone) and boy was this dude pissed off.  The computer 
was still haunted.  He didn't take my suggestions that he really needed 
a priest and not technical support so I got the machine couriered over 
that afternoon so I could look at it in the morning.

It was returned late in the afternoon and I plugged it in and left it 
(jenny was *very* pregnant at the time and I wasn't going to leave her 
to look at a dodgy machine) but one of the guys was working over getting 
some servers ready for an install the next morning, they obviously had a 
*really* good jit ordering system ;-) .

I got a call at 5 in the morning from the very tired tech who had been 
surprised that the machine had started up of it's own accord at 3.  I 
was mightly pissed off at getting woken up in the morning as I took this 
job to get out of such things until the baby was older and it wasn't 
even born yet.  Anyway dispite this at 6 in the morning I was being let 
in the empty office by a very tired tech who had just finished the 
server preps before this _haunted_ machine started of its own accord.

In his tired state he wasn't thinking straight and had claimed to have 
checked everything and still the machine had woken up.

I asked him if he had checked in the bios for any odd settings.  He said 
it wasn't connected to a lan so wake on lan packets couldn't be doing 
it.  Anyway we couldn't get in the bios becuase it was password 
protected by the customer and he hadn't supplied a password.

We went and had a breakfast then did some little bits around the office 
and workshop until everyone else arrived and the techy was driven off to 
do the server installs I phoned the bloke who owned the *haunted* machine.

He gives me the password and I look at the bios and the machine had 
something that was a little new at the time an option to automagically 
turn the machine on and off at set times.  He had set it to turn on a 3 
in the morning and off in at 3 in the afternoon.

I asked if it ever turned itself off in the afternoon and he said it did 
everytime the archers finished!  He thought the ghost was a radio 4 
listener who was used to turning off after the archers and must have 
worked early shifts because it turned on in the morning.

I explained he had set times to turn on and off in the bios and he said 
'oh, that, I didn't think that would be the problem!'  he was charged 
for the four trips on the back of the couriers van and our time and we 
never heard from him again.  Perhaps his haunted pc moved on to a 
backstreet shop once he heard the supplier wasn't interested in helping 
for free anymore and would only do geniune warrentty fixes and not 
exorcisms.

if I win the suse boxed set I would like it donated to a local infopoint 
event ;-)  not to influlence anyone at all ;-)

sparkes
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