After A Long Lunch, User Thought A Cursor Meant Their Computer Was Cactus

On Call The biggest days of the festive season may be behind us, but demand for tech support never stops. That's why each Friday, even this one, The Register shares stories of fixers forced to help flummoxed fools in On Call – the reader-contributed column that celebrates your successes.

This week, we’re revisiting the topic of extremely swift fixes that we raised in November, when a reader claimed to have solved a user's problem in 8.5 seconds.

Another reader, who we will Regomize as "Barry," told us he was once called by the user of a greenscreen terminal who, upon returning from a lunch break stretched to unusual length by the need to queue for a bank teller, complained their machine displayed nothing but a "flashing screen."

Barry got his hands on a replacement and lugged it to the user's desk.

When he arrived, he saw a blinking cursor in the top left corner of the terminal's screen.

"I pressed the space bar, and the cursor disappeared, replaced by the login prompt, fixing the problem."

Barry didn't claim the tech support world record though – he thinks his fix probably required less that ten seconds, but not much less.

"The user didn't know a screen saver kicked in after 30 minutes, because she was always back from lunch before it kicked in," Barry told On Call.

Bank tellers have sadly been largely replaced by IT, so there might be some ironic justice there.

Now let's meet a reader we'll Regomize as "Ron" who told us about the time a customer reported half their screen was blank and not working.

Ron quickly realized the customer had managed to adjust the Windows Task Bar so it occupied half of the PC's display.

"I resized the taskbar, locked it at regular size, and was out the door un under five minutes."

Ron rates the job as the fastest money he ever made!

• Tech support chap showed boss how to use a browser for a year – he still didn't get it
• Techie left 'For support, contact me' sign on a server. Twenty years later, someone did
• Tech support world record? 8.5 seconds from seeing to fixing
• That hardware will be more reliable if you stop stabbing it all day

Let's return to the greenscreen age for our final tale of fast fixes. It comes from a reader we'll Regomize as "Connor" whose customer complained that his terminal would crash every day at around 2:00PM – a massive inconvenience as this customer was a securities trader. Then as now in that industry, any downtime meant dollars down the drain.

After plenty of tests and hardware replacements, no root cause could be found, so one of Connor's colleagues was dispatched to stake out the machine.

On the second day of watching, the problem became apparent.

The greenscreen age was also the age of reading newspapers printed on actual newsprint – oh, the nostalgia! – and this user spent their lunch hours acquiring and reading both The Wall Street Journal and The Financial Times.

Upon returning from lunch, said user would fold both papers – which in those days could each be a couple of centimeters thick – and toss them onto the back of their terminal.

Which is where the machine's air vents were located.

As the afternoon wore on, hot air produced by the cathode ray tube could not escape, heat would build up, and the boxes would crash.

"My engineer got a face-full of hot air when he pulled the papers off," Connor told On Call. "Once the papers were relocated, the problem stopped!"

And once again, despite considerable investment in troubleshooting time, the fix itself took mere seconds.

There can't be many of you at work today, and hopefully those of you compelled to exchange your labor for currency at this time of year aren't very busy. So click here to send On Call an email with your story of fast tech support fixes, or the messes you've been asked to fix in this festive season, so we can tell your story when we return to work. ®