Captain Support to the rescue…

 

It’s Saturday night, South Park is on the TV and all is good. Then the phone rings…

  • Mom: I was looking up the symptoms of assorted diseases on the internet so I can panic about the possibilities of my friends, family and especially grandchildren getting them, then the laptop beeped and turned itself off. I kept trying to turn it on but the fan starts, then it immediately turns itself off.
  • Captain Support: It sounds to me like the power lead is not connected and the battery has run out of juice. Make sure it’s plugged in and turned on at the wall switch and it should be fine. If not, it means either a fuse has gone or the charger is bust. Check it now. Is the power lead connected?
  • Mom: Yes, all three leads are connected.
  • Captain Support: Describe the leads please. Are they rectangular with a prongy looking symbol on them?
  • Mom: Yes.
  • Captain Support: Those are USB cables, not power leads. It sounds like it’s disconnected from the power. Plug in the lead and you’ll be good to go.
  • Mom: I’ve only ever had these three cables in. There are no other cables.
  • Captain Support: Seriously, they are USB cables, not power leads. You must have had another lead plugged in before now.
  • Mom: There has never been another lead plugged into this laptop.
  • Captain Support: Check the back. Is there a round hole that looks like it could have a power lead plugged into it?
  • Mom: Yes. There is a round socket. Oh, I can see a cable down the back of the desk. I pulled the desk out earlier to hoover. It must have come out.
  • Captain Support: Plug it back in, then sacrifice a chicken at dawn on the altar of Captain Support and your problem will be solved.

Humans. Will they never learn?

Cheers

Captain Support…

Author: Tim...

DBA, Developer, Author, Trainer.

5 thoughts on “Captain Support to the rescue…”

  1. Funny story.

    I worked as a DBA for a small dot com in the Internet boom. We once had a 4 hour outage caused by a cleaner unplugging the main DB server 🙂

  2. Over the weekend I tried calling home while out shopping, kept getting a busy signal. I know the wife sometimes turns off call waiting when she’s on the phone with a patient, but it seemed a long time, so I called on my office phone and said “will someone pick up?” over the answering machine speaker.

    Anyways, she hadn’t been on the phone, so I asked her to call me back from it. She calls me from the other phone to tell me she got a dial tone, but a busy signal after she dialed me. I told her to call the cable telephone support.

    She calls support (from the other phone, of course), and they tell her unplug all the phones. She doesn’t know how to unplug my office phone, but unplugs the other phones (two line cordless phones), and is able to call on the formerly bad line from my office phone.

    It seems well-known that if the battery dies on a cordless phone, it silently kills the cable-phone. Phone probably knocked askew in charger by cat or cleaning lady several days earlier.

    That’s why I keep a hard-wired phone line, even though the cable phone now supposedly is able to call the alarm company (they didn’t used to).

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