A Soggy Case Of The Mondays
Right after the Y2K nonevent, I was working at a help desk for a fairly large company — 15,000 employees. The company had a surprisingly kind corporate culture and thus had pretty good morale. People were allowed to decorate their cubicles pretty much as they saw fit (with the obvious exceptions like offensive posters, etc.).
One employee in a prestigious department called on a Monday and told us that her monitor had failed.
Flatscreens were a lot more expensive back then, so nobody had multiple monitors. I grabbed a spare and was at her cubicle within five minutes.
Her cube was like a greenhouse. She must’ve had thirty different potted plants in a modest cube. Flowers, spider plants, little bamboo… it would have driven me nuts to work in this crowded little grove, but it smelled like a clean forest after the rain and she was obviously proud of it.
The monitor was dead as disco. It wouldn’t even show me a power LED. I carefully moved four or five plants and swapped in the new one. Happy user, closed ticket.
One week later…
The ticket reopened the next Monday morning. Statistically, it is certainly possible for a beat-up spare screen to fail, but it isn’t likely. I grabbed a shiny new monitor, tested it at my desk, and installed it. As I swapped cables, I asked her what had happened.
Employee: “It just shut off! I didn’t even touch it.”
Two monitors failing at the same time on the same day of the week for one user? This is not a coincidence. I longed for a previous job where we had a hardware guy who loved to dig into dead equipment and figure out the forensics.
I verified that she didn’t have a heater in her cube (power surge, thermal issues) and that no other users had seen any issues or heard anything. I Googled the model of monitor that had failed to see if it had a bad reputation. I talked to the rest of my team. Nothing suggested a reason.
So, the next Monday, early, I was camped out in her cube with iced coffee and suspicion. [Employee] came in.
Employee: “Did this monitor fail, too?!”
Me: “I’m here to make sure it doesn’t.”
She was pleased with the level of attention on her issue.
I watched her start up the PC, turn on the monitor, and head out for her own coffee. All good so far. The PC booted properly and loaded up the series of apps that she needed at about the normal rate. They connected to servers across the country, so boot up took ten minutes or so from power on to ready for calls.
She came back with coffee… and a watering can.
I looked at the three potted plants on the shelf above her monitor and stopped her.
She’d been slightly overwatering those plants once a week. I don’t know why it hadn’t killed the monitor before this, but she didn’t use a power strip, and apparently, the main circuit breakers weren’t sensitive enough.
User educated, problem solved, ticket reclosed.