Computer Issues Really Suck

This is a story from a job I had years ago. Our company took PCs and modded them to collect call records from a PBX. One such customer had the PC in his office on a table near the door.

It started having trouble: in the night it would just power down. It’d be down for an hour or two and then come back up. It was happening at pretty much the same time every night.

Our engineers got concerned because they worried that this could start happening with the hundreds of other machines in the field. They tried to replicate the problem. Nothing.

They had the customer send the computer back in for testing. It worked perfectly.

They sent it back. And it started happening again.

So, one night, the customer stayed in his office just to watch the machine and see what happened.

That night, the door opened a crack, a hand reached in… and unplugged it… and plugged in a vacuum cleaner.

Problem solved, and our engineers blew a big sigh of relief.