I work in tech support. Early Tuesday morning, I’m sitting with a few workmates who are in remote in our daily standup before the actual standup meeting. Suddenly, I get bombarded with Teams messages by a user.
Employee: “I need you to come upstairs and check on my computer. It’s acting up again.”
Me: “I’ll be there in fifteen minutes, after my standup.”
Employee: “That won’t do. I have a very important meeting to attend! I need you now!”
I just sigh, excuse myself from my colleagues, drink the remainder of my coffee, and head up.
She’s already standing at the doorway of her office, gesturing for me to hurry up.
Employee: “None of the programs respond. Everything is acting weird. Nothing works!”
Me: “Have you tried restarting the laptop?”
Employee: “No, I can’t do that. It won’t let me!”
I then try to restart the computer and indeed, it is acting weird. Opening the start menu only immediately opens the search query and then shows a constant space being input.
I look down and see that [Employee]’s headset is resting on top of the spacebar of the external keyboard. I remove them.
Me: “Hey, look. Your headset was resting against the spacebar.”
A look of mild panic settles on her face.
Employee: “That can’t be it! I just set those there before you came over!”
Me: “Can you tell me about some of the issues you’ve been having?
Employee: “When I opened Outlook, it kept scrolling through the mails on its own!”
I ask her to open Outlook, and then I hold down the spacebar, and to nobody’s surprise, the “error” she reported replicates.
Employee: “Huh. That’s weird. It does the same now.”
She’s trying her hardest to look surprised.
Me: “Yeah, that’s crazy. Anyway, whatever caused it, it’s gone now. If you’ve got any other problems, let me know.”
As I left, she was opening Teams to join her “extremely important meeting”.
It was her daily standup.