News
True Life Tale: Paging the Help Desk
Quick fix for a computer that has been making buzzing sounds for weeks.
I was new with the desktop support team and received a request to take
a look at a customer's computer that was making a funny noise. I went
on site and asked the user, "What kind of noise?" All she could say was
that it was making a buzzing noise and it was coming from the keyboard.
Surprised by this description, I sat down at the keyboard and began doing some basic troubleshooting when, all of a sudden, I heard the sound. It was definitely coming from somewhere near the keyboard, but it was a sound I've never heard before coming from a computer.
After further investigation of the area, I pulled the center drawer of her
desk open and —
voila! — there was a pager in the drawer, set on
vibrate.
When I told the customer that it was a pager located in her center drawer, her comment was "There it is. I've been looking for that for weeks!"
[The preceding "True Life Tale" was submitted by Dana Cummins, of Tacoma, Washington, as part of a Help Desk Support contest we ran in January/February. For her effort, Dana received a copy of Mastering Windows XP Registry, by Peter Hipson, courtesy of Sybex. To submit a "True Life Tale," send you 500-words-or-less story on any IT topic to mdomingo@101com.com. Published tales will win a book from our burgeoning tech library.]