Some things are too bizarre to plan for

We come across all sorts in our working lives. And one lesson learnt is that there is always something really bizarre waiting to trip you up. As examples, I offer a couple of jobs from our long history.

A few years ago we had a retired lady whose PC we looked after. It worked fine for ages, until one day I was asked to put in some extra memory. The job was pretty simple, soon completed and it all tested OK. However, the following day we got a phone call from her, telling me it had crashed. I went round, but it looked OK, so I put it down as one of those things. Not long after we had another call, and we went round the same loop again. On the third occasion I swapped out the new memory, but the problems persisted. This went on for a bit, but with no obvious cause. Eventually the customer went on holiday, and we had the machine in the workshop for a fortnight. It behaved faultlessly - and we did try hard to break it. "When the impossible has been eliminated, whatever remains must be the truth". Which, in this case, meant the mains electricity - because that was the only thing that changed between the two locations. So, when it went back, it went back with a UPS. And that was that. Thinking about it, the problems was probably caused by a faulty thermostat (or possibly a kettle switch) somewhere along the row of houses - and our customer lived next to the sub-station.

Even more bizarre was a problem at a customer in Watford. They had a frequent network outage, that we were called in to fix. But, upon arrival, no fault could be found, and a reset of the MUX unit brought it all back online. Eventually Tim (whose customer it was) spotted that the calls always came in at about 11 a.m; and he estimated that the actual fault was therefore occurring about 10:30. So for the rest of the week he was onsite at 10, keeping a beady eye on everything. Sure enough, one day, the network went down. The only thing he could see was that at 10:30 the P.A. to the M.D. made coffee: and on that day she was wearing high heels. And yes, dear reader, that was it. The pressure from the heel was sufficient to crush the cable cover & insulation and cause the cable (that ran past the coffee machine under the carpet) to short circuit, crashing the network.

Life will always surprise you!