How do you explain what magnetic fields do to monitors to people wearing bowling shoes?

Techie demoed the effect in about 3 seconds, as On Call again tries to break tech-support world records

On Call The working week sometimes speeds by, sometimes crawls, and often ends with a crash. Each Friday, we try to avert the latter by delivering a new edition of On Call, The Register's reader-contributed tales of handling ridiculous, ribald, and remarkable tech support requests.

This week, meet a reader we'll Regomize as "Simon" who shared three tales of extremely rapid tech support satisfaction that challenge our arrival-to-fix world record of 8.5 seconds.

We'll open with his story of a remote support job that came his way during COVID-19 lockdowns.

"A user told me the Lenovo laptop they'd taken home was broken because nobody could see or hear them during Teams meetings," Simon told On Call.

How do you explain magnetic fields to people who dispense bowling shoes for a living?

Simon knew his colleagues had not been equipped with external cameras, as the Lenovo machines' internal webcams and microphones were sufficient.

He therefore asked if the laptop's webcam shutter was closed.

"I just need to move my books off the laptop," came the reply, for this user was operating with her computer closed and the webcam pointed down at the keyboard.

On another occasion, Simon was summoned to a bowling alley to fix what he'd been told was a "wobbling monitor."

On arrival he found a large cathode ray tube monitor whose output was indeed wobbling around the screen.

Simon noticed the monitor was illuminated by a large Anglepoise lamp. You know the sort – they have a big metal shade at one end and a flexible arm held in place by large springs.

He swung the lamp away, so it was a little further from the monitor. Doing so had the effect of moving the magnetic field the coiled filament of the lamp produced far enough away that it stopped affecting the electrons streaming out from cathode ray tube.

"How do you explain magnetic fields around a helical filament to people who dispense bowling shoes for a living? " Simon asked On-Call.

He rated the time spend working on that fix as "less than Usain Bolt hitting the bar at last orders."

Simon's other super speedy support success came in the 1980s, when he was asked to visit a user who couldn't reset their computer.

This was a time when some machines – especially from IBM – came with an actual lock that had to be opened before the keyboard would work.

Simon drove for an hour to reach the user's office, noticed the lock was closed, inserted and turned the key, and left.

"Total hands-on time approximately two seconds," he boasted to On Call.

Have you fixed things faster than Simon? And do you have any tech support stories from the COVID years? Hurry up and click here to send On Call your story so we can rush it into production on a future Friday. ®