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Comment by arethuza | Hacker News Reader

Many years ago in my first job (1988) I was diagnosing a Unix printing problem on a machine remotely (dialed in via modems).

There was an IBM engineer on site who insisted it was a software problem - I was on the phone to him and he was getting rather annoyed with me and I asked the inevitable "Is it actually plugged into the power?" which got him very angry that I would have the cheek to suggest that he hadn't checked that.

Then the phone went silent for a bit and he said "Try now".

Power supply was plugged into the power but the power cable from the supply wasn't plugged into the printer.

Edit: I'm sure I've been the guilty party in similar scenarios myself a few times, though hopefully not more than once in any particular context.

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To give a story from a different field so that it's not all IT stories here:

When I served in the German army as a battle tank weapons systems front line mechanic I didn't know all the tricks of the tank crews from the start (obviously) - nor that they did have tricks that they used to get out of training exercises and to (our) fresh coffee.

One common trick was to turn all the dials for brightness and contrast for the passive heat-sensor (night vision) all the way down. Then they told their commanding officer they had to go to the "Inst" (German "Instandhaltung" = maintenance depmt., in our case right behind the battle field - with power generator and attached coffee maker) because their screen had gone out. Which was quite important

The first time I went to such a tank I fumbled around for a few minutes, not finding anything, before admitting defeat. I called in a more senior colleague of mine. He went in, turned up the dials and that was all, case closed.

It was sooo embarrassing (to me, I don't think the other people gave it much thought) - that's the reason I still remember it even though it's been 16 years or so by now.

In 1984 I was a PC instructor at a large paper company and I was called up to the 23rd floor to fix a senior vice president's PC. He stood there while I worked on it. It would not power up. I looked around the back of the desk and the PC was unplugged. I then carefully took off the case cover and removed all the cards and cleaned the contacts and put them back in. I assembled the PC, plugged it in and it booted. I did not want to tell a senior VP that his PC wasn't working because he didn't check to see if it was plugged in.

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