Brightest Day, Blackest Night

Well – I’ve only been in work for three hours, and I spent about two and half of those nearly going out of my mind.

The morning started peacefully enough. I told Jane all about the meal last night (she was the one who recommended the restaurant we went to), then I set about dealing with my messages (even on a good day, there are a few customers who feel it is their duty to inform me of one thing or another that has happened. And while I really do enjoy the customer service aspect of my job, there are times that I wish that I could just stick with being a simple code monkey, because it means I would not have to listen to how the Christian bookshop thinks we are unduly favouring GLAD, or how "Flights of Fancy" thinks we’d be better off moving CMM to the far end of the store because "their candles stink" and my life would be so much less full of stress).

However the messages were mostly peaceful today – just an advanced warning about a shop closing for a day, and other such things.

So I, being the utter fool that I am, thought there was probably time for me to nip out to one of the shops to pick up a present for my girlfriend.

Yeah – I know, I was tempting fate and risking the wrath of the gods high atop the whatever and – if it helps – I spent the next 150 minutes paying for my reckless attitude.

While I was in the second hand bookshop, their monitors went dark (and now that I am using that phrase I am starting to wonder why I didn’t use it before because it would have solved so many of my problems it’s not even funny). So me – being me – said I’d have a quick look. I couldn’t find anything. I tried turning it on and off, but it had no effect.

I was about to try rebooting the computer, when someone came in from CMM (the store next door) and told me their monitors had gone off as well.

A few moments later, my pager went off to recall me to the office because apparently it wasn’t just the bookshop and CMM – it was the entire Hive. Every single monitor screen had gone off, including in the supply department and the Monkey House (which, I know, is not a flattering way to refer to my office, but we are all code monkeys extraordinaire so what else am I supposed to call it?) and in the offices of The Triumvirate.

Needless to say, I didn’t actually get to pick up the present I wanted.

The next two hours were spent trying various things – rebooting computers, turning monitors off and then on again, plugging different monitors in to different computers and so forth. Anything you can think of to try, we tried.

The only real clues we had were that the two laptops that were plugged in to the network were still working fine, and that the computers themselves seemed to be working fine – we did a few remote desktop and Windows Mesh sessions from the laptops to the various computers around The Hive, and it was all good.

Plus the music was still playing, which meant the MCP hadn’t died a horrible, bloody death. Which was also good 🙂

After two hours of entirely futile attempts to fix the problem, Jane went down to the PC shop and asked to borrow a monitor. She brought it back, plugged it in, and it worked fine – we could see the screen and everything.

So, after a few more minutes of playing (sorry – testing and diagnosing the problem!) she managed to get her original monitor working again.

And it was at this point I decided I wanted to press the reset button on the day and start the whole thing over. Because the way she fixed it was to access the monitor’s menu, and turn the brightness and contrast settings back to what they should be.

Twenty minutes later, every monitor in The Hive had been reset, the shops were back on line and the purchase order that we’d drafted for 113 monitors was shredded.

It seems that when the original designer of The Hive had built the system (slightly before my time), they had been testing a routine to control various monitor settings. So that – at the touch of a button, a monitor could be dimmed or brightened (or go completely dark). It was supposed to be used for demonstrations to customers, and for presentations to potential customers/buyers/etc – so that once the demo was over, the monitor could be turned off and not be a distraction.

It’s a fairly impressive piece of code, but it was only ever supposed to be used within the staff computers, and never – ever – in The Hive itself. But the routine was part of the basic operating system of The Hive, and somehow it got triggered this morning, causing every single monitor to go in to standby mode.

So – now I get to spend the afternoon updating the routine so that it prompts whoever is using the computer at the time before going dark. Which will hopefully prevent us from having another morning as….. exciting as this one was!