The Case of the Disappearing Start Menu
I was summoned urgently to one of the admin offices to deal with a mysterious problem – every time the user clicked on a menu, it would open, then immediately vanish again.
I walked in, and lo and behold, she could demonstrate the problem perfectly.
“Look, I can click on Start, and it pops up for a second, then disappears! I can’t do any work!”
Restraining myself from commenting on how giddy she must be at actually having an excuse to be in her normal state of ‘not doing any work’, I quickly ascertained the cause of the problem. Leaning over the bomb site that passes for a desk in these parts, I gingerly lifted the pile of class registers off of the top-left corner of the keyboard, releasing the Esc key that was being held down and cancelling out of every menu.
If only they were all that easy…
12 Responses to “The Case of the Disappearing Start Menu”
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Have seen that happen to students sooo many times as well…!
I find this scenario allows one to perfect one’s “you really are very stupid” look…
Had the same, unimpressed doesnt quite cut it.
I had a call once because a woman’s mouse was mysteriously moving on it’s own only to find out that her rather large breasts were bumping her mouse as she leaned forward.
I’m glad I wasn;t drinking my coffee when I read that!
How did you deal with that one!?
Did you recommend some thorough investigation and examining of the problem?
I had one teacher that complained about her mouse being stuck on the screen. Went down to the room and moved the stick she had resting on the Smart Board!
Don’t knock it, because of users like this we will always have jobs!
No way! Knock it I will, because an IT tech’s job is to help manage and maintain the IT systems & network – not deal with ID-10-T errors!
So you didn’t use ANY sysinternals tools?
Haha, nope, not this time!
I was asked to fix a computer that when started up would make a buzzing sound and the teacher was unable to login. I turned on the computer, heard the buzzing but on the screen was the message “Keyboard Failure”. After I removed the pile of paper on the ESC key and restarted the computer worked fine.