One Sided Drama

Posted by Turbojelly@reddit | talesfromtechsupport | View on Reddit | 37 comments

I work as an IT Tech for a local council who provides us to support the schools in the area. Been working for them a few years now and while I was based at one site, I moved to current site this year. I have been to current site before to cover a coworkers holiday and worked on an ongoing issue here.

The issue was with the Drama rooms Interactive Screen. It would only ay sound out of 1 side. As stat3d, I've been here before so I have already had a go at fixing it, as well as the 2 usual techs. At one point the boards techs were called in to look and stated they would need to take the board off the wall to troubleshoot.

Yesterday I decided to have a fresh go at it. Started going through standard troubleshooting. Snugging and hugging in cables, verifying that sound output from the board co.es out one channel. Next I started delving into the board settings, only to find Audio options were almost non-existent. Until I noticed 3 dots on the channel changer. Clicking it bought up the audio options and what do I see? Balance set to Max Right.

Really?

Yes really. I changed the balqnce setting back to middle and there we go. My weird music tastes blasting out of both speakers. All the hours wasted troubleshooting this board, Internet searches, discussion s on Teams and outside techs. In the end, all it took was a fresh set of eyes and 1 Setting change.

I am both proud of myself for fixing it and deeply ashamed for not spotting it before.

Tl;Dr I can hear, I can hear, I'm going deaf.

[-]

Furdiburd10@reddit

but the question still remains:

who set it to max right? 🤔

Turbojelly@reddit (OP)

I work.in schools. The answer is always "students". There is at least 1 kid who knows how to change monitor settings to 0 Brightness/Contrast.

BraveDude8_1@reddit

Don't forget changing the language to Chinese, so it's completely impossible for an English speaker to fix it unless they've memorised the OSD.

me_groovy@reddit

Google lens app pointed at the monitor.

Jonathan_the_Nerd@reddit

Google Translate used to be bad at East Asian languages. I don't know if that's still the case.

FireLucid@reddit

I was fine in Japan with it last year, works pretty well. Although travel (at least trains) is very organised and there is a fair bit of english around.

Arterra@reddit

It's good enough to navigate menus, I've used and made digital purchases on region locked consoles with google translate.

I used to use it to try to translate my Chinese friends' Facebook posts/comments when I was in grad school. It could translate individual words, but it was very bad at stringing words together into comprehensible sentences.

Oh no, let me check the monitor next to the one set to Chinese, don't even need to get out my seat.

MadRocketScientist74@reddit

Used to do University tech support. Had one prof whose grad students were all Korean, so the laptops were all in Korean. I knew windows very well, so I knew what a lot of the dialog boxes said without needing to be able to read it. But sometimes I would need a translation, which was frustrating in the moment (the students were really bad at English) but hilarious in hindsight.

androshalforc1@reddit

I did this when my aunt was trying to sync her phone to the car,

About halfway through the car goes i think i heard something in French, would you like to change the language to French?

And i just pipe up oui

shanghailoz@reddit

Man, all you illiterates out there /s

你们需要学习汉字

Wendals87@reddit

Back about 20 years ago, we had old CRT TV's we used for some classes

One of my classmates had a watch that could send out IR signals and he found that he could control the TV.

He would turn it off, turn the volume up and down, change the channel etc

I don't think the teacher ever figured out what it was

banditofkills@reddit

was definitely guilty of doing this with my PSP 1000 and IRShell. was very amusing to mess with a few teachers.

shinra528@reddit

Happened at my high school too.

My dad used to do volunteer tech support for a small private school. At one point they had a problem with students setting BIOS passwords on the lab computers. Naturally, no one fessed up. So Dad and I had to find the manufacturer's documentation to learn how to reset the BIOS settings.

Reset BIOS pins or unplug the CMOS battery.

Dell's latest BIOS let's you add a HD password without needing the BIOS password. That wasn't fun finding out.

Yes, that's what we found out after searching. Find the correct jumper and move it to the other position, and that resets all BIOS settings to factory defaults. This was in the early 2000's, and the Internet was a lot less helpful then than it is now.

The teachers were about 90% sure which student had done it, but they didn't have enough evidence to punish the student. I'm guessing they just gave the class an ear-blistering lecture. Either way, it didn't happen again.

BrisingrAerowing@reddit

That's absurdly stupid design.

NotYourNanny@reddit

There's a lot of absurdly stupid in the name of security that doesn't really make things secure.

Id10t_techsupport@reddit

And was that setting "locked" out from being changed for future problems?

Responsible-End7361@reddit

I know!

I would not be surprised if a teacher whose room is close to the left speaker puts it back to right max.

Gullenbursti@reddit

I did. It was the only way to get the volume to 11

Milhent@reddit

I have a strangely opposite situation on my PC. If I want to hear sound from Skype and most videos, I have to set balance at 90-95 to the right. This way it results in good sound on both right and left. Otherwise I have no sound at all.

As far as I know, nobody in IT department have figured why. They just set it as part of troubleshooting script.

Chocolate_Bourbon@reddit

Almost 30 years ago I called the tech support line for my sound card. There was no sound from my speakers.

At the time I considered myself relatively astute since I had first used a home computer in the early 80’s. I knew my way around MS-DOS etc and was coming up to speed quickly on Windows. I had tried all sorts of stuff and could not figure it out.

It took the tech about 30’seconds to “diagnose” that I had the mute setting enabled. It happens.

Currently I’m trying to figure out why sound during a zoom meeting blasts out my Bluetooth headset but doesn’t with my cabled headset.

FrankDelahue@reddit

I think everyone has a story like that.

Just this week I had an issue with a Logitech rally bar in a teams meeting room. The thing was just not showing in teams, not in device manager and I was beating my head against it for an hour doing all the right things.

What I found in the end is that the USB cable that went from the PC to the device ran under a mat on the floor to prevent a trip hazard. Turns out that USB from the device was normally plugged in to a USB extension (USB A female > USB A male) and then into the PC. This had come unplugged.

Because I could see the USB out from the device and in to the computer it never occurred to me that there might be a break.

malteser_red@reddit

Wrapping some duck tape or electrical tape should keep the issue from popping up again.

Had the same chasing a power line, comes from device, goes behind that mount, and into the outlet. Of course there’sa power bar behind the mount.

AaronCorr@reddit

Sound like the brain fart I had as a teen. Changed my PC setup and got new speakers. Put them up and the sound was reversed. Was trying to find anything in settings to switch them around. It took me more than 10 minutes to realize, that I put them up the wrong way around.

Been there, done that with dual monitors.

xRamenator@reddit

Wait, elaborate. Dont tell me you moved the monitors around instead of going to Settings>Display and fixing it there?(Assuming Win10/11 environment)

Not the monitors, just the cables.

Yes, it was humiliating, once I thought about it.

Consistent-Jump-762@reddit

15 years ago there were students setting the printer to HEX Dump. And then go way to see someone print stacks of usless paper...

falthazar@reddit

Lol, love the title. Took me a sec to realize after I read the story, then I giggled.

I once had a USB extension (that was not defective in any way) on a barcode scanner that, if it was there, caused the credit card pad to not work right, and the drivers for the receipt printer to blue screen Windows. But the barcode scanner worked perfectly. That was a very frustrating troubleshooting day.

Swipecat@reddit

The controls would've been deliberately obscured if people aren't expected to mess with them except for special cases. The designers probably didn't think about putting them in an environment where the students were special cases.

meitemark@reddit

Most makers, designers or salespeons have no idea that putting anything in a school enviroment is like letting thousands of unhinged testers on a sugar high utterly try to destroy your creation in any way possible. We did it here in norway and handed out semi-good business laptops to everyone in what we call "videregående", aka 16-18 year olds (could be called high school). Yeah... well, at least the makers of the computers learned a LOT, like bios passwords should not be able to be reset by removing batteries, the whole thing had to be way more rugged and a lot more...