Let It Go, Let It Gooo…?

Posted by IncarnatePuppy52@reddit | talesfromtechsupport | View on Reddit | 60 comments

I worked tech support for a call center with a cellphone company contract. One cold winter, I had an admin call to say, “my computer is frozen”.

She had issues with this laptop all the time. I told her to try and reboot it.

“Uh. I don’t think that will help.”

“Oh, well, unplug it and take out the battery.”

“No, you don’t understand…it’s frozen.”

I thought, no. No no no way.

I went to her office. It was indeed frozen. Encased in a thin sheet of ice.

“How?” I asked.

“Well, I was going to work last night but changed my mind and-“

“You left it in your car in -2 degree (F) weather?”

“Yeah, sorry…”

I sighed, wrapped the poor thing up in a towel, and put it behind me in my office chair to slowly warm it up. It was only SIX MONTHS OLD. They would not replace it. And admins never got the knack of “save it to the server not your desktop”.

Luckily, it worked for another year. It did have some weird issues though.

These people were…interesting. Just like the government I had worked for prior. I don’t get how people are promoted into positions of power with the brain capacity of a walnut. 😂

[-]

HerfDog58@reddit

I manged laptops for a hybrid HS/college program which issued all the students laptops. On the first day of the class, I'd walk the students thru how to disable hibernate mode in Windows, and then review the list of dos and don'ts. One of the reminders was "don't leave it in the car overnight when it's cold out." Another was "Save a copy of all your files to your cloud storage."

One Monday I get a call from one of the teachers - a student can't get her laptop to boot, and she's got a project that's like 1/3 of her grade due the next day. "Did she save it to her cloud storage like she was told the first day of class? If so, she can login on any computer and download it."

"I'll check." <30 seconds later> "No." I tell him to collect the laptop from the student, I'll be there to pick it up as soon as I can.

I get to his classroom, and the student is still there. I asked her to tell me what happened - was she using it, did it display any errors, how did it behave? She told me "I didn't use it at all, I just left it in my mom's car all weekend." So for 3 days, her laptop had been in a car parked in a driveway that alternated between 0 and 20 degrees F. I said "Did you remember when I told you to not do that?"

"Yeah, but I didn't think it would be a big deal."

"How about now, is it a big deal now?"

"Yes."

I take the laptop, tell the teacher I'm going back to my workspace and I'll see what I can do. I tell him I can't promise anything since the computer has been basically frozen for 3 days, so there may be damaged components. I promise to do the best I can.

TWENTY MINUTES LATER, I get a call from the program administrator who goes off on a rant about what am I doing to solve the problem, this girl's grade counts on that project, how could I let this happen, the parents are pissed... I interrupt and tell her a) the student screwed up by not saving a copy to her cloud; b) the student screwed up by leaving the computer in a freezing car for 3 days; and c) I haven't even looked at the computer yet because I literally just got it to my work area so I don't know what the problem is, much less whether I can fix it. I tell her give me an hour and I'll report back.

By this time, the computer is room temp, but I removed the battery, borrowed a heat gun from our facilities crew and warmed it up more for a several minutes. I swapped in a fresh battery, plugged in a power brick, and fired it up. The drive was inaccessible due to some hibernation mode error. Sheesh this kid just did NOT listen to anything I told her.

I booted from a Hiren's Rescue disc, and was able to mount the drive, and read the volume. I was able to find the folder in which she stored her work, and download it to a flash drive. I configured one of our spare laptops, set up her login account, and logged in as the student. I then copied all the files to the user folder, then logged into her cloud account and saved copies in that as well. I then logged in as the admin account and disabled hibernation and configured a few other things she'd ignored. Elapsed time, 48 minutes.

I called the administrator, told her the files were in the student's cloud storage, and suggested SHE send a message to all the students and parents to NOT leave laptops in freezing cars for a weekend. She thanked me. The teacher came and picked up the laptop and took it back to his class. He thanked me.

I'm still waiting for a thank you from the student or parents, 10+ years later.

[-]

DJAttreides@reddit

Why couldn't you just disable hibernation beforehand?

[-]

HerfDog58@reddit

The laptops were unmanaged - partially due to the tech available at the time and partly due to political considerations. This was prior to M365/Intune, and the classrooms were not in a building where my organization had any kind of network nor VPN connection - the classrooms were on the college campus, but the laptops belonged to the HS program. The college had their own self contained network and wouldn't allow us to set up something like SCCM to manage our devices, and they weren't joined to any domain for either the HS or the college, so no GPOs to reinforce power management.

I walked the students thru how to disable hibernation on day 1 of them getting their laptops. This girl thought she knew more than me, hence her re-enabling hibernation AND leaving it in a sub-freezing car for 3 days.

I don't work in that sector anymore, nor do I manage endpoints. My life is infinitely less complicated now.

[-]

Birdbraned@reddit

I mean, she had a major thing due the day after the weekend and clearly didn't bother attempting to start the project beforehand if she only discovered it after the weekend. I'd almost suspect she did it intentionally so as to have an excuse not to submit.

[-]

Rathmun@reddit

If she hadn't even attempted to start it, there wouldn't be any files for u/HerfDog58 to find.

It sounds to me like she did the project ahead of time, didn't save it to the cloud, left the laptop in the car over the weekend (didn't need it to do any work because it was already done), and then discovered the problem when it was time to turn it in.

[-]

HerfDog58@reddit

I don't know any of the details about her work habits. I didn't care at the time because I wasn't her teacher. I don't care now because I don't work there any more.

[-]

Rathmun@reddit

Fair enough. Still, if there were files for you to find, they had to exist before you went looking.

[-]

IncarnatePuppy52@reddit (OP)

Damn you really kicked it hard! I’m impressed!

[-]

HerfDog58@reddit

35 years in the industry, you see some things, you do some things.

Sensitive_Hat_9871@reddit

I supervised an IT shop for several years. Each year in the late Fall and early Winter I sent reminders to staff with notebook computers to not leave their devices in vehicles overnight subjecting them to freezing temperatures. Luckily I never had to replace a device or battery due to freezing temperatures.

fresh-dork@reddit

i had the opposite problem - got on a plane and opened my backpack to find the laptop was fairly hot - a bit over 100. sees my MAC decided it wanted to cook itself.

MerionesofMolus@reddit

Yeah, I’ve had that a few times over the years myself. The annoying thing is that the SMC resets never fix it for long enough.

arahman81@reddit

Can't be just Windows laptops doing that now...

well, it didn't go full spicy pillow, so that's nice

ozzie286@reddit

I call BS. My work laptop has spent many nights in my work truck in colder weather. It's always worked fine. And where would the water have come from to make the thin layer of ice?

Pdan4@reddit

Condensation perhaps.

Elsa, probably. Idk. I just know I saw the gentle shimmer and was instantly confused in several ways.

MeanSecurity@reddit

Years ago I worked at a company where some hardware was stolen from an employee’s car, and it was full of sensitive information. I got trained real young not to leave my laptop in the car for that reason alone.

syntaxerror53@reddit

Talking to someone whose colleague one time stuck in traffic in car, some cyclists were around his car, opened back door and took off with laptop bag. Never saw it again.

Heard of one where two co-workers were walking towards car and one unlocked boot from distance, some thieves were around and made off with contents of boot.

Always lock car doors and never unlock car from distance.

limogesguy@reddit

You can do it quick; you can do it cheap; and then you'll do it over again. Or you can do it right and never need to go back to service it.

nymalous@reddit

I'm curious as to what the weird issues with the laptop were.

I know someone who let their laptop freeze in their car overnight and he flexed the screen and heard a whole bunch of cracking. I don't know what happened after that.

xRockTripodx@reddit

This is why our government is composed almost exclusively by people who failed up.

RandomBoomer@reddit

Unlike the business world? Unlike corporations? Sure, this only happens in the government....

Did I say that?

Riajnor@reddit

Worked in local government in new zealand l, watched people with minimal technical skills but plenty of social skills advance real quick. It’s definitely an environment of “it’s not what you know, it’s who you know”

dazcon5@reddit

I worked as a contractor for the federal government, the number of utter nincompoops in key management positions was astounding the political appointees were even worse.

Vinnie_Vegas@reddit

It's actually a massive detriment to be highly intelligent in those positions, because you're constantly being bombarded with such idiocy that you would go insane if you were a rational-minded person.

You have to be an utter nincompoop to be able to hear some of those opinions and just go about your day as per normal.

No argument there. It's dumb. I'm the IT director for a small school district in the states. The sheer number of third party companies that are taking advantage of the fact that most districts don't have an IT director with my experience is shocking. We are being picked apart by these parasites.

Objective-Target5437@reddit

so are corporations

SamuelVR@reddit

Told this one before. Laptop service. In comes the baker with his work laptop and all his 4 generation of family recipes. The intern didn´t see it and it was accidentally pushed into a barrel of jam. Fun times :D

Zepheria@reddit

Were you able to save it? :(

Unfortunately no. Laptop was dead and the jam got into the hdd (ssd's weren´t a thing yet) and we sent him to a data rescue company.

NekkidWire@reddit

It must have been jammed in three senses at least.. triple jammy :-) >!smeared with jam, stuck/glued, stopped working!<

Stryker_One@reddit

I'm betting Jays2Cents would love to know about this XOC trick.

BrisingrAerowing@reddit

This reminded me of this hilarious post.

harrywwc@reddit

the real zinger was "the third one this week" line - brilliant :)

Filosifee@reddit

Wow. Thats hilarious

helpwithtaxexam@reddit

I know. As an IRS retiree I had to solve problems with my 1 and a half years of computer science that the computer analyst was stumped by. Yet I couldn’t get hired or advanced from computer operator to computer programmer!

blueboy714@reddit

It's the Peter Principle in action. People rise to "a level of respective incompetence":

Loreen72@reddit

Quote from someone I knew in the Army: Shit floats.

That's not actually the same thing - The Peter Principle actually proposes a method of action for this problem that's basically unavoidable, in that doing one's job merely competently is grounds for promotion, so people keep getting promoted until they reach a position at which they are NOT doing their job competently, and the promotions cease. Multiply that across every position in your company and you now have people who are competent at lower levels but incompetent at their present level.

Which is the opposite to the implicit idea behind "shit floats" which suggests that these people were shit to begin with, and potentially promoted so that they'd stop being one person's problem and become someone else's.

The point is that you're supposed to promote people who show promise beyond their current level, not just anyone who manages to do their job for a while.

JackyRaven@reddit

Also; "it's not just the cream that rises to the top."

hemidemisemitruck@reddit

Why would the laptop be encased in ice? Did they leave it out by the sea?

It gets to -40 here and plenty of people leave electronics in their car overnight. LCD screens get hilariously slow pixels but otherwise, they survive just fine.

I'm going to guess a car with less than perfect seals or a window left open a crack.

fencepost_ajm@reddit

It was still well below freezing when brought into a probably fairly humid building, so water condensed on available surfaces including the interior. Leaving a device in the closed carrying case while it warms up might help because of limited air circulation but would still be iffy.

Maybe a bit frosty as it warms up, but literally a daily winter occurrence for people north of the 50th parallel. Nothing to worry about in the slightest.

forkimified@reddit

If you have anything like a laptop, camera, etc. out in sub freezing temperatures, seal it in a plastic bag BEFORE you bring it in, and the condensation should form on the outside of the bag!

gdmfsoabrb@reddit

The lights glow bright on the servers tonight
Not an outage to be seen
The fans in soft sussuration
The AC's cool and clean

fshannon3@reddit

Wow. Kinda remarkable that it still worked in some capacity afterwards. I had one guy at a previous job come in one cold, wintry morning and said his laptop wasn't powering on. He handed it over and it was quite cold to the touch. I asked him if he'd left it in his car overnight and he did say that he did. First thing I wanted to do was try reseating the battery so I opened the bottom of the laptop up and there was condensation all over the innards of the thing. I just said "Well, this thing's done." But I went ahead and removed the SSD and put it in another chassis...lo and behold, it actually booted up.

The other one never powered back up however, even the next day after letting it sit.

DrMylk@reddit

It was probably missing an ssd...

spiritsarise@reddit

😆

AdreKiseque@reddit

Encased?? 😭

It was this swirly layer of ice that was thankfully not too thick. But it did cover the poor thing. 😢

Zonnebloempje@reddit

Interesting...

I unknowingly dropped my cellphone (2 years old, but still very good) into my deep freezer a couple of months ago, when putting away some frozen groceries. Could not find it anywhere. Searched high and low (including calling it and using "find my phone"), but to no avail. So I called my provider and locked my SIM card/number, and would receive a new one.

Blocked my bank app as well, and started searching for a new phone and ordered one that same weekend. Took me a long time, but I did get most of my stuff working on the new phone without my old one present for easy transfer.

Couple of weeks later, my husband has to get something from the freezer and he finds my phone. Dead. So I carefully take it out of its cover, "dry" it off with a towel and just let it come back to room temperature by itself. Turn it on, and, amazingly, it does, with 10% battery. So I turn it back off, and put it on the charger (just in case). It goes back to 100% in a normal time frame, and has been working good ever since. It is now my back-up.

Is there so much difference between laptops and phones?