User told three times ‘Do Not Reboot This PC’ did it anyway • The Register

In final week’s version of On-Name, The Register’s weekly column devoted to readers’ days being broken by calls for to deflect useless catastrophe, we questioned if the inevitabilities of dying and taxes must be joined by meaningless managerial interventions. This week, now we have a brand new candidate to hitch lists of iconic inevitabilities: customers ignoring directions after which complaining when their very own actions create problems.

Let’s discover this concept with the assistance of a reader we’ll Regomize as “Ivan”, who as soon as sorted the IT fleet at a big power firm.

“The busiest part of the corporate was the retail arm with a number of hundred desktop PCs in name centres across the UK,” Ivan defined.

Ivan’s job was sophisticated by weekly rollouts of upgraded purposes, for which he used “a widely known software program large’s desktop administration suite” to make sure and patches would stream to the PC fleet.

Clients are typically grumpy with name centres at the perfect of instances, however taking these ones offline for software program upgrades was not an possibility. So Ivan was solely allowed to run upgrades over the weekend so they might not disrupt service – and left sufficient time for debugging to make sure enterprise might resume on Monday mornings.

“For one such rollout it was important that the PC was not used whereas the set up was happening so I wrote a batch script to disable the mouse and keyboard till the job had accomplished,” Ivan recalled.

In case customers had been confused by unresponsive machines, Ivan made positive the software program set up package deal “disabled the display screen saver and changed the desktop background with an enormous signal, white writing on a brilliant purple display screen, saying ‘Software program set up in progress. Do Not Try and Re-boot This System’.”

And simply to ram the message dwelling, each Friday earlier than a software program improve, Ivan emailed native help workers and customers to warn them to not mess with their PCs till the improve had concluded.

With all of that preparation full Ivan headed off to take pleasure in weekend and made all of it the way in which to Sunday evening when he checked the progress of the improve.

“The vast majority of the PCs reported again that the job had accomplished efficiently,” Ivan recalled. The few machines that hadn’t upgraded weren’t a fear: somebody all the time turned off their PC by mistake or did one thing else that wanted intervention.

And so it was on Monday morning, when one of many tech help minions that Ivan had warned in regards to the weekend’s improve reported a consumer whose PC was displaying a wierd message, and when she tried to do one thing in regards to the mouse and keyboard wouldn’t work.

This consumer – who was display screen that stated “Do Not Try and Re-boot This System” – then rebooted the machine by pulling out its energy twine.

“I known as her and requested her what the message stated and her reply was merely ‘Oh!’,” Ivan recalled.

He then fastened the PC, which rapidly labored as required, full with upgraded software program.

Ivan took a small victory from the mess: the consumer all the time learn his Friday afternoon emails after the incident.

Have customers ignored your directions? If that’s the case, click here to email On-Call together with your story. Get to it, folks, the On-Name mailbag might use a lift. ®