On Location

Sometimes troubleshooting leads nowhere. You try and try, but the problem remains. I've found that going on location can sometime help to track down the cause. Take this incident from about 15 years ago, for example.

Like clockwork the phone rings at 9:15AM. The database is corrupted again. Not just corrupted, but completely trashed. It's so bad the software no longer recognizes the database as a valid file. The user and I have fought this one for two weeks now. Every morning at 9:15AM the user calls to tell me the error message on the screen. "'Database corrupted' is what it says." the user tells me. So I spend 20 minutes walking the user through restoring the database from the last backup. You'd think the user would have the procedure memorized by now. I sure do.

"How about I come out to the office and check out your PC personally?" I ask. "That's okay with me. Anything to stop this stupid error." the user says. "Computers just hate me." he adds.
Something in the back of my head is nagging me about that last statement the user made. I realize he is frustrated and all, but to believe the computer hates him is a bit extreme.

The user meets me at the front door of the company the next morning. It's a manufacturing plant for electrical pumps. The big kind, like the ones you see at oil refineries and water treatment plants. They keep their on-hand inventory in a simple little database running on a 386 PC in the back corner of the office. I follow the user back to the corner cubicle and he turns the PC on. We chat a bit as the thing boots up. I ask him about the computer hating him.

"Oh it's not just this computer, but all of them. They all hate me. This is the third one we've had this database on in the last eight weeks. The boss got tired of them always shifting older machines over here, so he went out and bought this one last week." He tells me.

The machine comes up and sure as the sun rises the software errors out with a corrupted database. I also notice that the screen seems a bit fuzzy. A new PC and monitor should not look like this. It's like the screen can't decide what color it should be. Weird right? Anyways, I check the PC from top to bottom and find nothing wrong.

While restoring the last backup there is this rumbling like thunder, but it's a sunny day. The rumbling gets very loud and starts shaking the desk. Pencils start rattling around and it's almost like an earthquake. "What was that?" I ask the user. "Oh, that's the crane." he says calmly. "Crane? From where?" I ask. "Oh, this office is attached to the warehouse. Let me show you." he says.

The user leads me down a hall and around the corner and I'm inside this huge warehouse. Along one wall is this monstrous hulk of metal being lifted by some sort of overhead gantry crane. It's quite an impressive sight. "So what's that thing that it's lifting?" I ask the user. "That? Oh that is the largest pump we manufacture." he says proudly. "We've had that thing there for the last couple of months, ready to be shipped. Thank goodness it's finally going out the door today."

That's when it hits me. Largest pump. Electrical pump. That means a giant electric motor, with giant MAGNETS! "That wall right there, that's next to your office?" I ask the user. "Yeah, it can get real noisy some times." he says. We go back to his cubicle and the screen looks fine now.
Imagine that. I tell him my guess that the giant magnets might be messing up his database and it doesn't really register. So I go and talk to the boss. He agrees to move the user's cubicle off that wall and into one that's closer to the middle of the office. I never heard from them again.

Just to be safe I called them back about a week later. The machine, database, screen, everything is doing fine. I let them know that they should not put any kind of computer equipment along that wall in the future. Magnets and PCs just don't mix.