Good grief...

[ffutures]

I always thought it was an urban myth... even when I was doing phone support for a second-hand computer shop it never happened... but I just solved a relative's laptop problem over the phone by asking if it was plugged in. The answer, of course, was that it wasn't, and the battery was flat.

Comments

[davidkevin.livejournal.com]

This is not a "I know a guy who knew the guy who" story. It really happened.

About twenty years ago I worked for an independent Apple Computer dealer in Belleville, Illinois. One of our customers through an outside salesman was a weekly newspaper in Troy, Missouri, some 75 miles distant. We got a frantic call one afternoon about how their entire network of three Macs and a LaserWriter had gone dead, nothing they could do would bring any of the machines up, Help!!!

So the next morning one of our service techs, Jim Wright, who later went to work for Apple itself, got up at five a.m. to get to the customer when they opened for business at seven. He turned on the machines. Nothing. He cycled the surge protector/power strip on/off switch. Nothing. He followed the power cord for it to the wall plug hidden behind a file cabinet.

The power strip cord had pulled partially out of the wall. He pushed it back in. Everything came up.

He drove back to Belleville. They were billed for the two-hour minimum for an outside service call, plus mileage.