Lightening Strikes

July 12, 2004

It's been a busy week today.... we had the typical over-the-weekend lightening storms that are so common along the East Coast during the summer. On Monday the phone began to ring with various complaints of dead or damaged computers. One poor customer (Victim A) who got struck this weekend had also been hit a year ago — almost to the day. Another client's (Victim B) practically new G5 appeared to get burned.

Victim A was almost in a complete panic and depression — can't say I blame her. Poor dear is supposed to be on vacation this week. An iMac and a G4 lost their network connections after the storm. I asked her to try a different, known-working, network port before we wrote-off the NIC. She called back and said she had ordered a new NIC for the G4 (the iMac was a lost cause, since the NIC is built-in, so back for repair it went). My technician went out, installed the NIC card and it failed. He moved the cable and it worked. Hmmm... so he tried the built-in NIC and it worked too. So much for her bothering to try a different network port. Now she is the proud owner of a new network card and has a bill for an on-site visit — both of which could have been avoided by plugging a cable in to a different port in the wall. I hate it when that happens.

Moral: When we ask you to do something that seems stupid or redundant to you, it's because we want to save you money, not because we enjoy making you do things you don't want to do (which we DO enjoy, but only on our dime).

Victim B arrived in his office Monday to see the white light on his G5 on, but no other sign of life. He turned off the surge protector, and turned it back on and the white light went off and right back on. Pulled the plug, same thing. Don't lose hope, I said, there should be a reset button on the logic board that just might fix it. Since I haven't yet had to find the reset on a G5, I asked him to call Apple. Sure enough, he emailed me a couple of hours later from his working G5. Apple walked him through finding the switch and that fixed it (but he let me in on the secret of where it is, dad-gummit).

Moral: There really ARE magic buttons inside your computer we can press to make things work (or fail?).