Tech Support Stories: The Keyboard Warrior

A buddy who worked as a system administrator back in the late 80s early 90s told this story to me a few years ago. He had been working in a factory with heavy machinery and a surprisingly modern computer system. There were terminals on the floor that were connected to the mainframe. It was my buddy’s job to handle whatever problems arose on the factory floor, pretty normal stuff.

One day, he gets a call from the floor. He talks to the guy for a bit until the guy mentions his problem. The guy says he can’t log on when he stands up. Now my friend knows this is ridiculous. He immediately thinks it’s a prank. There’s no way that a chair would change the way the computer works. He starts to ask the man the standard questions “Are you sure it’s on? Is the power connected?” and the guy gets offended. He says he knows what he’s doing and that the problem is real.

So my buddy goes over to check out the problem after a long back and forth on the phone. He goes over to the floor and logs in, no problem. Then the worker tells him to try it again, this time standing up. Sure enough, it’s just as the worker said. When you log in sitting down on the chair, it works perfectly. When you stand up it fails and says invalid password. He tried again and again and it would not work.

There is no logical reason for this and no one could figure it out. This issue went from sounding like a prank phone call to becoming a fascinating debugging problem. The problem became very popular in the high tech modern factory. Everyone gathered around to try to figure it out. So many people come to test their password out that it affects productivity. 

As people come and try it out, the problem becomes even weirder. Some people are able to log in without issue either standing up or sitting down and others cannot log in either way. It took a long session of searching for the problem before they actually figured it out.

Basically some jokester had switched around two keys on the keyboard and both the original worker and my buddy had those keys in their passwords. Both guys were good at typing and didn’t need to look at the keyboard to enter in their passwords-when sitting down. However, when they would stand up they would look down at the keyboard and use the wrong keys when they entered their password.

This didn’t affect some people at all because they didn’t use those keys and others couldn’t log in sitting or standing because they always needed to look at the keyboard and became confused.  Since people type all day and often don’t think about it, it was hard to figure out that that had been the problem. It was such a sweet victory to solve that problem.