I see a lot of strange things in my computer service wanderings around the Southport area. Usually any humorous incidents I encounter are humorous only to people like me (i.e. nerds) and so I don't usually write about them. But, this one transcended the nerd humor level and I felt that I just had to write about it. Of course, I told the party in question that I was going to do this - it was too good to pass up.
I recently received an emergency call from a business client who informed me that their router had suddenly stopped working. It was completely dead - no LEDs were lit on the front panel at all, even the Power On LED. This situation brought their office to a screaming halt, so I rushed over to diagnose the situation.
I found that the analysis was correct - the router was completely dead. By swapping with a known good unit, I realized that the router itself was fine. What was broken was the power supply. Plugging in the power supply from a good unit, and their router sprang to life as usual.
By power supply, I am referring to the standard wall transformer/plug unit with thin cord that is so ubiquitous these days. It seems that every device has a power cord or a wall brick; the area under my computer desk has so many that I hardly remember what is what.
But these things almost never fail. Any components inside the power block (a transformer and perhaps some other components) are tightly potted into the enclosure (usually with epoxy or something similar) and are very, very rugged.
To get the client running, I left the good power cord and took the bad unit to the local Radio Shack to find a replacement. Unfortunately there are many different voltages of these things, and they did not carry this one. At that point, the client had two options: The unit was under warranty, but to exercise the warranty they would have had to send the unit in for service and that would have left them without a working unit. The other option would be to buy a new unit - not horribly expensive but it seems like overkill for just a power cord.
I had the power cord at home and was searching the Internet for a replacement, when I just happened to run my fingers down the length of the cord. My fingers immediately encountered an anomaly; further analysis showed what looked like a very neat bite taken out of the cord, completely severing one of the two wires and the other cut partially. That was certainly the cause of the problem! If the cut had gone completely through the cord, it would have been an easy diagnosis right there at the client's office. By a sixteenth of an inch, it was left intact enough to deceive.
I soldered the cable back together and it worked fine. I cut out the bad piece and taped it to a business card for further analysis. Looking at it, my only assumption was that a small animal, perhaps a mouse, had bitten the cord as it looked like a perfect bite mark. But it was too perfect, and the cord was not gnawed at all - a very clean cut.
After frightening the office personnel with stories of mouse infestation, I then plugged the fixed cable back in. But the mystery deepened as the plug end of the cord went into a socket on top of the desk area and the break did not extend down to the floor where I would expect an animal to be. Also, they claimed that the failure occurred during the day and you wouldn't have expected a mouse to take a bite out of it on top of the desk during the day.
They suggested that it might have gotten caught in a drawer closing or something similar, but that again would not have left such a neat cut. We continued to look, now thoroughly confused, until we spied the cause of the problem. Sitting on the desk was a hole punch tool! When we matched the bite to the diameter of the hole punch, we knew that we had our solution - someone had punched a hole in the cord while punching holes in a document.
Case solved!
(Bob Seidel is a local computer consultant in the Southport / Oak Island area. You can visit his website at www.bobseidel.com or e-mail him at bsc@bobseidel.com).