Re: Flying Windows screensaver - Strange Tales From A National Railway Enquiry Service.
Y2K came & went (As did my job) so I started contracting at the time everybody stopped.
One contract I was on involved the replacement of machines at NRES in Plymouth (It was a nice gig despite the distance 80 mile round trip). After the initial rollout I was asked to babysit the users for teething issues etc, the project manager was happy to sign off my time sheets & all was well issues included.
Someone maliciously deleting the application folder in program files, replaced the missing folders a few times by dragging a copy across the network.
Machines freezing in use\unattended, this was a little harder & to see which workstations were freezing I started looking for machines by running & looking for those with frozen screensavers & the issue was mainly on the second & third floors, not the first floor. Thu it was found that the bright young things on the upper floors were using the mouse wheel, the older users were not as adept, removing the supplied Logitech mouse driver restored normal operation.
I in the meantime started expanding my range of support duties as I had been there for about 6 weeks in total & quite fancied the idea of making this a permanent gig. When this happened….
The supervisors were monitoring recorded calls, the incoming calls were running through the PC sound card & headphones & one such conversation went like this….
“Once you get to Holyhead, you need to take the ferry I can’t look that up on the system, I am just going to check the ferry timetabling information I will be back in a few minutes…”
“OK Thank you”
Silence then “Gloop!” More silence “Gloop gloop” Silence again “Gloop….Gloop gloop………..Gloop”.
Those of a certain age will recall the aquarium screensaver that someone had decided would be nice to install on their shared work machine, thus I was tasked with locking down the build (Windows 95 build IIRC possibly due to the desk hot* swapping nature of the operators & Plug n Play support for the sound cards). Alas that was the day the agency & client awoke to the fact I was still on-site & terminated me at end of day & so the problem remained (Hence Icon).
*Including one rather hot operator, that liked to amuse herself while giving out time table information, would tuck one foot up & vigorously rubbing her heel\foot against her crotch & slightly bouncing in her seat.