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My PC makes ‘negative energy waves’, said user, then demanded fix

Ignorance of the giant radio antennae atop the office building was bliss

On-Call Everybody’s working for the weekend, the song goes, but here at On-Call, The Register works to bring you a weekly story of a fellow reader’s tech support trauma.

This week, meet “Roger” who once took a call from a user “well known as being very sensitive to radio waves and who therefore did things like using a headset so that a mobile phone wouldn’t cook her cranium.

And then one day the user complained to Roger that their new laptop was “sending out very negative waves”.

Roger wasn’t sure what that meant, but the user explained she wanted to turn off the wireless. So Roger explained that “the button on the top of the keyboard with a very bright blue LED would turn off the WiFi.

The user, who remember could detect negative energy waves, could not find the button. Roger explained where the button could be found and it transpired the WiFi was already off.

Yet the user “could still feel the negative energy coming off of it.”

A few weeks later she called again to explain she’d found the source of the negative energy: it was the printer!

The same printer that had been on her desk for a year before the new laptop arrived.

And the best part? The user was ignorant of the three huge mobile phone antennae on the roof of the building where she and Roger worked, and had never complained about those producing negative anything!

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Roger had other wireless troubles, too, in the form of a user who insisted their computer would constantly type the letter “G” without so much as a finger being laid on the keyboard.

Roger’s no n00b so he made sure that the user didn’t have something resting on their keyboard or any other physical complications. He also considered metaphysical options, because he’d sometimes seen computers behaving in a rather ghostly fashion.

So down Roger went to the user’s desk, where he verified the phantom “G” was real. Next, he went beneath the desk to examine their PC. A quick tug on a USB cord disconnected the keyboard, but still the “G” persisted.

At this point Roger noticed an unidentified USB device, so asked what that was for.

“I have a wireless keyboard but I don’t use it anymore and put it in the cabinet behind me,” the user replied.

So Roger opened the cabinet and found said keyboard, complete with a stack of papers resting on the “G” key.

Roger’s response? “At least it wasn’t a ghost!”

Have wireless gremlins made your life tricky? If so, write to share your story with On-Call and we might pop it in here on a future Friday. If the energy flows are propitious. ®

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