Dumb Terminals? Are They Called That After Tech Support Have Murdered Them? humor

Dumb Terminals? Are They Called That After Tech Support Have Murdered Them?

I worked for a company that provided billing and office management software to physicians offices. Most of our users had dumb terminals with dial-up or dedicated lines that connected them to a stack of Unix systems at our facility. One day, we received a call transferred from the front-line help desk. The user was saying her enter key wasn't working.

My co-worker and I were the support techs for the organization. We took the call and found that when the user hit the enter key, the information wasn't accepted, and the cursor simply moved one column to the right. Now, the terminal hardware in the offices was rather old and prone to bizarre failure behavior. Keyboards and logic controllers would die in very odd ways.

We went through our hardware troubleshooting procedures. We confirmed that it was just this one key that was malfunctioning, and that the problem persisted when the keyboard was swapped out with another.

We tried checking keyboard mapping settings in the terminal and in the software she was using, but nothing worked. Finally we monitored the serial data stream by hooking another terminal up to the inbound port on the multiplexer and placing it into "dump" mode. As the user hit the troubled enter key, we saw a continuous line of hex 's the ASCII space character.

At this point we were resolved to having to replace the whole terminal. As we had no spares and were waiting on a shipment, we couldn't do it for at least three days. The user expressed concern at being without a functional terminal for that period. We asked her to use the second enter key until we could fix the problem permanently. The following dialog ensued:

"What second enter key?"

Me: "Over on the right hand side of the keyboard, there's a number pad. There should be an enter key over there that you can use."

Her: "Which one?"

Me: "It should say Enter or have a crooked arrow pointing to the left, depending on the keyboard model. It should look identical to the broken enter key."

Her: "There's no key over there that looks the same."

Me: "Well, what does the broken key say on it?"

Her: "It doesn't say anything."

Me: "What does the broken enter key look like, exactly?"

Her: "It's big and long, and it doesn't have anything on it."

Me: And it's the one at the bottom of the keyboard?"

Her: "Yes, that's it!"

Me: "And you say that every time you hit it, it just puts a space on the screen?"

Her: "Yeah!"

Me: "That's because you're hitting the space bar."

We heard a swift intake of breath, and then the user hung up.

Somehow, one day after years of working on the same software, with the same terminal, performing the same procedure, she decided that the space bar was the enter key. We stared at each other for about five minutes after she hung up, utterly disbelieving that we didn't even think about checking to make sure the user was hitting the right key and even more disbelieving that in the nearly minutes she was on the phone, it never occurred to her that the key marked enter might be the one she wanted.