Monitor Burnout
I was in another office with my coworker today and I noticed a smell. I asked her if she smelled electric. She smelled something, but didn’t think it was electric. Her laptop had been run over by a car and the screen looked like a piece of modern art. She had a regular CRT monitor hooked up to it so she could still use it. I suggested that she should keep a close eye on it and use caution.
From there I went to my cube and sat at the desk. I had a black screen and figured the screen saver had kicked on and that the monitor went out due to my energy saving features. It even had its amber “standing by” LED turned on. This is common as I’m usually away from my desk for hours at a time. Only this time, the screen wouldn’t come on.
I jerked the mouse, typed a few keys and even hit the infamous CTRL+ALT+DEL combination of keys. Nothing. I decided to just hit the power button to turn it off and turn it back on. Snap! A very bright white horizontal line was burning across my screen as smoke came out of the back of the monitor. After some quick reflexes, the monitor was turned back off and all cables were pulled out of my battery backup system.
The system administrator was on vacation so the configuration management guy and myself took care of things and left a nice note.
This monitor literally blew up. Thisiswas Lewis’s monitor.
So for the rest of the day, I had been working on everyone else’s computers with them getting my work done. As I said before, I’m usually not in my office. It gave an interesting task for one of the new people to work with me as I walked through my tasks.
January 3rd, 2006 at 7:38 pm
[…] My monitor that had blown up last week was replaced. I’m uncertain if it is my permanent replacement, but hey - it works. I was in another office when the system administrator announced that he got a big shipment of hard drives and memory to upgrade every ones machines. I asked what was going to happen with the old hard drives. He said he could see what he could do about getting me a 20 GB hard drive if I was interested. Anything is great for a backup drive! He also mentioned that I had a new desktop setting at my cube. That shocked me a bit. I had just gotten a brand new laptop a while back and now they are upgrading my desktop. Wow! […]