Everytime Employee 2 walks by a cubicle, one of the screens blacks out | Hacker News Reader

Everytime Employee 2 walks by a cubicle, one of the screens blacks out

reddit.com

69 pointschrisan35 comments

I am prone to static shocks and one day I discovered I could temporarily bypass the card key lock at our office by shocking the handle. No one believed me until one day we gathered everyone at the office around and I did it while being filmed. Our head of security was furious, everyone else thought it was hilarious.

> Our head of security was furious

Furious with you or the vendor? How long did it take to fix, if ever?

Loss of control can result in anger.

Even if your not mad it sometimes helps to put on a show. Lets others know that you’re serious about security.

I remember these emails while in the Defense Industry. Sprinkled through the email would be choice words in all caps, and bolded, and in Italics, likely in red, maybe highlighted in some other color as well.

Such attempts at "letting others know you're serious about security" seemed more for CYA oversight purposes for the company's security department, but at least 100s of people got reeducated-by-email about proper door security during or after a fire drill.

I'm not sure if it ever did, it would have been the jurisdiction of the building management rather than our company. We had all our critical hardware locked in a separate room with analog locks so it wasn't an emergency at the time.

This was also years ago, so imagine it's been addressed and may have been at the time. I didn't keep testing it because it involves static shocking yourself, which is something I like to avoid.

Seems like glitching locks is still a thing: https://nfckill.com

Static shocks can do damage.

Some weeks ago I was sitting at an office where everything was static (I think they did not ground the power outlets in the desks properly).

Every time I sat down I got a big hit. But one time my laptop crashed and shut down.

So back to the story: it might as well has to do with the shoes employee 2 is wearing and the way he/she walks.

Edit: from the poster on Reddit: "She wears a wool cover to stay warm."

30 years ago I was working at a place that just had started with computers. One of the older employees always had computer problems and had been told to spray the floor with softener by th IT staff tired of repairing the fried motherboard.

A few years later another company kept a stack of keyboards next to a lady that kept killing hers. They start working again after a while thanks to keyboards having a nice fuse. Just rotate them until the keyboard port fried one day. She was also wearing a wool sweater, big old stone building in northern Sweden...

>...old stone building

Yeah, I think we often forget that ground from the outlet is not necessarily local ground in the building materials (concrete and whatever)

I have a power cord that has everything but the ground wire cut and the single ground part of the plug plugged into the wall. Near my keyboard, I have the other end of the ground wire exposed. Before I touch my keyboard, I touch it. In the winter, 9/10 times I discharge a little shock. I've ruined keyboards and computers with my shocks, and since I installed this setup, zero problems.

I set up a coworker with this, after he killed his laptop by shocking it.

In my old office, one of the girls got a humidifier to combat the dry air during wintertime. It also seemed to help with the amount of static buildup maybe by making it easier to dissipate. Not a fix by any measure, but it did seem to help a bit. Anyone else tried this?

Yes, a cold water with vibration humidifier. Everything is now covered by a thin layer of white dust from the water. We have medium soft water. A little less chocks I guess but we can't have this white dust everywhere so can't say for sure.

Like an oil diffuser? I think I've read to use distilled water to avoid that problem

We're in a soft water area, so that wasn't a problem! And the type we used heated the water, so most residue would stay within the humidifier.

you could attach a resistor to the ground wire, and touch the other electrode of the resistor, with 2 resistors appropriately chosen (so that you don't fry the MM), you can put a multimeter across one of them and observe the discharge, or alternatively build a simple circuit that lights a LED as long as the voltage across the resistor is higher than some value... Discharging doesn't need to hurt..

That said, depending on the setup (type of ground system and electronics) it is not necessarily safe to touch the ground from an outlet!

I always thought that man made fibres were most prone to generating static. Wool, cotton and other natural fibres being least likely. Borne out by putting on or removing so many of those clever outdoors base layers accompanied by crackle that wool never has. Artificial commercial carpets positively encourage static too.

Something something long chain molecules something something better insulators, or something. :)

I have had my monitor turn off when I touch my laptop whilst being statically charged. Might well be the issue here too, especially since they mention she wears wool quite often.

However, that was by direct touch, how that would happen when walking by is still a mystery to me :)

Wearing an old cellphone and the computer was old and no shielding? ;)

When we were still young and played a lot, we also overclocked a lot. At one hacker convent we had three computers with the hood of, all running w95. Any time there was a phone call (Nokia 3210 era) all three would get a bluescreen. The computers ran much better with hoods on except for the heat.

I expected to read a solution, not just the symptoms- but other than the theory that the monitor is connected to a power cable that runs under the floor, and the employee who triggers the screen to shut off is heavier than the others and stepping on the cable, there isn't anything relevant posted there. I'm currently searching for a solution to a clients' random monitor shutoff issue so I was hoping for some insight!

It did, however, give me a greater appreciation for the quality of comments on HN compared to Reddit.

No kidding. I read through until I hit a reddit comment discussing a possible paranormal connection. Yeesh.

There are a ton of people suggesting it's related to ESD (electrostatic discharge), which is IMO the most likely culprit. The effects of ESD are pretty wild and generally invisible to the naked eye. We have yearly ESD safety meetings at my job and are required to wear ESD-safe shoes/jackets and use anti-static wrist straps when working with any hardware (which I rarely do, but I still love the "perk" of getting free ESD Birkenstocks every couple years).

My theory: Employee wears a large wool cover and sits on a synthetic materiel office chair(PVC?). As employee stands up, they pick up a fairly heavy static charge. As employee walks by, the motion of the static charge creates a moving magnetic field which then induces an electric charge in the monitor's electronics, causing the blackout.

Possible solution: replace wool wrap on employee 2 with aluminum foil.

Source on possible material combinations: https://www.school-for-champions.com/science/static_material...

The writer mentions that it occasionally happens to other employees as well and that it happens not every time but "more than 50% of the time" for employee 2. This makes me suspect that it could just be variance that makes it seem as if the phenomenon happens "everytime" for employee 2.

It takes quite a lot of trials to reach 2 SD significance, you'd have to let employee 2 walk past the cubicle at least a hundred times to be sure that there is really anything going on.

Perhaps static. Employee 2 maybe has clothes which cause more static than for other employees. In the Reddit thread a "wool cover" has been mentioned.

It could coincide with one of Employee 2's habits or routines before they leave their desk. For example, I used to have a cheap fan on my desk and whenever I changed the speed or turned it off, it caused all of the Dell monitors nearby to go blank for a few seconds before turning back on and readjusting to the resolution of my laptop. I usually turned my fan off whenever I expected to be away from my desk for more than a few minutes.

It could be software too: Employee 2 launches a build before going on a break, or a GPU-intensive screensaver that starts up. That would explain the ~50% occurrence.

I posted this to reddit but I'm more likely to get a reasonable discussion on here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r-V_Z3bD_PA

Dave covers "static" turning off a monitor in this video. Could it be this?

yep, and it all goes back to this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sUG_sjS67K4

Street Light Interference (SLIders) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Street_light_interference_phen...

We had a chair that would crash the system - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=87jnCABBaeY

One interesting bit is that it could be linked to a medical condition of Employee 2 (peacemaker for instance). And an employer can't ask about an employee medical records.

replace the defective employee

Floating floors and Employee 2 is heavier than others. Cord is pinching under a panel and unplugging/resetting itself.

That's my guess anyway.

I think it's just a prank and the employer 2 had bugged the victim's system somehow and triggers it remotely

Reply on news.ycombinator.com