This exact problem that the OP describes, happened to one of my team members in my last job - we took the whole setup apart and reassembled it at a different desk and the problem did not manifest. We moved it all back to the original desk and it happened again there, regular as clockwork.
We went through all of the same thought processes that have been detailed in this thread - static electricity, loose cables, wires under the carpet, someone playing a prank, some malfunction of proximity sensing on the docked laptop. None of it really made sense.
In the end, we just switched desks because that was the only way to make it stop. It probably was some weird electrical phenomenon involving some failure of grounding in a cable or connector, capacitive coupling, static electricity etc, but we never managed to resolve it.
I am an IT professional with over 25 years of experience providing support and sometimes I will straight-up declare that a problem was either a haunting or some kind of curse.
In the end if you fix the issue, it doesn’t matter.
I’m leaning towards haunting. There just doesn’t seem to be a physical connection between the two events. When I get the time I am going to switch the cables as suggested above.
This reminds me of a puzzler segment the Car Talk guys used to do. The setup would be some seemingly crazy issue that had no clear obvious cause and effect, similar to the OP. But there was one, it just wasn’t obvious at first.
One was (going from memory of years ago so I might get small details wrong), a man had a pregnant wife who would often call him at work to stop at the store and pick her up a pint of ice cream. Sometime she asked for chocolate, sometimes vanilla. Every time he picked up vanilla, his car would have a lot of trouble starting back up. But every time he picked up chocolate, his car started just fine. Spoiler-blurred for anyone who wants to try to guess the solution:
His car had some problem that required it, after shutting off the engine, to sit for a little while before it would start right up again. Since vanilla ice cream was the most popular flavor, it was kept in a freezer case right in front of the store. So he’d return to the car too quickly. The chocolate was all the way in the back, so it would give his car time to rest or ‘reset’ or whatever (can’t remember the exact car issue).
The point is, there was a cause and effect, it just took some out of the box thinking. In the OP’s case, as @Mangetout and @Atamasama have said, it’s probably just a matter of switching out chairs, cables, monitors, etc., until the problem is solved. The exact cause and effect may never be known, but finding out exactly what it is isn’t always as important as just fixing it.
I used to have a car, I don’t remember exactly what but some compact sedan that I bought for interim transportation, but anyway the speedometer stopped working. I didn’t have it fixed, I just drove it that way. Every once in a while, I would see the speedo jump to life. Eventually I put it together that when I idly lifted the hand brake, just a smidge, the speedometer would work. So I would drive, lifting the hand brake about a 1/16 of an inch and it worked fine.
Eventually, I decided to have it repaired. I stopped in a garage and explained to the grizzled old mechanic what the issue was. He looked up from under the hood of the car he was working on and said flatly, “That’s not possible - they are two different systems that don’t intersect”.
So, of course, I invited him to take a test drive. He refused, insisting what I was telling him couldn’t be happening. The speedometer cable goes from the dashboard to the transmission. The brake cable goes from the console to the back wheels, the two don’t cross, he explained.
Yes, I know that, I told him but it’s happening!
He never looked at it. I was so frustrated I just dropped it. When I eventually sold it, I explained to the girl how to get the speedo to work. She accepted it.
The speedo cable coming out of the transmission needed to be lifted slightly to make contact due to a bad connection. When you took up the slack in the e-brake cable, that cable, being routed under the speedo cable, flexed a bit and lifted the speedo cable as required…
I worked more than 30 years in IT and I declare that it’s the most esoteric professional field, although I’m a staunch materialist. Maybe only electrics in 70s British cars are even more mystifying.
Heheh, as a person who’s got about the same about of experience in support, administration and development: You’ve got a workaround, but not a diagnosis. Bugs that are unreproducible and closed are the least satisfying bugs.
I’ve fixed a lot of weird ghost server problems by telling the end user to power off the unit gracefully and then unplug the power from the chassis for a few minutes, then plug it in and turn it back on. It fixes the issue, and they usually don’t see it again until the machine is out of support. But sadly, I haven’t diagnosed the problem other than identify it as probably being an issue with the BMC or IMPI systems. Restarting them fixed the issue. Totally unsatisfying.
