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BG: People have been telling me they've been hearing intermittent beeping noises from the pharmacy while it's closed. They even called my boss down to open the gates to see what was up. Nobody could figure it out. Was it one of the computers, the fax, the microwave, or what? Nobody knew.
So today I'm working. The layout of the store is like this: it's a smallish supermarket. Three checkout aisles in the front, with conveyor belts etc. Then there's another counter in the back, which has two cash registers on it, one for pharmacy only and the other for the store. These "cash registers" are in reality Dell computers with a till attached. Behind this counter is a space for cashiers to walk, then there's a half-height wall, and on the other side of the wall is my pharmacy work area with my own counter.
I'm standing here, and I'm hearing feedback, just like tinnitus but from outside my head. I figured someone in the store has a badly adjusted hearing aid, and try to ignore it. But it gets louder and louder, until it finally shrieks so loudly that I have to cover my ears.
I go looking for the source, and the cashier finds that it's coming from the speakers on his monitor. He turns it down, and presto, no more feedback, but then he can't hear the beeps from his POS software, so he turns it back up again. Obviously there's a mike somewhere that's picking up the output from the speaker, but where? I start tapping on things, playing "hotter, colder", trying to find out where this SOB microphone is. It's nowhere on the monitor, nor the keyboard. Bang on the till, it gets louder. Bang on the tower case, and that's where it must be; I holler into the case vent and hear my voice coming out of the speaker.
Then I get smart, I look at the back of the tower case. Sure enough there's a plug plugged into the microphone jack, I pull that out and the noise stops. Blessed silence, ah. The other end of the wire goes through a hole that looks like it was gnawed by mice in the rear vent of the case and disappears inside.
Now I'm curious. I pull the cover and look inside. What do I find, some genius has taken a microphone, ripped the capsule out of the stick, scotch-taped it to the motherboard, and passed the wire out the hole they made in the back so they could plug it into the mike jack.
I peel this off, and find it's stuck right to the tiny motherboard sounder.
Now I could see this if they were only able to get sound out of the speaker, but that makes no sense, because the sound is still going through the sound card. Everything else that makes sound (the 'doze volume control, the POS software) still makes sound, so it's not like that mike was a vital link in the sound path. I have absolutely no idea why this was done; the only time that sounder should make any noise is one beep when you first fire the box up, or if there's some severe error like an overheat condition, and even then, you're standing right there so you'd hear it anyway.
In any case, I unplugged the mike, winkled it out of the hole, and left it next to the computer. Now we'll just wait and see who gets mad at me for messing up their pet kludge...
So today I'm working. The layout of the store is like this: it's a smallish supermarket. Three checkout aisles in the front, with conveyor belts etc. Then there's another counter in the back, which has two cash registers on it, one for pharmacy only and the other for the store. These "cash registers" are in reality Dell computers with a till attached. Behind this counter is a space for cashiers to walk, then there's a half-height wall, and on the other side of the wall is my pharmacy work area with my own counter.
I'm standing here, and I'm hearing feedback, just like tinnitus but from outside my head. I figured someone in the store has a badly adjusted hearing aid, and try to ignore it. But it gets louder and louder, until it finally shrieks so loudly that I have to cover my ears.
I go looking for the source, and the cashier finds that it's coming from the speakers on his monitor. He turns it down, and presto, no more feedback, but then he can't hear the beeps from his POS software, so he turns it back up again. Obviously there's a mike somewhere that's picking up the output from the speaker, but where? I start tapping on things, playing "hotter, colder", trying to find out where this SOB microphone is. It's nowhere on the monitor, nor the keyboard. Bang on the till, it gets louder. Bang on the tower case, and that's where it must be; I holler into the case vent and hear my voice coming out of the speaker.
Then I get smart, I look at the back of the tower case. Sure enough there's a plug plugged into the microphone jack, I pull that out and the noise stops. Blessed silence, ah. The other end of the wire goes through a hole that looks like it was gnawed by mice in the rear vent of the case and disappears inside.
Now I'm curious. I pull the cover and look inside. What do I find, some genius has taken a microphone, ripped the capsule out of the stick, scotch-taped it to the motherboard, and passed the wire out the hole they made in the back so they could plug it into the mike jack.
I peel this off, and find it's stuck right to the tiny motherboard sounder. Now I could see this if they were only able to get sound out of the speaker, but that makes no sense, because the sound is still going through the sound card. Everything else that makes sound (the 'doze volume control, the POS software) still makes sound, so it's not like that mike was a vital link in the sound path. I have absolutely no idea why this was done; the only time that sounder should make any noise is one beep when you first fire the box up, or if there's some severe error like an overheat condition, and even then, you're standing right there so you'd hear it anyway.
In any case, I unplugged the mike, winkled it out of the hole, and left it next to the computer. Now we'll just wait and see who gets mad at me for messing up their pet kludge...
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