BUD wrote:
I'll guess the lightening strike cut the power long enough to force a hard reboot.
I'm sure you're correct, BUD. Carlsbad tried a remote fix that didn't take. Wild Bill's Woodbury keeps its server up near the ceiling, and I doubt whether anyone climbed the 15' ladder to make the attempt.
AARDVK wrote:
...the tablets at this location "recognize" my handle but then refuse the password...
The hard reboot which fixed the phantom handles has not made a log-in a Wild Bill's any easier. JOHNL reports that he sometimes has to attempt his log-in 3-4 times before it'll take. Those tablets can be fussy little buggers.
Yesterday afternoon, playing with KRISPY and JOHNL, the MICE perpetrated a hijacking far more sinister than anything described above. MICE were playing the new #6 playmaker; the number on JOHNL's playmaker wasn't known. In the 3:00 PM PST Coundown, JOHNL proposed an answer late in the quiz. The MICE disagreed (with typical stubborness) and then decided JOHNL was right and switched answers for 800 points. Whereupon JOHNL looks down at his playmaker and exclaims, "Gah! It didn't take my answer! I know I hit that key." So he hit it again, for 731 points. He ran everything else in the quiz, and so lost a perfecto to what is most commonly operator error.
Something similar, but even worse, happened in the following quiz. After some hedging, JOHNL proposed an answer, and again the MICE disagreed, but this time they stayed on their original response. As is so often the case, JOHNL was right and the MICE were wrong. But the upshot was that MICE received 976 points on the question, and JOHNL received the 236 points the MICE were able to salvage on the third clue. Again, the MICE knew they'd hit the wrong key, because they were obligated to correct themselves. JOHNL knew that he'd hit the correct key and entered only one keystroke. Somehow he ended up with MICE's score on that question, and vice versa! In both these examples, the correct response was the #3 key. The even more correct response was for both players to swap out their playmakers, pronto.
Anyone curious to know how the stubborn MICE might have crept ahead of a fine player like JOHNL in the Countdown rankings need look no further. It was a daylight robbery.