"Oh - My - Gawd!" Sue was freaked.
"No, no, nononononononooooo!" Roger crashed his hands on the keyboard, which made Sue jump.
All screens were blank, however the power was on and everything else was working. Maintenance programs were working in the background and could be accessed. The main program was running, but there was no input.
Roger dived under the desk and was checking cables - nothing was loose. Sue meanwhile called up the remote lines, the IT department, and anyone else they had numbers for. All reported the system was working fine. IT even told her to keep Roger from touching anything - just report any loose wires and they'd be right over to fix them.
Roger bumped his head coming back up, which didn't help his attitude. But instead of saying anything impolite, he just sat and glowered.
Sue, relieved at the quiet, was off in her own world in thinking of alternative solutions to get it running again - when suddenly the screens were filled with figures and data like nothing had ever happened.
Roger dialed into IT immediately and demanded they start analytics on the whole line right away. IT responded that they already had, thank you, and they'd have someone over in minutes to do a line-trace, that he had been on his way since the first call. Roger mumbled something apologetic and hung up, much to Sue's displeasure.
"Well?" she said.
"Well, what?"
"Never mind." She had already started routine cross-check subprograms when the screens came back. "They're all reporting that it was a simple lack of data. Nothing happened for a moment there."
"Doesn't make sense. That just doesn't happen. It's not like he's gone digital and can just turn on and off on his own. It's an analog signal, for chrissakes!"
"OK, OK. We both know that. I can understand your upset, but it's not helping. We need to find out what happened, and it is going to take both of us to figure it out."
"Right. Sorry." Roger was quiet, composing himself, forcing his body to relax. "Were the recorders running?"
"Yes. They got all the same readouts. Just a blank that happened. Cross-checks confirm what we saw."
Roger sighed. "OK, then we simply have some work to do. It's procedure 01-a."
Sue had already pulled the hard-copy manual out from the tiny bookshelf with the few actual books in the room. She sneezed lightly at the dust. "I thought they cleaned these things."
Roger had his copy as well, the standard procedure for these situations, written in a time when printouts were more common than monitors. He frowned at the type-style, reminiscent of typewritten pages. Fumbling around his pockets and in the desk drawer, he found an actual pencil with an eraser, as the instructions called for. "OK, by the numbers: 1-1..."