It was just past 9PM when the helpdesk phone buzzed to life. On the other end was a user from the finance department, clearly distressed. “My monitor is too bright at night. It’s hurting my eyes. Can you fix it?”
Given the time, and the usual nature of issues we handle after hours, I expected a straightforward request to lower brightness or enable a blue light filter. Easy enough, right? But as I asked for more details, it quickly became clear this was not a normal brightness complaint.
The user explained that every evening around 8PM, their monitor suddenly shined like a spotlight. “Even if I turn the brightness all the way down, it still looks like I’m working under the noon sun. It’s really distracting and I can’t focus.”
Curious, I asked if they had checked the power settings or tried the automatic night mode. Their response was, “No, I don’t want anything to do with those.” They insisted something else was causing it and that IT needed to fix it immediately.
During a remote session, I had them share their screen and observed… a perfectly normal desktop with standard brightness settings. To rule out anything strange, I switched the monitor to night mode myself, dimmed the brightness, and everything looked fine.
I inquired if anything else in the environment changed at night, and they said, “Yes. My desk lamp comes on just as the sun goes down.” This was followed by a moment of silence, then a careful, “Hmm, could the lamp be making my monitor look brighter?”
With a laugh, I suggested they try moving the lamp or turning it off and see if the monitor still looks so bright. “Wait… you mean my eyes have been seeing the lamp shining on the screen and thinking it was the monitor? Wow, I feel silly now!”
After that call, I realized sometimes the brightest problems don’t come from the screen, but from the light shining around it—and how our eyes perceive things in the dark. The user was relieved, the “too bright” monitor mystery solved, and I closed the ticket with a grin. Just another day in IT support.