Weird tech support: Thunderbolt 4 cables and ThinkPad docks

I spent probably 60 minutes this morning, after vacation, trying to figure out why my external HP monitor wasn't connecting to my laptop after having been disconnected for about a week. The cable is DP (DisplayPort) and nothing seemed wrong with it. 

The dock appeared fine because my ThinkPad laptop was charging through it, and my keyboard and mouse were working. 

After extensive troubleshooting, including a restart of the graphics drivers, multiple dock/monitor/laptop restarts, a zillion power cycles, switching the DisplayPort version from the monitor itself, and an unsuccessful (read: permission denied on company machines) attempt to update my NVIDIA drivers, I finally realized that the issue was not with the DP cable, or the drivers for that matter. My Nintendo Switch HDMI worked when plugged directly into my laptop and monitor, but not when connecting from my monitor to my dock. The DP cable looked totally fine and I cleaned the ports with compressed air for good measure. 

For some reason, the issue fixed itself with these approximate steps: 

  • Reversed the direction of my Thunderbolt 4 cable. 
  • Reversed the direction of the cable's other end; i.e., the one that plugged into the dock. 
  • Power-cycled the dock again. (Doing this on its own was not sufficient) 
The dock light blinked an angry orange, then turned white, and now everything is working, except my laptop screen is occasionally flashing. The monitor screen itself has no issues. Might be fixed with a restart, but I'm not going to mess with that right now. Anyway, whew. I'm not going to unplug those cables for a while. I really wish I knew the root cause, but I really can't conclude anything definitive from this other than the issue was likely with the Thunderbolt 4 cable and its connection specifically to my ThinkPad dock. 

Tech support is weird, because it's fun, but usually only in retrospect. In the heat of the moment, I was mostly annoyed and panicking about catching up after PTO, plus the fact that we arrived pretty late last night so I missed my morning study session altogether (will regroup during a break later today). I considered doing the Switch HDMI workaround but then I would've had to jack with all of my display resolution settings and I really didn't want to. Plus, I wanted to reconnect my Switch to my monitor/gaming PC setup so that way everything would be properly set up after a week of playing Pokemon Violet with no monitor or TV screen. 

Now time to actually do what I'm getting paid for. :-)

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