On Call Techies are often beset by undeserving and despicable dolts who demand daunting feats of tech support. Which is why each Friday The Register brings you a fresh instalment of On Call – the reader-contributed column in which you share stories of defeating those dunderheads.
This week, meet a reader we’ll Regomize as “Norman” who is an electrical engineer by trade and during one phase of his career found himself doing a lot of office refit jobs, most of them in the financial district of the City of London.
On the first day of one such job – which took place on one floor of a building that was already occupied and very much in use for the wheeling and dealing that goes on in the City – Norman was asked to strip out old wiring, as the contractor he worked for had hired someone else to lay new stuff.
Norman got to work and before long had ripped out all the old wires, leaving just three white cables in place.
That trio survived because, in Norman’s estimation, they were the main cables carrying voice and data to the wheeler-dealers on other floors.
Norman’s boss didn’t believe him.
“He was an arrogant and brash man,” Norman told On Call, “and he commanded me to strip out those cables.”
Norman pushed back – and his boss pushed back harder.
- You’re wrong, I’m right, and you’re hiding the data that proves it
- We need a volunteer to literally crawl over broken glass to fix this network
- I didn’t touch a thing – just some cables and a monitor – and my computer broke
- Thanks for coming to help. No, we can’t say why we called – it’s classified
A couple more rounds of that fun game saw the boss start