Custom PC worked in the lab, failed on site – and so did the angry client

On Call

It's amazing what happens when you plug everything in

No week at The Register is complete without a new installment of On Call, the reader-contributed column in which you share tales of the peaks and troughs of the tech support experience.

So let's get going and meet this week's contributor, who we shall Regomize as "Gerald." He took us back to an early moment in his career, when he worked for an outfit that configured Windows 98 PCs as "data collectors" for its clients.

As part of his job, Gerald built PCs and provided field support.

In this story, he built a new data collector, checked that it worked with the usual round of tests, and left it for someone else to install because he had another job to do elsewhere for a different client.

That visit was interrupted by his boss, who Gerald said "reamed me out for allowing a non-functional system to leave the shop."

After the criticism stopped, Gerald's boss ordered him to fix the stricken PC, ASAP, even though it was 100 km away by car.

"The boss man said go, so I went," Gerald told On Call.

"About an hour and a half later, I arrived to diagnose the recalcitrant PC. The client was literally hopping mad and asking how I could be so stupid, because his firm was losing money."

Gerald got to work and inspected the PC, which was on the shop floor, connected to power and peripherals. It booted and worked well but couldn't reach the network.

"A check of devices installed showed the network card," Gerald reported, "and a ping to home worked... but nothing outside the box itself was reachable."

Gerald decided the only thing to do was take the PC back to the office for more tests, so he started unplugging the peripherals.

"Out came the power cord, display cable, keyboard, mouse..." and then he noticed the network cable wasn't plugged in.

"It was neatly coiled and taped to a support column," Gerald told On Call, making it very easily fixed – and quite the embarrassment for the angry client and boss.

Have you been abused for a customer's error? If so, click here to send On Call an email so we can share your story on a future Friday. ®