On Call Welcome once again to On Call, the weekly column in which readers tell their tales of tech support troubles and triumphs.
This week, meet a reader we'll Regomize as "Nate" who told us a tale from the 1990s, when he worked for Her Majesty's Government at the sort of agency newspapers like to describe as "secret."
Nate could never figure out why, as the building in which he worked was well signposted, and even inhabited by some civilian businesses.
But the agency's activities included what Nate called "things we did behind closed doors that remained that way."
One example he outlined in his mail to On Call involved "some kit that did a fairly simple job on board one of the Queen's collection of boats."
After a little navel-gazing we think we understand which boats you're referring to, Nate!
One of those boats had a tech issue that Nate and his colleagues figured out how to fix – though sadly that work would take a while. As an interim solution they installed a basic desktop computer – Nate thinks it was the legendary Acorn Archimedes – to make sure the boat could go about its business.
"It was a simple patch that the crew liked so much that they preferred to use the Archimedes rather than the onboard kit – even when the onboard kit was working properly. So we decided to do a proper job of servicing it every now and again to keep it running nicely and keep the crew very happy," Nate told On Call.
For Nate and his mates a "proper" job meant driving to the boat – which took a couple of hours – and then "spending time on board polishing the monitor, tidying up the Archimedes desktop to remove all the extra useless icons and generally staring at the screen for a while before declaring it still good and retiring to the ward room for a cup of tea and a chat."
Between the travel and the chat, doing "proper" maintenance took so long that Nate and friends were able to claim a whole day's worth of special allowances for off-site work.
The extra cash was welcome, but Nate feels the extra hours paid off in other ways.
"It also served to keep good relations with the crew. They liked us because they thought we were big-brained boffins who had their backs – and they were right, about the last bit anyway."
One other thing we need to know about Nate's workplace is that it featured a young man with a talent for two things: coding, and managing to somehow insult everyone in a room on almost any occasion.
Nate offered us an example of this chap's talents: at work drinks he loudly asked the boss if he was still having an affair with a colleague – in front of the entire office and the boss's wife, who had come in for the occasion.
The young coder had created an important fix for the shipboard app that had been requested by the boat's crew, but Nate knew he must not be allowed to make the service call to install it. The risk of an incident was just too great.
After proving the software worked by running it on a local replica of the boat's systems, the coder was instructed to leave a disk with the software in a certain spot – ready for Nate to pick it up the next day on his way to visit the boat.
The programmer agreed, and muttered something about perhaps making a few last-minute improvements, but Nate thought little of it on his way out the door for the day.
- Muppet broke the datacenter every day, in its own weighty way
- To patch this server, we need to get someone drunk
- A nice cup of tea rewired the datacenter and got things working again
- Tech support chap solved knotty disk failure problem by staring at the floor
The next morning Nate came by the office, found the disk in the approved place, scooped it up and hit the road.
On arrival at the boat, monitor polishing and icon removal went well. Nate soon felt it was time to announce he would perform the software upgrade.
"Our host was very happy, and we could sense our good egg status creeping up a few notches," he told On Call.
Then the software didn't work. At all. It crashed. Repeatedly.
Nate restored the previous version of the program and, as he drove back to the office, wondered what the rude programmer had done the previous evening.
"Back in the office we cornered him and gave him the interrogation which mostly consisted of us asking if he changed anything and him denying anything until he eventually confessed to having made a change so small it could not have made a difference."
He was wrong. The update crashed the test system, eliciting an admission of error and a pleasingly rapid repair job.
Nate returned to the boat the next day, made the fix, and even found reasons to stick around long enough to again claim that full-day off-site allowance!
"Boffinry reputations still intact with the crew, we left with finally a job well done and on the way home I may even have got myself a pasty – life was that good then."
How rude was the rudest person you worked with while doing tech support? Keep it clean, but Click here to send On Call your story so we can share it on a future Friday. ®