On Name Welcome as soon as extra to On Name, the weekly column during which Reg readers dump their foulest tales of execrable tech assist incidents from which they emerged smelling like roses.
This week, meet a reader we’ll Regomize as “Curtis” who shared a story from the late Nineteen Nineties when he labored for a colossal multinational client items conglomerate.
One of many duties that landed on Curtis’s desk was putting in Outlook on laptops utilized by senior administration – as a result of the model of Lotus Mail they had been utilizing would not survive Y2K. When a colleague received wind of that job, he advised that Curtis would possibly as nicely kill two birds with one stone and improve the OS, because the agency had simply began rolling out a customized construct of Home windows NT.
“I duly recruited a staff of long-term unemployed (the corporate was eager to do that), skilled them up and set them to work,” Curtis wrote.
Curtis and his recruits devised a course of that began with a well mannered request that customers delete pointless e-mail and information, as disk-to-disk switch charges had been glacial at time.
That velocity mattered, as a result of the following step within the course of was to gather the laptop computer on the shut of enterprise, whereupon it might be backed as much as a brief location earlier than a substitute exhausting disk was inserted and the spanking new OS and Outlook put in.
Mail and information would then be restored from the backup, and when the boss arrived the following morning they’d discover a new machine buzzing alongside properly.
Curtis was cautious: the previous exhausting drive was positioned in safe storage “till we had been sure that every one had gone nicely.”
He admitted to On Name that this was maybe an unduly laborious course of – nevertheless it was resilient.
All went nicely for the primary couple of weeks.
Then one morning the cellphone rang. One of many high three execs within the UK workplace was not completely satisfied along with his refreshed laptop computer, which wanted consideration now.
Curtis dispatched his most tactful staff member, who returned twenty minutes later scarcely capable of communicate amid bouts of laughter.
When Curtis received the story out of him it began with an outline of an oak-panelled workplace with partitions lined in larger-than-life work of the corporate founders. A private assistant ushered the techie in to the presence of the manager, who had allowed his frustration to boil over into “screaming and shouting and calling IT essentially the most incompetent bunch of morons to ever stroll the planet.”
The core of the criticism was that some emails had not survived the migration. Curtis’s colleague dug into the state of affairs and watched because the exec clicked on the mail folder construction and demanded to know the place the “Trash” folder may be discovered.
Curtis’s apprentice confirmed him the Recycle Bin.
That motion noticed the exec intone the next:
“I want my Trash again, it’s the place I hold all my necessary mails.”
“For sure, due to the restricted time accessible to my staff, the one folder we hadn’t migrated was the Trash,” Curtis lamented.
Keep in mind how Curtis stored the previous disk secure? That call made it straightforward to revive the Trash. And in addition meant the exec’s identify was trashed as the whole IT division chortled on the “I want my Trash” line.
“After that we made positive that any directions despatched to the manager stage had been pitched on the proper stage of intelligence,” Curtis concluded.
Have you ever been concerned in an incident that noticed you resolve to dumb issues down? Click here to email On Call and share your story. ®
