Tech Support Fill-in Given No Budget, No Help, No Training, And No Empathy For His Plight

On Call When the weekend rolls around, nobody needs permission to do whatever they desire. Unless, of course, they're required to be available to support tech – a restriction we mark each week in On Call, the column that celebrates fine fixing feats achieved despite the footling of flummoxed fools.

This week, meet a reader we'll Regomize as "Ronnie" who admitted he has never been an IT professional, but used to fill that role when he worked at a non-profit which was affiliated with a university and shared offices with its academic collaborators.

Despite a lack of formal tech training (his background was in law and conflict resolution), Ronnie enjoyed his IT responsibilities because he wasn't bound by the university's rules and standards, but was able to ask its IT staff to fix stuff he couldn't fathom.

"Everything was humming along fine until the academics moved out of our building to another campus and our network immediately slowed down to a crawl," he told On Call.

Crawl is too kind a word: Ronnie told us keystrokes took eight minutes to appear on screen.

"I called university IT, and they came out and informed me that when the academics moved, they took their server with them." Ronnie's team was therefore now connected to a server shared by the population of the whole building. IT wouldn't help to speed things up. Finding a fix was Ronnie's responsibility.

But Ronnie wasn't entirely sure if he could accurately describe a server, never mind explain why it might be slowing things down.

He did a little digging and learned that his little non-profit was not the only tenant suffering. Apparently a professor was running a workload that overwhelmed the server.

Ronnie asked what could be done and was told he could buy a server. Between his lack of knowledge and the non-profit's lack of budget, that wasn't an option.

He suggested the professor could buy a server for their own use, which seemed fair as the boffin clearly needed one.

IT bluntly said that wasn't going to happen.

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Ronnie despaired. "Our office was completely stuck in inactivity; it was up to me to save my job and those of our other staff."

So he went online and learned about network attached storage (NAS) devices, which he came to understand were simple to operate and could house and serve the files his org needed - freeing it from the slow University server.

Would IT let him have one? Sadly not. They knew nothing about the machines and – for once – stuck to their rules by prohibiting such a device being connected to the university network.

"I bought one anyway for about $300," Ronnie admitted to On Call, and figured out how to install it on the university network. In the dead of night, when the professor wasn't thrashing the server, he snuck in, connected the NAS, and moved all his non-profit's files to the storage appliance.

Ronnie also configured the box to back up to the university server – he'd learned to do that, too. Nobody at the uni knew. But Ronnie and his crew did – because they were back in business!

"Sometimes it is easier to ask for forgiveness than to get permission," he concluded his mail to On Call.

We're sure you have stories of a tech support triumph, so why not click here to send On Call an email so we can share your experience? We never use your real name and take care not to identify your workplace or otherwise endanger your career: This is a safe space to swap fun yarns with your peers! ®