Tech Support Session Saved Files, But Probably Ended A Marriage

On Call The working week can be ugly, which is why The Register beautifies each Friday morning with a new instalment of On Call, the reader-contributed column in which we tell your tales of tech support splendor.

This week, meet a reader who asked to be Regomized as "Terry" and told us about the job he had in the late 2000s providing tech support for students and teachers.

Strangely, the job wasn't attached to the IT department. But that team didn't mind because they were massively overworked.

To earn his users' trust, Terry would help staff by fixing their personal devices and he developed a reputation as a solid citizen, which helped him to negotiate frequent management changes.

Most of Terry's bosses were decent.

This story is about one who Terry asked us to name "Tyrant."

"He was an ambitious new member of the management team, a man who claimed he had a vision 'To Revolutionize the way technology worked in Education'."

That vision seemed mostly to consist of a weekly challenge that saw Terry asked to achieve the impossible, in no time, without any budget.

"I would have to research and demo as best I could and politely explain that what he was asking for was often of little or no benefit to educational outcomes," Terry told On Call. "Tyrant didn't care. He wanted to make a name for himself climbing on the backs of others and was burying me under a pile of time-wasting projects that would never come to anything."

Worse still, Tyrant was giving Terry poor quarterly reviews that could be bad for his career.

"I loathed the man," Terry told On Call.

Give up your Sunday, or else …

When Tyrant called Terry on a Sunday and asked for help, he was not inclined to do so and suggested paying for service at a local computer shop.

Tyrant was having none of it, claimed he was working on an important document that was due on Monday and that Terry simply had to come and fix a PC ASAP as it was in his best professional interest to do so.

Terry felt that was a threat, and decided the best way to defuse it was to just do the job.

"On arrival Tyrant was in a state of panic," Terry told On Call, and explained that he'd been working on his wife's laptop while his own iMac was being repaired.

The laptop was a mess, but after a few hours Terry figured out how to fix it and started to restore files from an external hard disk.

That felt like job done, so Terry asked to be excused. Tyrant insisted he stay until the very last file was safely copied.

The two of them therefore watched as a Windows progress bar inched across the screen.

And then Tyrant's wife came home, which seemed to surprise him mightily.

"His panic level shot up again and Mrs Tyrant was less than pleased to see me in her kitchen," Terry said.

It got worse: Terry cringed as he heard Tyrant and Mrs Tyrant bicker about him using her laptop without permission.

• Weeks with a BBC Micro? Good enough to fix a mainframe, apparently
• User complained his mouse wasn’t working. But he wasn’t using a mouse
• Glitchy taxi tech blew cover on steamy dispatch dalliance
• One stupid keystroke exposed sysadmin to inappropriate information he could not unsee

Mrs Tyrant angrily stated she would be most displeased if a single file went missing, and therefore took over the watching-files-copy vigil and sent Tyrant out to buy dinner.

During that process, Mrs Tyrant asked Terry what files Tyrant had created on her laptop.

Terry found a few Word and Excel docs … and an enormous collection of videos featuring people wearing not much more than oil while noisily enjoying each other's company.

As soon as he saw one of those videos, Terry made his excuses and left.

Oh, what a Monday

Terry had no idea what happened once Tyrant came home with dinner but imagined he would be blamed for it.

Come Monday, Tyrant summoned him to a meeting and Terry asked if he should bring a Union representative. Tyrant called off the confab and the two hardly spoke for weeks until Tyrant casually mentioned he was searching for a new place to live.

Terry's pretty sure the videos he found were the reason why.

"I didn't last there much longer due to budget cuts and restructuring, but I did learn never to offer out-of-hours help to people I work with, no matter their position in the organization," he told On Call.

But he occasionally checked Tyrant's LinkedIn profile.

"He's not yet revolutionized technology in Education," Terry told On Call. "I'm shocked, I tell you. Shocked."

Has supporting colleagues' personal tech caused trouble? If so, trouble yourself to click here as doing so will send On Call an email in which you can share your story. ®