Techie Cleaned Up Criminally Bad Tech Support That Was Probably Also An Actual Crime

On Call If it's Friday, it's time for another edition of On Call, our reader-contributed column in which you tell tales of crimes against tech support.

This week, meet a reader we'll Regomize as "Dean" who once worked for a very large IT services provider and was assigned to a contract for a law enforcement agency. Dean got the gig because he was an excellent chap and had experience with the slightly odd database the client employed.

Dean's days usually started with instructions to visit one of the agency's offices to fix whatever had gone awry.

One such assignment saw Dean sent to a facility that a colleague – let's call him "Colin" – had visited the day before, supposedly to install a new PC that ran a database. In the wake of that visit, some of the data had become inaccessible.

You guessed it, dear reader. The database in question was the slightly odd one Dean knew inside out.

When Dean arrived at the facility, he quickly realized it was dedicated to investigating and prosecuting utterly revolting crimes. The database included the names of suspects and victims.

"You would be hard-pressed to come up with more sensitive data," Dean told On Call.

After assessing the situation, Dean realized the PC stored five discrete databases, each written to one of five disk partitions.

One of those partitions was empty, suggesting Colin had failed to copy some data.

Dean phoned Colin to ask for help and was told the PC he'd replaced was on site and its disk contained the missing database.

But when Dean opened the old PC, the disk was not there.

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• User said he did nothing that explained his dead PC – does a new motherboard count?
• Tech support fill-in given no budget, no help, no training, and no empathy for his plight

Had his client known the disk was missing, the consequences would have been immediate and enormous.

Dean therefore asked the client about the best local sandwich shops and, under the pretense of buying his lunch, scuttled beyond his client's hearing range before demanding that Colin reveal the whereabouts of the drive.

Colin denied any knowledge of the disk's location, or how it had disappeared from the old PC.

Dean saw no option but to escalate.

"There are two possible ways this can go," he told his colleague. "You can be here within the hour with the disk, or I can go back inside and explain to the client that a database containing some of the most delicate information imaginable is missing."

Dean suggested Colin would likely end up behind bars for having stolen the disk, and sketched a scenario that saw his actions cause hundreds of job losses as their employer would surely lose the contract due to the incredible seriousness of this incident.

Colin suddenly found the drive in his car, which he drove to the customer's site within an hour. He and Dean spent 20 minutes copying the data and reinstalling the disk.

The client was none the wiser.

On Call hopes Colin was being truthful when he told Dean he had no interest in the database, but just wanted to use the disk at home as it was an expensive large-capacity model.

How close have you come to committing a crime while doing tech support? This is a sensitive question, but if you think we handled this week's tale well, why not click here to send On Call an email so we can submit your story as evidence on a future Friday. ®