Tech Support World Record? 8.5 Seconds From Seeing To Fixing

On Call The working week can be a trek. And so can a holiday, which the On Call author has taken this week – but not before preparing a new installment of The Register’s Friday column that recounts tech support tales kindly contributed by readers.

This week’s On Call is a compendium of responses to our recent request for your fastest fixes, which we made after the story about the techie who took five minutes to sort out a problem that had confounded the might of Microsoft and Adobe for two weeks.

One reader, whom we will Regomize as "Russel," told us of the time a colleague complained their CD-ROM wasn't working.

"I opened the drawer, took out the CD and flipped it over," Russel told On Call. "Job done! They had put the disc in the drive upside-down."

"Barney" told us the story of being asked to fix a PC that just wouldn't start.

He looked at it for a second, then connected its monitor.

"I think arrival to diagnosis to resolution took maybe 8.5 seconds?" he told us.

Another reader, whom we"ll refer to as "Hugh," was asked to sort out a situation in which a projector would only produce a hopelessly tiny image.

"I tried to help user to find the zoom lens controls on the device, which he was unable to do," Hugh told us. And then he moved the projector further away from the screen.

• Your computer's not working? Sure, I can fix that problem – which I caused
• Yes, your network is down – you annoyed us so much we crashed it
• Techie took five minutes to fix problem Adobe and Microsoft couldn't solve in two weeks
• OS/2 expert channeled a higher power to dispel digital doom vortex

In The Time Before Google

Another reader, who we'll name "Denholm," told us of his early career doing tech support for a big Silicon Valley concern.

"We had just consolidated IT support into one unit instead of each division running their own," Denholm said. That new unit was dubbed the "Senior Tech Team," and one day they gave Denholm a trouble ticket from the payroll team.

"They put this in every month," a Senior Tech Team member said. "Just go, look at it, and tell them it's normal operation. That's what the rest of us have done."

Denholm did as he was told and visited the payroll office, where he learned that paying staff required a spreadsheet to be transferred from a DOS box to a Sun box, using FTP.

Despite the spreadsheet being just 300 kilobytes, the transfer took more than 15 minutes.

"Even my poor math skills said it should take a few seconds," Denholm told On Call. He also told the payroll team. This meant he had to fix it.

As the references to DOS, Sun, and FTP probably make plain, this story happened in The Time Before Google. The vendor of the payroll software wasn't responsive, and Denholm was deperate to find a fix.

But he did have Usenet" and that early social network had a group dedicated to the very software Denholm was trying to fix.

He posted news of his predicament, and a suggestion arrived within an hour – so Denholm put it to the test.

"To this day, I owe a clever bloke in the UK a promised pint, because this was a simple fix. I went back to payroll with a one-line change for their config file."

"The next file transfer took two seconds."

The payroll team gave Denholm a corporate award and a $25 gift card. And during the ceremony at which Denholm was lauded, he said the Senior Tech Team glared at him with undisguised loathing.

"I never worked in the headquarters building again," Denholm told On Call. "Somehow, I managed to get over that crushing disappointment."

Readers have hopefully managed to get over this unusual edition of On Call, but we didn't want our fans missing a week. Make sure that doesn't happen – keep those tech support stories coming with a click here to send your tale to On Call. They'll be the first thing the On Call desk reads after returning to work. ®