On Call Friday has arrived, bringing a promise of fleeting freedom – and a new instalment of On Call, The Register‘s reader-contributed column that retells your tales of tech support incidents that became memorable for all the wrong reasons.
This week, meet a reader we’ll Regomize as “Kent” who told us he once worked as a field engineer and shares a story of the time a client dispatched him to a private datacenter to replace a failed system board in an HP server.
“A straightforward job,” Kent told On Call. “Board swap, set serial number and BIOS options, bring it through POST, confirm hardware health, hand it back. Flee.”
Kent arrived at the datacenter and made it through what he called “the usual mantrap routine” – the combination of revolving doors and swipe-card barriers that properly secure datacenters use to regulate entries and exits.
Once inside he found the server, tested to verify the system board had failed – and saw it had. He therefore replaced it, reseated the RAM and CPU, put everything back together and turned the machine on.
It booted, everything worked as intended, and the client’s admin logged in and verified all was well – and then started talking to someone else about what sounded like a software upgrade.
Kent didn’t stick around to learn more.
“My brief was to swap a board. The board was swapped,” he told On Call. So he packed up the failed board and his tools, then left.
On his way out, Kent swiped his card and the mantrap gate didn’t open. A short time later he tried again, without success.
“After a few minutes I called out to the security desk behind the glass and the guard checked his screen and said: ‘We’ve been told to hold you. The admin says there’s still a problem with the server.'”
This was a surprise to Kent, who just a few minutes earlier had watched the server boot and heard the client’s admin acknowledge the fact.
Fifteen minutes later nobody had explained what was going on.
Kent called his dispatcher, who called the client. “The message relayed back was that they were ‘still having issues,’ and I was not to be released until they were resolved.”
“At this point I was no longer a field engineer. I was collateral,” Kent told On Call.
One hour and forty-five minutes later, Kent’s supervisor called for a three-way chat with the client.
“The tone had shifted,” Kent wrote. “My supervisor calmly informed them that if I was not released immediately, I had two options available to me: pull the fire alarm inside the datacenter or call Police.”
The client decided to let Kent leave.
He later learned why he’d been detained.
“An application running on the server was malfunctioning,” he told On Call. “The application vendor blamed the operating system. The operating system vendor suggested the hardware might be unstable. The hardware had just had a board replaced. Therefore, the man who replaced the board must be the problem.”
20 minutes after Kent left the datacenter, his phone rang.
“The client’s admin called my mobile – not to apologize, but to inform me that I was banned from the site.”
Kent thinks his crime was to successfully replace a motherboard in a server that ran a buggy application.
“My brief was to swap a board,” he told On Call. “The board was swapped.”
Has a client or a colleague ever kept you on site against your will? If so, release your story by clicking here to send On Call an email so we can share your story on a future Friday. ®