User found two reasons – both of them wrong – to dispute tech support's diagnosis

Hey, teacher, leave that cabling alone

On Call Welcome once more to On Call, The Register's reader-contributed Friday column in which we share your stories of tech support jobs so wrong, they're right.

This week, meet a reader we'll Regomize as "Mike," who told us about his time as a traveling engineer for a local education authority in the UK Midlands. The job meant Mike drove across the region, visiting various schools to fix whatever IT problems popped up.

"One day I was sent to a school to carry out some work on the head teacher's laptop, which wasn't connecting to the network," he told On Call.

When Mike arrived, he plugged in an Ethernet cable and quickly realized the network port in the head teacher's office wasn't live.

"He walked in as I was about to leave, and insisted that the point was indeed live, which he proceeded to demonstrate by showing that he could check for new email," Mike told On Call.

The teacher's email client, Outlook Express, promptly produced a message complaining that no internet connection could be found.

"He insisted the real problem was a full inbox," Mike told On Call. "And to be fair, that did happen in those days."

The teacher's next attempt to prove Mike wrong was to open a browser and show him that web pages would load.

That didn't work either, and the teacher told Mike that was because he had "too much stuff on his desktop."

Mike decided the best way to support the teacher was to leave him alone.

"One of our network guys got the network point working, but I made sure another engineer got assigned to complete the original task," he told On Call.

How do you handle users who push back with nonsense diagnoses? To share your story, click here to send On Call an email. The column will continue across the festive season and we can always use and appreciate a good story. ®