On Call Welcome once again to On Call, The Register's weekly reader-contributed column in which we share your stories of delivering excellent tech support amid your colleagues' ambivalence, anger, and unjust admonitions.
This week, meet a reader we'll Regomize as "George" who told us about his first job in IT.
"Fresh out of university, where I studied history, but mostly fiddled around with computers, I enrolled in an IT course as part of a learn/work contract to become an SCO Unix admin."
Three months later, George had a certification, a debt, a job, and not much to do at work.
"Out of boredom, I connected the SCO Unix machine to a Novell 3.1 machine I installed, using TCP/IP." At the time, such connections were unusual. George's bosses noticed his feat and decreed he was now a Novell engineer, not a SCO specialist.
And then they let him loose on real, live clients.
"I drove about 70,000 km in my first year, mostly visiting small customers, lugging PCs that were officially 'Novell servers,'" George told On Call.
This was not pleasant work. George said plenty of jobs required him to enter dusty cupboards or crawl into cellars. One job involved "standing on a forklift above a fish-gutting production line."
Wherever George was sent, he strung up cables and connected devices using BNC connectors, a 1940s-vintage connector that somehow survived into the early LAN age.
George was also required to troubleshoot customers' wonky networks.
"One day, I was called to a customer to fix a malfunctioning network that was intermittently dropping connections," he told On Call.
The network used coaxial cables and 10Base2 – a combination that meant a single bad connection would crash the whole network.
George investigated by taking down parts of the network and looking for faults, but couldn't find the cause of the network outages, which persisted.
There was nothing for it but to check every PC to make sure their LAN cables were in working order.
George had nearly checked the company's entire PC fleet when he found a loose cable.
"As soon as I tried to disconnect the BNC connector, the cable fell out," he told On Call.
He therefore asked the user of this PC if he had ever noticed any network problems.
"Oh yeah, that cable falls out all the time. I just stick it back in," was the response.
George whipped out his cable crimper, fixed the connector, and decided to quit his job.
At which point his boss threatened to sue if he didn't pay back the cost of the SCO Unix course.
"I said they needed to pay me more if they wanted me to pay the money back," George told On Call, admitting he then made some mentions of "places where the Sun never shines" to illustrate his thorough disinterest in paying back even a cent.
"I moved on to better pastures, where Windows NT 4 was shining on the horizon," he wrote.
What's your preferred method for finding cable faults? Make a connection by clicking here to send an email to On Call. ®
Source: The register