On Call Welcome to another instalment of On Call, The Register’s Friday reader-contributed column that celebrates the fine art of tech support.
This week, meet a reader we’ll Regomize as “Mason” who told us that in the mid-1990s he worked as a Unix administrator for a daily newspaper which decided to start a new business as a dialup internet service provider (ISP).
The ISP was set up as a separate department with its own help desk and server administrators, but Mason was sometimes called in to help because the Unix boxes he managed handled jobs like dialup authentication and DNS.
“I’m not sure what minimal hiring criteria the ISP department applied, because our group was frequently annoyed with spillover problems from their incompetence,” he told On Call.
Mason also pointed out that in the innocent early years of the internet, netizens enjoyed sharing prank emails.
One day, he received such a message about “Internet Cleaning Day” which explained that in a few days, at midnight, the entire Internet would be shut down and scrubbed clean for six hours.
“During that window, lost packets would be cleaned out of routers, dead gopher servers would be pulled out of holes, leaky pipes would be mended, etc,” Mason explained to On Call.
In the spirit of the age, he sent the message to the manager of the ISP’s help desk, who he rated as “marginally competent on the best of days.”
And then he took his team to lunch.
When Mason returned, he found an email from the ISP help desk filled with profuse thanks for letting him know about Internet Cleaning Day.
“He said the ISP would have looked very silly if we it had not notified customers about the outage, so would start notifying our customers immediately.”
Mason quickly rationalized that explaining the prank to the help desk manager immediately would be less embarrassing than letting him send those customer notifications.
“I immediately called and informed him that it was all a joke,” he told On Call. “ After a bit of silence, he quickly said something to the effect of ‘Oh, ha-ha. Of course I knew that.’”
“Crisis averted that time,” Mason said. “But a good laugh was had by all in our group.”
Has your tech team pranked colleagues? And if so, how did that work out? To share your story, click here to send On Call an email. We’re deadly serious about our desire to hear your story and perhaps feature it on a future Friday. ®
Source: The register