I have one of those technician jobs where I go all over and work on point-of-sale machines. I often get mistaken for someone that works at the store because I’m behind the counter. Normally, people are understanding, but not at this store.

When I arrived at this store, I was greeted by the manager and owner of the store because they had been having issues with a barcode reader. The problem was that there was nothing I was really able to do about it. We had been having this issue for months, and as techs, we were not given any way to fix it.

I had the manager and owner threatening to get me fired because I “didn’t want to do my job”. (They didn’t like me already because of something that my coworker told them months earlier when I was still in training.) I was pretty frustrated just minutes after walking into the store.

I spent about four hours in this store doing everything to try and fix this issue. This store had a big island in the middle of it with a cashier on either end, and I was working in the middle of them. I had people come up to me almost the entire time I was there trying to get me to ring them up. I would just tell them I didn’t work there and they’d have to go to the other people, and I would point to the cashiers.

As I was about to wrap up for the day, I noticed six police officers come into the store and start talking to the manager. I didn’t catch the whole conversation, but I did hear the cop ask:

Cop: “Are you sure that everyone behind the counter is supposed to be there?”

Manager: “Yeah, those are my two clerks, and he’s the tech trying to fix the problem.”

They were there for about fifteen minutes and never said anything to me.

To sum it up, I went to fix a broken machine, got my job threatened, and had people walk up to me every five or so minutes, and one of them called the cops because someone was behind the counter that didn’t work there.

I am working at the computer lab help desk at my university. A woman calls the helpline from the lab.

Caller: “I can’t figure out how to turn on the PC.”

Me: “Are you pressing the power button?”

Caller: “What? Button? No, I’m putting money in the change slot and the computer won’t turn on.”

Me: “Umm, what?”

I went down there, and the woman was gone and only one PC was free. Suspicious, I shook the tower and it jingled. She’d been sticking quarters into the power supply fan cover for goodness knows how long!

I used to work in IT for a local credit union. One day, we start getting calls from several branches with roughly the same question.

Branches: “Hey, there’s a guy here from [Company], and he says he’s here to look at the printers. Is he cleared to do this?”

While this is following process for unscheduled visits, it happens to about five branches in the same area and it is the same tech showing up. We start talking to our manager, and just as he’s getting to a point where he’s going to have us tell the branch to call the cops, one of my coworkers gets off the phone.

Coworker: “Hey, guys, I was just talking to [Manager #2] at [Branch]. She said the tech gave her a card and he’s supposed to be doing this? Like, they’re actually a security company of some kind that does tests like this to make sure people are following protocol.”

Manager: “[Coworker] and [My Name], go talk to [Security Engineer] and see if he’s aware of this. For now, if we get any more calls, continue to have branches follow the process of turning him away. If [Security Engineer] isn’t aware, we’ll call the cops.”

My coworker and I head around the corner and into the engineer’s office.

Security Engineer: “Hey, guys, what’s up?”

Me: “We just wanted to check in because we’ve gotten calls from several branches saying they’ve got an unauthorized vendor onsite looking to inspect the printers. So far, we’ve told them to follow process and turn him away because we can’t verify the visit.”

Coworker: “But I just got off the phone with [Branch], and they said the tech gave them a card that showed he worked for a different company and that they did this kind of thing to test security.”

Security Engineer: “He wasn’t supposed to do that!”

[Coworker] and I just blink at him.

Security Engineer: “Yes, this was scheduled through us—” *meaning the security team* “—but the tech wasn’t supposed to tell him who he was! The branches were going to be notified at the end of the day. He should have hit all the branches we asked him to by now, but if you get any more calls, have them follow process.”

[Coworker] and I start walking back to our seats.

Me: “Did they send us any sort of notice that this was going on?”

Coworker: “I have no idea.”

We get back to our desks and tell our manager what happened. He starts looking through his email.

Manager: “They didn’t tell me.” *Heavy sigh* “All right, that’s fine. Like he said, if we get more calls, have them follow process. I’ll go talk to security and let them know if they do it again, they need to tell us.”

Me: “I mean, you’d think it would be smart to at least warn IT that this is going to be happening, so we don’t, you know, tell the branches to call the cops because there’s a random guy trying to get in!”

Manager: “Yeah, I know. I’ll handle it.”

We hadn’t had another instance like that by the time I left. But sometimes I wonder what was going through the security team’s heads that they thought NOT telling IT they were running this test was smart, especially since we were the ones who would get those calls in that situation and we would check tickets and system for visits. It would have been simple to send us an email that said, “Hey, we’re running an experiment/test, and if the stores call about an unauthorized vendor from [Company], he’s supposed to do this. Don’t tell them who he is; just remind them to follow process and turn him away.”

I am working tech support for an office, and I get a chat raised from one of our users with an issue. The general humour level of the office is a “We’re all a**eholes, but we’re all friends” kind of vibe, so no one here is easily offended.

In my defense, it is the end of a long day, and I am trying to cut back on caffeine.

User: “$omeKey$OnMyKeyboardAren’tWorkingAnymore.”

Me: “Which ones?”

User: “WhyDon’tYouGue$$?”

In 2010, I am renting a house with a bunch of other guys in their twenties. Our landlord lives in the guest house in the backyard garage, and she also keeps the wireless router there.

One day, our Internet goes out. My fellow tenants and I are pretty good with the tech stuff, and we diagnose that the problem is beyond our own network. Something is preventing a signal from reaching our house from the utility line, and after waiting two days hoping the problem will fix itself, we have to call [Internet Provider] customer support to send a guy out and fix it.

He arrives five days later. Our landlord is a very friendly Filipino lady in her early sixties, a loving mother, and the kindest soul on the block. She’s everything an opportunistic commission-driven technician loves. But unfortunately for him, she isn’t a dumba**.

The tech is in the middle of explaining what our problem is and comes up with this harebrained story about how we aren’t getting a signal because our Ethernet cable connecting the router to the modem is “kinked”, causing data to “back up like water in a garden hose”.

Let’s pause and reiterate. A major Internet provider’s technician told us that data was backing up in our Ethernet cable because it was coiled, and backing up… “like water in a garden hose”.

He then gives his whole spiel about how the problem could be fixed by buying one of their new $120 routers and spending an extra fifteen dollars on buying an [Internet Provider]-approved Ethernet cable. The idiot takes the bait, and our landlord springs the trap. She calls the other tenants and me to come to the guest house.

The look on the technician’s face is golden. Upon being surrounded by a bunch of twenty-somethings, many of whom work in software and medical tech, we can see his soul trying to jettison out of his butt in a frantic escape. We all walk in with laptops and net diagnostics open, and we plug the laptop straight into the modem to show there’s no down signal. We access the modem properties and confirm that the modem log shows an external outage starting one week ago.

The technician tries to explain that he’ll simply send a call out to see if they can confirm connectivity or something, but our landlord interrupts him to say that he gave her a completely different explanation. She tries to force him to give us the pitch he gave her, but after he refuses and backtracks, she then tells us every single detail.

Coiled cable. Data backing up. Water in a g**d*** garden hose.

After we share a good derisive laugh at this guy, he disappears outside for about ten minutes to make a phone call. He comes back.

Technician: “All right, they’re looking at it. Give us a call if—”

Nope. We held his a** hostage. We bombarded the technician with questions, demanded explanations, and asked him things about the router and the Ethernet cable he was trying to sell that made it somehow better than the ones we already had. All the while, we were really just holding him down while constantly refreshing our connection. We were deprived of the Internet for a week; we had frustrations to vent.

Fortunately for the technician, he was only apprehended by our questioning for a short while. Before we could get any sort of justifiable reasoning for trying to swindle our dear, sweet landlord, the Internet miraculously fired back to life after just ten minutes.

It didn’t matter, though. After that ordeal, we dumped [Internet Provider] forever. Because of that technician, they didn’t just lose that household, but every household my housemates and I moved out to later in life.