Tech Support Chap Showed Boss How To Use A Browser For A Year – He Still Didn't Get It

On Call Welcome once more to On Call, the weekly reader-contributed column in which The Register tells your tales of tech support.

This week, meet a reader who asked to be Regomized as "Bob Philips" and told us about a job he held in the 1990s at a small engineering concern.

Bob's employer had just entered the internet age, with a dialup connection shared among its 50-odd staff. That went well, and eventually it was extended to the managing director's office, courtesy of some messing about with a Novell Netware server and 10base2 coaxial cables.

While the biz was now wired, in other ways it remained primitive. Tech support was a prime example of its state: trouble tickets were unheard of, and when help was needed the telephonist would use the office loudspeaker system to summon assistance.

Bob would therefore learn he was needed when speakers boomed out "Will Bob Phillips please contact the switchboard."

When summoned thusly, Bob would dash to the nearest phone, call reception, and usually be told the boss needed him ASAP.

"You'd drop everything, dash through the factory, into the office building, all the while wondering what you might have done wrong before knocking on the boss's door."

Most of the time the boss would say "The internet doesn't work."

Bob would then turn on the boss's computer, double-click the Internet Explorer icon on the Windows desktop – which he had renamed "The Internet" – and wait for a connection.

Next, Bob would ask the boss what he was looking for, type a relevant term into a search engine, and open a few sites. If and when the boss approved of that assistance, Bob was able to leave.

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After this happened a couple of times, Bob thought maybe he'd messed up that NetWare work. But log files offered no hint of an error.

After a while, the boss's internet was breaking every week – but Bob had his "fix" nicely grooved.

"I eventually concluded that the company either had an MD who couldn't open a browser, or an MD that liked to show off his power by summoning help to double-click an icon," Bob told On Call.

He thinks the latter scenario most likely. Despite its modest size the company employed a driver who took its directors' cars to the petrol station to fuel them up!

But he also can't shake the feeling that double-clicking was just too hard for this boss to grasp.

"Either way, I gained some amazing life experience, and learnt many things about how not to run a company," he told On Call.

Have you been unable to teach a user how to do something simple? To tell your story to On Call, click on this link to send us an email and we may feature your story on a future Friday. If you need help doing that, maybe this isn't the column for you? ®