'Trained Monkey' From Tech Support Saved Know-it-all Manager's Mistake With A Single Keypress

On Call Friday dawns with the promise of precious freedom, yet the world of tech support is seldom free from trouble. The Register always finds a way to celebrate anyway, by bringing you a fresh instalment of On Call, the reader-contributed column that tells your tales of breaking away from bad bosses and ungrateful users.

This week, meet a reader we'll Regomize as "Mark" who can’t forget a former manager who claimed to be an IT expert and disdainfully referred to colleagues in his IT department as “trained monkeys” because he felt computers were so simple even a simian could make them sing.

"As you can imagine, I didn't particularly like him," Mark told On Call.

Mark's opinion mattered little because senior execs thought the manager was hot stuff who deserved an expensive new laptop.

This tale took place at a time when laptops were not the norm. The manager's ability to create PowerPoint presentations and show them off during meetings was therefore leading edge.

To help the hotshot dazzle the world with PowerPoint, Mark picked a laptop that sported a VGA connector that allowed it to connect to projectors.

Both lappies and projectors were somewhat primitive at the time, and video output would not change from a laptop's screen to the projector until a user pressed a combination of keys – Mark thinks the combo was FN+F3. Once a user set the laptop to display video on an external display, its screen would not work until another FN+F3 – even after a reboot.

One day, Mark was monkeying about at work when his phone rang and the manager blurted a torrent of panicked expletives and abuse.

Mark managed to figure out that the manager was attending an offsite meeting and his attempt to impress some higher-ups with PowerPoint was going very badly.

"I tried to calm him down and asked him to explain exactly what was happening but he told me, in no uncertain terms, that I must drop everything and rush to his aid," Mark told On Call.

So Mark did.

• Don't shoot me, I'm only the system administrator!
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• User demanded a ‘wireless’ computer and was outraged when its battery died
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On arrival, he found the manager "anxiously dancing from one foot to the other outside the conference room, clutching the laptop." After making polite inquiries about the problem, Mark learned the manager tried to prepare for the meeting by getting his PowerPoint ready to roll – but nothing appeared on its screen. The manager had no backup, so the only way he could show his slides was on this laptop.

The manager told Mark to fix the problem instantly, shoved the laptop into his hands, and allowed him to enter the meeting room.

Once in the room, Mark asked the manager to share his extensive IT knowledge and detail his troubleshooting efforts.

"He practically screamed at me that I shouldn't be in the room at all and that he had done everything to fix the problem but, clearly, I was somehow responsible for this failure as the Tech Support guy," Mark told On Call.

Mark apologized to the meeting attendees for the delay, connected the laptop to the VGA cable that reached the projector, and watched as the slides immediately appeared.

He then explained the FN+F3 thing, pressed that key combo a couple of times to show how it worked, and watched the manager's face turn a lovely shade of embarrassed red.

And then Mark left the meeting.

"Some time later, back at my desk, the still livid manager presented himself and complained loudly about how I had deliberately shown him up in front of his colleagues," Mark told On Call.

As the tirade continued, Mark learned that the audience for the PowerPoint didn't spend much time admiring the slides and instead conducted a whispered discussion about the hotshot manager's meltdown.

"The gist of the rant was that I hadn't paid him due respect," Mark said.

"I replied that I gave him all the respect he deserved."

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