On Call Welcome once again to On Call, The Register‘s Friday column that shares your terrifying tech support stories.
This week, meet a reader we’ll Regomize as “Kent” who told us about a job he held in the 1980s, when he worked for a manufacturer of some of the first digital waveform recorders and logic analyzers – vintage kit for diagnosing problems in electronic devices.
“I was hired as a repair tech and eventually ended up running the department,” Kent told On Call.
That lofty position meant that when a very important client – the USA’s National Security Agency (NSA) – reported a logic analyzer was producing junk data, Kent got the job of sorting it out.
“Shipping the device for a factory repair would have been prohibitively expensive, so I had to travel to the site along with the software developer who was responsible for that model’s firmware,” he told On Call.
That meant flying from California to Washington DC, then hiring a car to reach the NSA’s Maryland headquarters.
“The software guy insisted on driving and got lost getting to the right gatehouse,” Kent told On Call. “He eventually came to a blind intersection with a huge berm and a large ‘Yield’ sign. He had no intention of slowing; I begged him to be careful but he went ahead at full speed.”
The resulting side-on crash with two incoming vehicles sent the car containing Kent and his software guy rolling and flipping before landing upside down in a ditch.
Miraculously, both crawled away unharmed, but the drivers of the cars they hit weren’t so lucky.
“I quit my job on the spot out of anger and went to the hotel to have a stiff drink and a hot bath,” Kent said, before his boss called and talked him into staying.
Once Kent got to the customer site, he experienced the kind of paranoid security for which the NSA is infamous.
“We had to put up with getting weighed and our gear searched before entering the building,” he told On Call. “Inside, every single door was shut and locked and we were of course escorted. At the proper door, we went in to discover our ‘misbehaving’ machine in a break area with cables going through the wall connected to a top secret target.”
This was less than ideal, because it meant Kent – a hardware expert – could not see or touch the device he was there to fix.
He therefore watched as his software guy spent hours debugging, without producing any useful insights.
Kent eventually ran out of patience, told the software guy the machine ran fully validated production code, so it was time to inspect the hardware.
“Like any good tech, the first thing I did was power down to do a basic check on all possible connections,” Kent said. “I immediately discovered that the power cord was missing the ground prong for some reason.”
He supplied a cord with that prong, and the machine started working again.
“The geniuses at the NSA were happy that their machine was working properly and I finally got to go home.”
“The best part was that on the way home I had a huge jet almost to myself for the long flight,” he told On Call.
And he was alive, too!
Have you seen your life flash before your eyes on the way to a tech support job? If so, click here to send On Call an email so we can share your story. ®