Last week the training centre from one of our remote sites sent a hard drive up to us from one of their servers. Our task – to put a simple freeware email server on for demo purposes. No worries.
They sent the wrong hard drive.
In fairness, there weren’t many clues as to which drive it was that they’d sent. Apart from the big yellow bit of tape with the server name on the front of the box they took it out of. Or the big yellow bits of tape with that server name and operating system on the drive itself.
So back it went, after we’d got it running just to check it wasn’t the right drive after all, only (vigorously) mislabelled.
Early Monday morning and the trainign department go mental. They can only get one of the applications in the remote training office to work. When they try to connect to the second from the first, all kinds of “cannot open file” errors appear and things fall over. This, obviously, is our fault.
We ring up the on-site trainer and check things with him.
“Did the drive arrive last week?”
“Yes, we got it back and I put it in the server.”
“Hmm. And you say you can’t get to the applications on the server? Can you get to the screen?”
“No – there’s no screen attached to it. It just runs.”
(which is fair enough – it’s a UNIX boxand it usually gets accessed remotely)
“OK, can you just reboot it?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because it’s not switched on.”
Call closed.
takes me back to my days as an IT Support monkey – if in doubt, always ask the operators to reboot / power on & off – used to solve better than 50% of all faults & was much better than having to (a) think and / or (b) wake up properly and dial in on the laptop
(shudders at the memories)