Chef couldn’t learn how to use a browser after a year • The Register

On call Welcome once again to On Call, the weekly reader-written column where The Register shares your tech support stories.

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

Bob’s employer had just entered the Internet age and had a shared dial-up connection for its approximately 50 employees. That went well, and eventually it was expanded to the CEO’s office, thanks to some experimentation with a Novell Netware server and 10base2 coaxial cables.

While the business was now networked, it otherwise remained primitive. Technical support was a prime example of its condition: there were no reports of any problems, and when help was needed, the operator used the office PA system to request help.

Bob would therefore learn he was needed when the speakers boomed, “Would Bob Phillips please contact the switchboard?”

When Bob was called in this way, he would run to the nearest phone, call the front desk, and usually get a message that the boss needed him as soon as possible.

“You dropped everything and ran through the factory to the office building, wondering what you might have done wrong, before knocking on the boss’s door.”

Most of the time the boss would say, “The internet isn’t working.”

Bob then turned on the boss’s computer, double-clicked the Internet Explorer icon on the Windows desktop – which he renamed “The Internet” – and waited for a connection.

Next, Bob asked the boss what he was looking for, entered a relevant term into a search engine, and opened a few websites. If the boss agreed to this support, Bob could leave.

After this happened a few times, Bob thought that maybe he had screwed up the NetWare work. However, the log files did not provide any indication of an error.

After a while, the boss’s internet dropped out every week – but Bob had his “fix” well under control.

“I eventually came to the conclusion that there was either a CEO in the company who couldn’t open a browser or a CEO who liked to show off his skills by summoning help to double-click an icon,” said Bob on On Call.

He believes the latter scenario is most likely. Despite its modest size, the company employed a driver to take its managers’ cars to the gas station to refuel!

But he also can’t shake the feeling that double-clicking was just too difficult for this boss to understand.

“Definitely, I’ve had some amazing life experiences and learned a lot of things about not running a business,” he told On Call.

Couldn’t teach a user how to do something simple? To share your story with On Call, click this link to email us. We may then feature your story on a future Friday. If you need help with that, perhaps this column isn’t right for you? ®