The IT stories enterprise IT pros actually laugh at.
Volume 342, Issue 3 · 7 articles from 3 issues
This week, meet 'Martin' who told us about his very first job in tech. 'I had just started working as a network engineer for a very small IT infrastructure company. Since I was the only person who worked with Cisco gear, that made me 'The Cisco expert',' he told The Register.
That dubious status was enough for the company to send Martin to a customer who needed a new switch for a network that ran Nortel kit – not the Cisco boxes he kind of knew.
Martin told us he arrived to a warm welcome from the customer’s IT team, a decent coffee, and some friendly chat about adding VLANs.
With those pleasantries accomplished, he got to work.
“I completed rack and stack, basic default configuration, and the VLANs discussed over the coffee,” he wrote. Then he hooked everything up, tested the results, decided all was well, and prepared to leave.
While he packed up, the phone rang.
Meet 'Roy' who toiled at a company that did work related to tissue donations and organ transplants. 'The on-call duties were a bit hair-raising due to the high stakes involved,' Roy told On Call. 'Thankfully, things typically ran well and I didn't get too many calls in the off hours.'
One call stuck in Roy’s mind, because it involved “an irate lab worker who was having difficulties logging into her workstation so she could get to work.”
Roy started with the usual troubleshooting questions: was the machine connected to the network; were any lights on, and so on.
“She was getting a bit more defensive, so I just reset her password and then had her change it to one she knew for sure, so we could move on with things,” he explained.
Strangely, even the new password didn’t work. Roy therefore asked if the lab worker would spell the password out to him, so he could use her credentials in the company’s webmail service.
The lab worker agreed and started to spell out her password.
A sarcastic IT administrator explains why the company's content management system cannot manage content.
The BOFH humorously describes a poorly-designed CMS that makes documents nearly impossible to find or retrieve.
The system uses flawed AI-driven tagging that regenerates nightly with erratic keyword associations, rendering searches unreliable.
Despite its obvious failures, nobody wants it fixed because staff use it as a convenient place for documents to disappear, and the original invoice is, naturally, lost within the system itself.
A datacenter technician held down the wrong power button to prevent an outage while colleagues laughed.
In a Glasgow datacenter during the early 2000s, technician Vince accidentally pressed the power button on a storage array instead of a server.
Unable to release the button without causing an outage, he held it down until the team could arrange emergency maintenance as cover.
The incident became a humorous workplace moment as colleagues arrived to witness his predicament, offering support and compassion by pointing and laughing before finally providing relief.
A reader recalls plugging a mouse into the wrong nine-pin port on a future Nobel laureate's IBM PC and making it smoke.
In The Register's weekly Who, Me? column, a reader dubbed "Marc" recalls his early-1990s job supporting PCs for professors at a graduate school, some of whom later won Nobel Prizes.
Sent to replace a faulty mouse on an Intel 286-based IBM PC, he plugged it into a physically identical but differently pinned nine-pin port.
The machine immediately began emitting foul electrical smoke, so he kicked out the power cord. After moving the mouse to the correct port, the PC booted fine and the mouse worked, and the professor later won his Nobel Prize unaware of the incident.
A support war story about an executive who blamed IT for missing files he had saved to the wrong folder.
The weekly On Call column recounts a support technician's encounter with an executive who insisted IT had deleted his files.
The files were where he had saved them, in the Home directory rather than Documents, and recovering them took a single click.
The executive declined to learn the fix, guaranteeing the ticket would recur. The story is a compact illustration of why user-education failures become permanent support load, and why support teams increasingly document the resolution path for the ticket rather than the user.
It also shows how quickly a misunderstanding becomes an accusation against the IT team.
IT technician resolves Wi-Fi interference by drilling a new desk hole for monitor cables.
An IT professional working at an assisted living facility discovered that crimped power cables running through a desk hole were causing Wi-Fi interference and monitor failures.
After drilling a separate hole to reroute the cables, the technician unexpectedly resolved both the monitor cutout issue and Wi-Fi problems at that location.
The technician later planned to investigate another persistent dead zone in a back hallway using specialized equipment to identify additional interference sources.