Who, Me? Welcome, gentle reader, to another Monday morning. We here at The Reg hope your working week is starting well - or at least better than it went for the protagonist of this week's instalment of Who, Me?

Our hero this week we'll Regomize as "Nikolai" who spent the turn of the century (there's a phrase to make you feel old) doing a lot of short contracts as network/desktop support, including a stint with a French finance house which needed help setting up swanky new digs in London, UK.

And when Nikolai says swanky, he means swanky: "No expense had been spared to make the dealers comfortable and happy to be there. There was a gym on the ground floor behind reception, and a massage room. We all had cards loaded with credit for the plentiful vending machines. Somehow every facilities staff member looked like they did catalog modelling on the side."

Even the food was deluxe: "In the basement was the canteen, with its own coffee shop attended by two baristas. There were three stations for food, depending on your preference, with chefs preparing French, Italian and Indian meals daily. All to be consumed surrounded by tastefully lit frosted glass panels and water features that cost more than the average house."

All of which is germane to this point: money in this place was not a problem. As Nikolai put it: "The consumption was conspicuous."

Nikolai himself was well compensated, and in return expected to jump to attention at any moment if one of the dealers was being in any way inconvenienced. It seemed like a fairly good deal. You might think that if everyone was being so well paid there would be no incentive to get greedy.

But, as Nikolai noted, it didn't work that way: "The seemingly infinite budgets for office supplies had a negative effect on everyone's attitude to honesty." Everyone Nikolai worked with was running a scam - from fiddling time sheets to outright stealing company equipment.

Nikolai's boss, who we'll call "Thomas," had a particularly cushy gig and scam, He was responsible for his own procurement budget and would also be rewarded for finishing the year under that budget. What could go wrong?

One fine day, Thomas announced that he had managed to procure high-powered PCs for every desktop in the office, with Pentium MMX chips and Windows NT 4.0 pre-loaded. The staff were suitably impressed, though a little concerned when the PCs didn't arrive in the usual black-and-white Gateway boxes. Indeed, the packaging bore no branding whatsoever.

Nonetheless, Nikolai's task was to load a standard disk image onto each PC before delivering it to users. One of the financial geniuses to whom Nik was answerable had heard about the new machines and insisted that he had to be upgraded immediately, though, so a box was assigned and Nikolai headed to the desk.

The plan was to disconnect the cables from the dealer's existing box, put the new one in place, plug everything back in and then install the requisite software. All went well until it came time to switch the mysteriously generic PC on.

With a bang and a pop, the blue smoke genie who makes all PCs work began escaping from the power supply.

Apologetically, Nikolai reinstated the dealer's old machine and examined the now-dead new box. As he did so, he heard another bang and a pop, and the tell-tale smoke of an escaping genie as a colleague's head popped up, meerkat-like, from a nearby cubicle.

Examining the carcass of the PC before him, Nikolai spotted something he had not seen before: a switch, to set the power supply to either 110 or 240 volts.

Nikolai realized in that moment that more than likely all of the new machines had arrived with that switch set to 110 volts. And, moreover, that roughly ten of them were in the process of being hooked up in the IT room preparatory to being imaged with the standard installation.

As our story pre-dates the era of mobile phones, you must now picture our hero frantically running through the halls, hoping to reach the office before the fatal switch was pulled.

Sadly, he was not quick enough. He did tell Who, Me? that he regretted missing the fireworks and smoke. But he did get there in time to see the look on the IT manager's face as the realization dawned that there would be no end of year bonus forthcoming.

And it only got better - it transpired that whichever fly-by-night operator Thomas has bought the gear from had no returns policy.

Are you a Nikolai, or a Thomas? Ever tried to save a bit of money and ended up with junk? Or overlooked the one switch that may have saved the day? The Who, Me? mailbag is starting to get a bit low, so if you have a story of tech support gone wrong, click here to send us an email so that we can brighten some future Monday with your tale. ®

https://www.theregister.com//2024/08/26/who_me/