Tech Support Team Won Pay Rise For Teaching Customers How To RTFM
The Register, Friday, August 8th, 2025
This week, meet a reader who we'll Regomize as "Marvin," who once held the title "field engineer" at a company that provided outsourced maintenance and repair services for a minicomputer company.
As is usually the case in any story about minicomputers, this one took place in a time before use of the internet was common, and also before vendors placed product documentation online. At each customer site Marvin visited, he would therefore find a huge stack of manuals - he told On Call they measured about five feet (150 cm) in height.