User Found Two Reasons - Both Of Them Wrong - To Dispute Tech Support's Diagnosis
The Register, Friday, December 19th, 2025
Hey, teacher, leave that cabling alone
Welcome once more to On Call, The Register's reader-contributed Friday column in which we share your stories of tech support jobs so wrong, they're right.
This week, meet a reader we'll Regomize as "Mike," who told us about his time as a traveling engineer for a local education authority in the UK Midlands. The job meant Mike drove across the region, visiting various schools to fix whatever IT problems popped up.
"One day I was sent to a school to carry out some work on the head teacher's laptop, which wasn't connecting to the network," he told On Call.
When Mike arrived, he plugged in an Ethernet cable and quickly realized the network port in the head teacher's office wasn't live.