For some reason, end users hate doing what they are told when it comes to troubleshooting tech issues.

When the technical support representative in this story asked a user to reboot the router, they said they did, but the technician could see that they really didn’t.

So, he told him the issue could be that the power cable has dust in it, like old school video games, so he has to unplug it and blow on the end. When he did, the router started working.

Dusty cables

I just read a story where the user wasn’t very honest about what they did or didn’t do when talking to their tech support and thus got reminded of this story.

Every industry needs tech support.

Quite a few years ago, I was first level support for a large car manufacturer.

On that fateful day, I got a call by a user, that his internet was bad.

Should be easy enough.

He had already created a ticket and the ticket showed, that there was a problem with his router and that he needed to restart his router in order to fix the problem.

How to do that? Simply pull the power plug from the router, wait a moment, then plug it back in.

You can never really trust the users.

The user told me, that he had done so but the problem persisted, which is why he called again.

I loged onto the router. Uptime: About 3.500 days => He did NOT restart his router.

He should be able to, but not everyone has permissions.

Unfortunately, I could not restart the router remotely either.

How to get the person to do it right and not just saying he did?

Oh, this is very clever.

He sounded to to be about my age range, so I said “Do you remember the old game cartridges for the game boy, where sometimes there was dust in them and you had to blow into the cartridge to remove the dust to get it to work?

It seems that he had a ‘special’ router, that sometimes had a similar problem with dust in the power cable.

Now this is just funny.

So in order to make sure, that this isn’t the problem, could he please pull out the power cable, blow over the connections to dislodge and dust and put it back in.”

He agreed and moments later I lost connection to the router -> He finally pulled the cable and waited long enough for the router to properly restart.

He just saved having to dispatch someone out to the site.

After that, everything worked the way it should! Surprise! “There must have been dust in the cable” 😉

Now that is what I call thinking outside the box and problem-solving. Well done.

Read on to see what the people in the comments have to say about it.

Wow, what a mess.

Good idea!

Hey, that’s a free meal.

Users will lie all day.

Wow, that is funny.

Creative problem-solving at its finest.

If you liked this post, check out this story about an employee who got revenge on a co-worker who kept grading their work suspiciously low.