It doesn’t matter how good you are at your job – if the people around you are incompetent it can make the whole thing a lot harder.

That’s exactly what the guy in this story found out when he wanted to do a simple tech task for a client.

But first he needed some information.

And getting that information was easier said than done.

Read on to find out what happened.

How do they not get it?

The people I work with are driving me slowly insane.

Recently I had to have a very long in depth discussion with several of my colleagues over some remote engineering.

All I was doing was requesting a new SSL certificate from Sectigo and using openSSL to manipulate it from being a pfx file, into a cer and key file so it could be uploaded into an azure hosted debian linux machine which runs the client’s phone system.

“You need to be on site to do this!” was the start of it.

Let’s see how this tech worker responded to that.

“Pardon?”

“You need to go to site to do the SSL work, as it’s for their phone system.”

“What?”

“As you are installing this, you need access to their phone system!”

The employee struggled to cope with this woeful misunderstanding.

“You do realise this is a hosted phone system?”

“Okay, so do you need to be scheduled in to go to the branch office nearest you, or the head office in the city?”

“It’s hosted in a Microsoft azure data center.”

“Well, give us the address for the DC then!”

And that last comment was too much for them.

My head hit my hands so hard I think it broke my desk.

“Okay, I’m not sure I have the time or the crayons necessary to explain this. I do the SSL creation on my own laptop and using a web portal for Sectigo, this can be done from anywhere in the world, no need to be anywhere specific.

Installing a certificate is NOT a physical action, there is no device that needs to be connected for this to happen, it’s a transfer of data and a reconfiguration. Nothing hosted in azure can be physically accessed by the clients.

I have full remote access to their azure infrastructure from my laptop, which I again, can do from anywhere in the world. There is zero requirement for me to go to the client’s office to update a backend system which is not even in their offices.

It’s called remote engineering for a reason, so I do not need to waste three hours of my day travelling unnecessarily to do a job I can do from my desk at home!”

Uh-oh.

It would be one thing trying to explain this to a clueless customer.

But the fact that it was a fellow tech worker making this mistake must have been really frustrating.

Let’s see what folks on Reddit made of this.

This person thought he could’ve taken advantage of the situation.

While others thought he’d inadvertently spoiled others’ great excuses.

But this non-techie explained how incomprehensible this was.

If the person on the phone wasn’t actually an expert, their mistake makes a lot of sense.

If they are? It’s no wonder he got so frustrated.

Sometimes you just want to do your job – it’s others who get in the way.

If you liked that post, check out this story about a customer who insists that their credit card works, and finds out that isn’t the case.