Lying to a help desk about the scale of a system outage is a bold move considering no one knows the system better than IT.

When a caller insisted ten people were locked out of a system and refused every suggestion offered, the on-call tech soon realized she had fabricated the entire story.

After that, it didn’t take long for HR to get involved.

Keep reading for the full story.

Lying about a system being down? Enjoy your disciplinary meeting with HR!

I work a help desk supporting multiple businesses out of hours.

This particular business we do not have systems access to, so we are unable to do any testing or confirm issues before contacting their on-call — we basically have to believe what the caller is telling us.

The day started with a call that went something like this.

Me: “Service Desk?”

Caller: “[SYSTEM] is down!”

Me: “Okay, what’s the error message please?”

This caller is quite frantic.

Caller: “[SYSTEM] is telling me invalid username or password — YOU NEED TO FIX THIS RIGHT NOW!”

Me: “Oh okay, have you tried a password reset?”

Caller: “NO I didn’t — my password is fine!”

The employee tries to guide the caller.

Me: “Can you please try and rule out your password, as I’ll need to rule out that being the issue here?”

Caller: “NO! Anyway, it’s happening to EVERYONE RIGHT NOW — don’t you know about this?”

Me: “No. Can you please confirm how many people are affected?”

Caller: “All of us.”

Again, the employee pushes for more information.

Me: “Can you please give me an idea of the number of people this is impacting?”

Caller: “ALL OF US!”

Me: “Which is what please? 5, 10, 20…?”

Caller: “I HAVEN’T GOT TIME FOR THIS. 10. 10 PEOPLE!”

The employee is forced to backtrack now.

Me: “Can I just double-check that there are 10 of you experiencing exactly the same issue? Are you all working late or something, as it’s currently 9pm and there’s not usually that many staff around at this time.”

Caller: “Yes, just get it working — you’re wasting my time!”

Me: “Sure thing. As it’s after 5pm however, you’ve reached the out-of-hours desk. I’m going to start our escalation procedure now and contact the on-call.”

Now the caller is even more mad.

Caller: “WHICH MEANS WHAT?”

Me: “This means I’ll contact the person on call who will start investigating the problem for you.”

Caller: “SO YOU CAN’T FIX THIS? ARE YOU IT OR NOT?”

The caller clearly doesn’t understand the concept of after-hours support.

Me: “Yes, this is IT. However, it’s currently out of hours, hence why I have to call the person on call who can take this further.”

Caller: “JUST HURRY UP!”

Me: “Sure. Please give me your username and a contact number to get this logged?”

The caller is now suddenly getting secretive.

Caller: “WHY? You don’t need any of that!”

Me: “I’m sorry, however you’re being very unprofessional here. If you’d like me to call the on-call team, I’ll need some details to provide them — bearing in mind they’re most likely at home at this time and will be less than impressed if we’re unable to provide them with the relevant information, including the name of the person who reported the system as being down.”

Caller: “FINE. It’s [USERNAME] and I’m on [telephone number].” *click*

The employee tries to do the best they can with the scant information they were provided.

Wow, okay. Anger management issues!

Anyway, I gave our on-call guy a call.

Me: “Hi [on-call tech], it’s TheDroolinFool here, just calling to report a possible system outage.”

OCT: “What system, TheDroolinFool?”

Me: “[SYSTEM].”

OCT: “Okay, one moment.”

The on-call guy then reveals something very interesting.

OCT: “[SYSTEM] is working fine — servers up, no issues on our dashboard — I can log in fine. Who’s reporting this?”

Me: “Well, [username] is, and apparently she is reporting 10 people with the same issue.”

OCT: “Let me take a look. I see [username] has 6 bad password attempts — did you suggest a reset?”

Me: “Yup, she refused outright. Claims there are multiple people impacted.”

The situation is getting weirder and weirder by the second.

OCT: “Well, that’s strange — only [username] has attempted to log in within the last hour. Who the heck is trying to use [SYSTEM] at this time anyway? Do you have a contact number for [username]?”

Me: “Sure, it’s [telephone number].”

OCT: “Leave it with me. Have a good shift!” *click*

Soon, the employee followed up on the status of the case.

A few days later I needed to call the on-call tech for something unrelated and decided to ask what had happened.

Me: “By the way, whatever happened with [username] reporting [SYSTEM] down a few days ago?”

Turns out, this caller was about to face some consequences.

OCT: “I called her and told her that her password was bad. She ran her mouth and I terminated the call. Turns out she was on her own and fabricated the whole 10-other-people story. No idea why she lied about something like this, but HR have taken it pretty seriously — all I know is she has a disciplinary meeting scheduled.”

Me: “Well, couldn’t happen to a more charming person!”

OCT: “Agreed.” *click*

The system wasn’t down, but her judgement sure was.

If you enjoyed this story, check out this post about an IT department who keeps receiving tickets for a company that was previously spun off.

What did Reddit think?

This customer service worker can’t help but recall all the awful customers they’ve had.

This user thinks they may understand a bit of the psychology behind the pathological liar customer.

It’s very possible this was all an elaborate plot to hide some kind of wrongdoing.

In the end, her problem was escalated, but not in the way she expected.

If you enjoyed this story, check out this post about an IT worker who logged on early to fix something simple, and discovered a system-wide cyber attack instead.