When working with any type of technical equipment, every little detail matters.

What would you do if you worked as a support engineer for a specialized type of equipment, and a customer called in with a problem, but you found that he had installed all of the sensor cards upside-down?

That is what the guy in this story experienced, so rather than trying to get him to redo everything from scratch, he simply turned his support manual upside-down to match the equipment and worked from there.

It’s a great example of creative problem-solving that you just love to see. Read on to get the full story here.

The mud is only ankle deep. . . If you stand on your head.

I’m on a small team of slightly deranged individuals responsible for providing world wide technical support for the dealers who sell my company’s products.

There are a few idiots in every bunch.

Many of the technicians we support are competent individuals and a pleasure to work with. However, there are a few who don’t know which way is up.

So, there I was. . . Sitting at my desk, minding my own business, and doing absolutely nothing unexpected, when Jake Tucker from Family Guy calls in.

Well, this isn’t going well.

Jake is working on a product that is essentially a bank of input cards used to monitor a variety of sensors and it is not going well.

The sensor readouts are reporting Fire and brimstone coming down from the skies! Rivers and seas boiling! Forty years of darkness! Earthquakes, volcanoes… The dead rising from the grave! Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together… MASS HYSTERIA!

I’m sure that setting up new equipment is difficult.

The conditions outside are in fact somewhat better than that so we get to work straightening out the sensor inputs. It doesn’t take long before I realize there is something a bit off about what he’s telling me.

This type of device has a row of analog and digital sensor input cards that need to be configured using an online tool.

At a minimum, this will cause a lot of confusion.

The physical placement of these cards matters when you start configuring them through that tool. The input cards also contain several jumper blocks that need to be adjusted to accommodate the supply and input voltages.

We quickly find out Jake has mounted the entire assembly sideways and has chosen to refer to the top as the bottom and bottom as the top.

Moving the inputs would take getting used to.

This at least explains all our issues as the configuration assignments are all in the wrong places and the jumper blocks are a mess.

I then inform Jake of the error and attempt to proceed with fixing it all. The problem is that Jake is entirely incapable of reorienting himself to view the assembly from the correct point of view and we are going nowhere fast.

Wow, that’s a creative solution.

I could have spent the next 3 hours painstakingly walking Jake through each step of the process and correcting each mistake multiple times, but I had a far more elegant solution.

I flipped my manual so the bottom now faced the sky and proceeded to give Jake all his instructions upside down and backwards.

Hey, it worked.

Jake would then do the opposite of what I told him which resulted in everything being in perfect working order after 15 minutes.

Sometimes it pays to behave like a Looney Toons character.

Now that’s what I call creative problem solving. Sometimes it is best to work within the limitations of a customer, and that is exactly what this guy did.

If you enjoyed this story, check out this post about a person who spent nearly 3 decades climbing the ladder at work only to be fired in a meeting that lasted less than a minute.

Read on to see what the people in the comments thought of this unusual situation.

This guy thinks he handled the situation well.

Hey, directions are hard.

This is very true.

Troubleshooting takes some specialized talents.

Really? The top is the front?

Finding the fastest solution to a problem sometimes requires you to think outside the box. That is just what this guy did, and he fixed the issue right away.

While it may have looked weird, it definitely worked. The next time this person has a problem, however, he might not get a support engineer who is quite that helpful.

If you enjoyed this story, check out this post about a woman whose HR department advised her to quit if she was that unhappy, so she did and found herself in a role reversal years later.