Source: Pexels/Reddit

Successful support technicians usually possess a savvy combination of both patience and technical prowess. And only the best can survive dealing with the absurd asks from the technology illiterate…

How would you react if C-Suite summoned you on a plane to come fix an absolutely asinine issue? One guy recently shared an insane personal story about this with Reddit. Here’s what went down.

A tale of two breakers

A few years back, my company got a call from one our customers.

“Machine is down. Throwing error codes. Need someone ASAP.”

Nothing out of the ordinary, such is life in service.

Sounds like the start of a pretty standard day.

Unfortunately this customer is several states away, and has minimum training requirements to even get through the door.

But duty calls, so next day sees me on a plane.

So day one is spent flying and driving to a hotel.

With not much time to relax, presumably.

Day two is spent going through training and talking through what could be causing the issues.

Based on the error description, we determine what parts they have that might be useful and gather them from the warehouse.

All set for day three.

This is certainly no small feat.

Day three I finally get hands on the machinery.

Start troubleshooting.

Find that a brake is not releasing, causing the error.

Sounds like a pretty common technical error.

Fair enough, that was one of the issues I expected.

Keep working through the issue…

Guy standing next to me as I’m on a ladder, “Hey, should this breaker be off?”

Let him do his job, dude!

This customer had a very particular procedure for this piece of equipment.

At the start of every shift, the operator had to climb onto the machine, walk down the walkway, and open up the *fourth* electrical enclosure to turn on a breaker to enable the machine.

At the end of his shift, he had to climb onto the machine, walk to the *fourth* enclosure and turn off that same breaker.

No pressure though, right?

This ensured that a proper walkdown was being done every shift.

We knew about this during the design phase.

The salesman suggested: “Hey, there are several breakers in these panels. If there’s one that you need to manipulate twice every shift, we can move it out to the cover so you can access it without having to open anything up.”

Sounds like common sense even to a layperson.

“No,” says the customer, in their infinite wisdom, “the process is procedure-driven. We’ll do it our way.”

Fast-forward to me, 3 days into an out-of-state service trip, staring at a little breaker in the *third* electrical enclosure.

“No. No that breaker should not be off.”

Oh boy, looks like the dude was right.

One little flip of a switch later, and the machine is right as rain.

No errors, no problems.

Just an easy mistake that cost a lot of money, and which was just waiting to happen.

Gotta love those types of situations.

If only someone had warned them…

Day four saw me back on a plane, with a stupidly funny story to tell.

Corporate probably had a field day pointing figures over that one. Let’s see how the good people of Reddit responded to this.

The comments didn’t hesitate to drop some knowledge.

Some even took the time to share their own similar stories.

One person thought they should have escalated the situation further.

If you enjoyed this story, check out this post about a man who gets revenge on his company after they fire him and try to steal his custom program.

Another pointed out the hopeful lesson at hand.

And someone else provided some well-deserved kudos.

Outsourcing help wasn’t the flex these guys thought it was.