Have you ever had an experience where you’re talking to someone who is supposed to be an expert in a certain area but after a few minutes you realize you know more about that line of work than they do? In a case like that, would you call them out on their foolishness or let them figure out their mistakes on their own?

In this story, one man is in that situation when he helps out his friend who owns a PC repair shop. The lead technician is having trouble figuring something out, but this man swoops in and figures it out quickly.

Keep reading for all the details.

When the lead technician can’t technician

I was contacted by a friend of mine who ran a PC repair shop.

He had recently been contracted (this was in the early 2000s) by a local fire department to build them some servers for their firehouses, five in total.

He went out and bought all the parts required from the local distributors. Takes the parts back to his shop and sets about having his technicians build these servers.

So far so good.

But there was a problem.

Apparently, though, it’s not so far so good. His technicians are having a problem to get these servers to load the operating system and his lead technician cannot figure out what the problem is.

He wants to know if I can stop by after work to take a look at these servers.

I tell him certainly.

It didn’t take him too long to figure out the problem.

Roll around to about 6 PM. I stop by his shop to diagnose the problem.

I plugin one of the servers and the SCSI card is not recognizing the hard drives.

I make sure that the hard drives are all connected on to the data cable, that they all have power and that the data cable is terminated.

Then I notice the faux pas, all of the drives have the same id selected.

The lead technician didn’t understand.

I tell the lead technician this and he in bewilderment states, “But they are all supposed to be on the same id, how else are we supposed to put them in a RAID configuration?”

*Insert major face palm*

After a few minutes of back and forth, I say, “Fine, you take that one server over there and work on it. I will take this server and do it my way. Let’s see who can load the operating system first.”

Needless to say, I was finished first and he was still trying to figure out his screw up. He did not last much longer in his position.

It’s a good thing his friend called him! The lead technician he hired didn’t seem to understand his job very well.

Let’s see how Reddit responded.

This is seriously the biggest problem.

This person has a question about the fire department.

If you enjoyed this story, check out this post about a widow who returned to a store to thank employees for their kindness to her late husband.

Another person shares their thoughts.

This person considers the story a bad memory.

Learning from your mistakes is key in any job. In this case, the lead technician assumed he was right even when his way clearly wasn’t working. It’s hard to last long in a job if you don’t learn from your mistakes.