Users hated a new app – maybe so much they filed a fake support call

On Call Some working weeks are full of achievements, and others miserably unproductive. Here at The Register , we always make sure that if nothing else we produce a fresh instalment of On Call, the column that recounts readers' tales of delivering top-notch tech support. This week let's again meet "Ben," who we first Regomized in 2021 when he shared his tale of a tangle with a printer.

At the time of this story, Ben was sysadmin for a client/server system that relied on a Unix server and PC clients. "The system held documents for a large construction project and the end-users were engineers who had previously walked round a factory with a technical drawing," Ben explained to On Call. The engineers hated the system.



"They scorned the idea of looking at the drawings on a computer monitor," Ben told On Call. "But the PCs that displayed the drawings were nonetheless installed on construction sites." And then two of those PCs stopped working.

Or so the engineers said. "My boss authorized a hire car and a hotel," Ben told On Call, explaining that he was given instructions to drive to the first site on Monday morning, work there in the afternoon, then drive to the hotel which was near the second site. The Tuesday plan was to fix the PC at the second site, then drive home.

"I got to the first site and found nothing wrong," Ben told On Call. "I reported this to my boss, set off for the second site, and again found nothing wrong." "Both PCs were working normally.

" At this point Ben asked if he could come home instead of staying in the hotel, and his boss agreed it was OK to do so despite the drive ending deep into the evening. "I have often wondered what repercussions there were," he told On Call. "Surely, management would have had something to say given I made a round trip of 1,000km, for ten minutes [of] checking computers that weren't broken.

" Have you ever been asked to work on a fake ticket? Or one raised in malice, rather than need? If so, click here to send On Call an email . We promise we're not asking you to do something futile and really do hope to run your story on a future Friday. ®.