Rejecting a promotion sent field service tech into support hell

Chap who took the job left a trail of wreckage – and invaluable case studies – in his incompetent wake

Welcome to another installment of On Call, The Register's reader-contributed Friday column which often shares your stories of what happens when incompetent people climb the greasy pole and send their failures straight back down into the lap of tech support.

This week, meet a reader we'll Regomize as "Preston," who wrote to share his story of working as a field service tech in the late 1990s.

"I'd risen to the rank of senior field service engineer and was offered a position in consultancy," Preston told The Register.

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He turned it down because he liked working at the coal face, and the people he worked with there appreciated his skills.

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"As soon as I arrived at clients, someone was making me a coffee just as I liked it," Preston explained, "so I turned down the consultancy position."

One of Preston's colleagues took the promotion and was soon working on projects such as reconfiguring Windows NT 4.0 and the servers it ran on to handle two CPUs, configuring backup systems, and ensuring uninterruptible power supplies (UPSes) were in place to keep things alive.

Preston kept doing his own thing, but the character of his job soon changed.
"Within weeks, I was getting assigned calls where upgrades had gone wrong, UPSes were failing, and backups were not working."

Preston realized the chap who took the promotion was making basic mistakes on almost every job – some of them so bad that one customer refused to work with the newly minted consultant.

One of the jobs that eventually landed on Preston's to-fix list saw the consultant wipe a customer database that his backup regime did not protect. At another site, he created a system that pointlessly powered down every day and botched the installation of the UPS that would have saved his bacon.

Preston covered as best he could to protect his company rather than the incompetent "consultant."

He eventually quit the IT services caper and became a trainer.

"I used these incidents as examples of what to look out for when installing and fault finding on customer sites, and also as a lesson on why you should never rely on the person who does a job before you getting things perfectly right."

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Have you had to mop up after incompetent colleagues? If so, click here to share your story with On Call for a future Friday column. ®