Gross! Unsanitized tales from tech support

As an IT professional, you generally like to give people the benefit of the doubt and hope they have at least a marginal degree of common sense and good personal hygiene. They come through most of the time, but there are always glaring exceptions. Over the span of my IT career, I ran into three notable examples.

My eyes!

One comes from early in my career when working at the computer repair desk at a tech retailer. At this place, the repair desk was right out on the sales floor. We’d voiced concerns about this arrangement because anyone passing by could see what was on the computers, opening the door for serious privacy and security issues. But upper management had made up their mind, and that was that.

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One day, a gentleman brought us a laptop that had been experiencing “weird problems.” I filled out the work order and entered his information in the computer system. As the customer signed the forms and walked away, I secured the laptop with a locking arm and pressed the power button. Then I too walked away for a couple of minutes to help another customer.

It was a slow day in the summer season, and hardly a soul stirred in the store. This was fortunate — upon returning to the repair desk, I discovered that the laptop’s background picture was horribly, pornographically disgusting. It took me a moment to register in my mind what I was looking at, and in a panic I went for the power button.

The five seconds from when I pressed the button to when the machine actually powered off felt like an eternity. When it did shut down, I pulled the laptop out of the security arm, took it to the back room, and changed the desktop background to the Windows XP standard.

After some quick diagnostics, I discovered that the machine was eaten alive with so much malware that it was unfixable, so we had to ask the customer to bring in the restore disks and set it back to the factory image. When he came to pick up the laptop, staying polite with a good customer service smile was very difficult — but I did it.

Smartphone etiquette 101

Later in my career, I was working at a relatively small company that had several dozen employees and a couple of SQL servers that lived onsite. One server had died on a Friday night. On Saturday morning, myself, the IT manager, the CEO, a couple of developers, a project manager, a SQL DBA, and Microsoft support were on a conference call trying to sort out the mess.

The CEO was a pompous fellow who usually loved the sound of his own voice, but about two hours into the call he had been quiet for an unusual amount of time — “unusual” being all of a couple of minutes. Then, in the background, we heard a strange noise: the sound of water falling, followed by the unmistakable whoosh of a toilet flush.

A second later, the CEO said, “Sorry guys, I had to step away for a minute. Did I miss anything?”

There was silence on the call for a bit as most of us muted our lines to mask the sounds of laughter and revulsion and to regain our composure. To make matters worse, we never did hear the sound of the CEO washing his hands.

A warning would have been nice

More recently, there was an incident at a different company where an exec came storming into the IT area, threw his BlackBerry on my desk, and demanded a replacement immediately.

“What’s wrong with this one?” I asked.

“It just doesn’t work.”

“Well, have you tried rebooting …”

“Look, can I just get a new BlackBerry?!” he snapped.

I calmly said, “OK, let me try a couple of things with this unit and then we’ll see what we can do about a replacement.” I picked it up, popped off the battery cover, and out came a flood of lukewarm water. “Oh, did you drop this in a mud puddle or something?”

“No!” he snapped. Then added, more quietly and with a blushing red face, “It fell in the urinal while I was talking on it!”

I dropped it. With a paper towel, I then picked up the phone and threw it in the garbage, not even bothering to pull the SIM card.

It took all of my willpower to restrain myself from saying things I’d later regret, but yes, he got a new BlackBerry. I made him wait a couple of days, but after this incident he didn’t have the gall to complain.

The takeaway of these incidents? Keep gloves, disinfectant wipes, and hand sanitizer at your desk at all times. You never know when you’ll need them.

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This story, “Gross! Unsanitized tales from tech support,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Read more crazy-but-true stories in the anonymous Off the Record blog at InfoWorld.com. For the latest business technology news, follow InfoWorld.com on Twitter.