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On Call Welcome again to On Call, The Register’s weekly reader-contributed tale of being asked to hold in your rage while dealing with the effluent of tech support.
This week, meet a reader we’ll Regomize as “Brian” who told us about the time he was called into central London to install some audio-visual hardware at a government agency.
He arrived for the job just after lunchtime, on the same day as the England football team was playing a home match. The city was aswarm with fans wearing their respective colors, pubs were full, and the city was buzzing.
The office Brian was asked to visit was the sort of place that he couldn’t enter until the right security person showed up to escort him inside. While he waited for that worthy in the agency’s reception area, he took in the stately atmosphere of a century-old building: all dark wood and heavy curtains.
Brian’s appreciation of the décor was rudely interrupted by the sounding of alarms and automatic doors slamming shut.
Brian asked the receptionist what was going on.
The answer unnerved him: a major bomb scare.
Worse was to come. Brian was locked inside the very small reception room, which as it happened lacked any bathrooms.
“I was trapped in what can only be described as ‘a big brown wood-paneled box’,” Brian lamented in his letter to On Call.
Stop installing that software – you may have just died
Innocent techie jailed for taking hours to fix storage
For the record: You just ordered me to cause a very expensive outage
We need a volunteer to literally crawl over broken glass to fix this network
Hours passed. Nobody was allowed in or out, and nobody knew what was happening, or if an exit would be allowed.
Brian’s scheduled 13:00–15:00 installation window sailed past. Quitting time came and went. The inability to reach a bathroom became a major issue.
He was finally released into early evening sunlight, quickly sorted out his most pressing problem, and arranged a new appointment to do the job.
He then bantered with the agency’s staff, and learned that the lockdown was caused by a suspicious package under a pub table.
“It turned out a very sheepish football fan later asked why Police were trying to detonate his sandwiches.”
Have you been locked up or locked down on a job? If so, click here to send On Call an email so we can release your story to the world on a future Friday. ®
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