On Call 2025 has ended and a new year is upon us, but The Register will continue opening Friday mornings with a fresh installment of On Call – the reader-contributed column that tells your tales of tech support.
This week, meet a reader we'll Regomize as "Rodney" – a serial contributor who opened his missive to On Call by sharing his frustration with help desks that work from scripts instead of exercising expertise.
His prime example of this tactic is the instruction to "start by deleting your cache and cookies," which Rodney says is an indicator of bad things to come.
"You know it means the person you reached has no interest in your setup," he told On Call. "You will probably have to reinstall your browser, if not your OS, before it's all said and done."
Rodney has experienced similar things at work.
"A colleague and I needed help to get our two firewalls to establish a VPN in the early days of the internet," he told On Call. "We had a support contract with a company that had been recommended by the firewall vendor, but when we called they had no interest in hearing about our troubleshooting efforts."
The support tech instead told Rodney to delete everything, reinstall the firewalls' operating systems, and adopt a rule base that ran counter to company policy.
"To add insult to injury, he kept putting us on hold as he was also helping out another poor schlub, while billing both of us simultaneously at the full rate," Rodney complained.
Rodney and his colleague therefore spent hours on hold waiting for help, and during one of those interminable sessions noticed that their routers' clocks were out by an hour. This made sense because it was just a few days since a change to daylight saving time.
"We changed the time and the routers suddenly worked," Rodney triumphantly told On Call. "We reloaded our original rule bases and that worked too."
So he hung up on the help desk.
"The satisfying conclusion to this tale is that when the support contractor sent me a bill, I shot back that the support provided was unhelpful, we figured out the problem on our own, and we would not be paying nor renewing the contract," Rodney wrote. He CC'ed his company's legal team and never heard mention of the incident again!
Have you supported yourself more effectively than your On Call resources? If so, click here to share your story with On Call – with your support we can tell more of these stories next week! ®
Source: The register