Under-trained techie didn't claim overtime for mistakenly failing to phone it in

Networks

After making a medical clinic’s network rather ill, she ‘kept working until I somewhat knew what I was doing’

WHO, ME? Welcome once again to “Who, Me?” –
The Register’s Monday column in which we celebrate the
things you get wrong at work, and your skill at emerging unscathed.

This week, meet a reader we’ll
Regomize as “April,” who told us that early in her career, she worked for a
company that operated several medical clinics.

April admitted she did not feel
she was a great candidate for the job as she had recently completed her CompTIA
A+ certification – one of the most entry-level certs – and had only tangential experience
supporting doctors as they struggled to use a single application.

That résumé was enough to score a
job imaging new PCs, deploying them, and handling whatever other tasks popped up.

“One day I received a task to
convert an unused space into offices, so I loaded an armload of PCs and a dozen VoIP
phones into my car and drove the 45 minutes to the clinic,” April wrote.

“The deployment went
smoothly – or so I thought – because at each of the desks one of the people who
knew what they were doing had already put two network drops, one for the phone
and one for the PC.”

April was therefore able to
methodically get through the job, then slow down to tackle the slightly tricky
elements.

“Some of the desks needed two
computers,” she wrote. “On those, I was expected to use the secondary Ethernet
port on the phones to get internet to those PCs.”

April hooked everything up with time
to spare and decided to put her feet up for the 15 minutes that remained until 5pm – meaning she would glide into an unusually early end to her working day.

“My paid respite was interrupted
quickly by a nurse who found me and let me know none of the computers in the
entire clinic could access the internet,” April wrote.

“I wasn’t trusted with any tasks
that could actually break anything, so I was convinced that something major had
happened like a fiber line getting cut, or an outage with our ISP,” she told
Who, Me?

She investigated anyway and found
pings produced no results, so in a panic called head office and hoped
colleagues hadn’t already left for the day.

“I spent maybe an hour running
around frantically searching for anything with one of my superiors giving me
commands over the phone until someone who knew what they were doing could get
to the site and take a look in person,” she wrote.

That person eventually arrived and
quickly spotted the problem: April had made a single mistake by plugging both of
one phone’s Ethernet ports into the network, which disrupted every other
connection.

“They unplugged one and everything
came back up almost instantaneously,” she confessed. “I was genuinely surprised
they weren’t absolutely furious. They just clapped me on the back and said: ‘Well,
you won’t do that again.'”

April was so upset by her mistake
that she amended her timesheet to record that she finished work at 5pm. “If
anyone deserved an hour and a half of OT, it wasn’t me,” she wrote, adding that
she soon took it upon herself to acquire a networking certification at her own
expense.

“I kept working there for a few
more years until I became one of the people who at least somewhat knew what
they were doing,” she said.

Have you been asked to
tackle a task you weren’t properly trained to complete? Or been hired without
all the necessary skills? In either case, feel free to demonstrate your
storytelling competence by clicking here to share your tale with Who, Me? Let’s shine a light on the shoddy bosses who dumped
you into these messes! ®