I went over to Pakistan to manufacture a tricky medicinal product for the first time outside the UK.

As I left when the job was complete, I was presented with a suitcase-sized, sack-wrapped package with handles sewn on to it, and instructions not to open it until I got home. They wouldn't tell me what it was, but I guessed 'rug' - which was fortunate, because when I checked in at Karachi Airport, the first thing the armed guards did was ask me what was in the bag. So I guessed 'rug' again and they were satisfied. They were less (i.e. completely not) interested in the large polythene bag I was also carrying - in the open to avoid any unpleasantness - of samples of white powder from various stages of the process I'd been monitoring.

When I finally got home, I opened the bag and inside was a huge and beautiful handmade Persian rug.

Some central Asian countries are quite hot on people trying to export antiquarian rugs and like to make sure you've got a certificate for it saying it's not!

If people can't deal with something being fixed in a few seconds then that's their problem.

If it's my job to fix something, I'll fix it. I'm not going to hold your fucking hand for a week to make you feel better. I've got more important things to do.

I agree with your sentiment, but there are worse ways to waste some time than a fully expensed week in Venezuela.

Better things to do than what you're being paid to do?

Take the money and shut up, would be my advice.

I get your thinking and would normally just do the voodoo and leave. In this situation however it sound like a week of paid holiday for very little effort and free booze. Can't complain there.

Supposedly the client had checked everything, double checked everything, triple checked everything, & "done everything Humanly possible" to fix an issue for nearly a month before calling my employer for a fix.

Employer sends me out, I start checking all the physical connections first to get them out of the way, & realize that the Cat5 cable's little locking tab thingy is broken off. I replace the cable & the problem went away.

A thousand dollar multi hour plane flight to send me out, car rental to get me from the airport to the client site, a hotel reserved for me with an open-ended occupancy, and it all got fixed faster than the hire car attendant took to make sure I was legally allowed to drive a car at all.

I checked in to the hotel, informed the manager that I'd need it overnight, requested a wake up call for my return flight in the morning, called the airline to let them know I'd need to be on the return flight in the morning, and set about to enjoy a nice meal (room service) & use the room internet connection to chat with my girlfriend at the time.

Next day goes without incident, I get back home, & report to work the next morning as normal.

Boss nearly has a cow when I tell him what happened & how long it took to fix. He demanded to know why I used the hotel & spent the night if I could have been on a flight back the same day.

"Because if I *had*, I wouldn't have arrived until after close of business & been one very grumpy boy when I showed up this morning. Instead I spent the night in a hotel you had already paid for, had a meal within my meal allowance, took a leisurely flight back, had a good night's sleep to lose the jetlag, & am fully prepared to get to work right now *without* ripping off anyone's head for intercepting me before my first tankard of caffeine."

Boss gave one of those sheepish full-toothed grins as if to say "Ok, please don't kill me" and let me go. My meal was part of the room cost, so I didn't even have a receipt to hand over to the bean counters for reimbursement, thus it all ended fairly calmly.

Sometimes you wish you could reach through the phone & thwap the caller in the forehead while shouting "WAKE UP, DINGUS!" in the hopes they congeal enough coherency to realize that they could save themselves a hefty bill & the responding on-site tech a LOT of headache meds if they just, y'know, ACTUALLY did some basic checks before calling... /Sigh/

We have a saying (my background being Austrian) along the lines:

The thing that doesn't cost anything,

isn't worth anything.

... and shockyingly, in many businesses that seems to be accepted management practice.

Ive just experienced a similar but different problem. We were in a drama competition, where groups put on a play, and an adjudicator gives marks for presentation, acting, technical etc.

We had a play and a critical part was projection on to the back of the stage. The projection worked the day before.

When we tried it with out play, we found someone had hung a black cloth in the auditorium - blocking the projection.

Our lighting man got his own projector, plugged it in to the mains, and computer and it would display the set up screen, but not talk to the computer. He tried everything. He finally used a different extension lead thinking it will make no difference, and it suddenly worked.

The problem was that the computer and projector needed about 5 second to sync up. The extension lead had a dicky plug and would drop power for a millisecond, every second or so. As a result, it never synced up

This took him 60 minutes to find - all the time we were allocated to set up the technical stuff.

I can only imagine being sent to exotic places... I was sent to a neurotic office, where the cleaners had bumped the Cat5 cable with the vacuum, and the printer didn't! Only to push the cable back in, no thanks, no drinks and pats on the back... Those were the days eh?

" "Culminating with the company president offering me a leather-wrapped ancient bottle of rum." "

Are they hiring? Asking for a friend...