Every time you hear someone complaining about the incompetency of IT, you can pretty much guarantee two things:

1) Said complainer is not a competent/proficient user of IT devices.

2) Said complainer is utterly unable to admit and accept their own shortcomings.

End result: "It doesn't work, and I'm going to blame everyone but myself"...

Yup. If you're competent you complain quietly - chances are that next time it will be you who caused it.

If the guy didn't have the basic intelligence to check and see if he'd plugged the connector into the correct port then he should have had the laptop taken off him and given an abacus to play with instead. As he'd already had a demo of how to connect it all up it had been proven to work and the guy should have at least made some attempt at checking whatever he could. I know plenty of people who are not IT savvy in the slightest, but would have taken the time to look at the ports that were present and try plugging the cable into any ports that looked likely to be the right shape or colour (if that was a thing at that time).

I dunno. When you're used to a PC having 3 USB ports that are completely interchangeable then it's not unforgiveable to assume that the modem plug would work in any socket it fitted in. What's unforgiveable is the attitude.

I'm not sure laptops with RJ11 modem ports necessarily even had USB ports - sure there might have been a brief overlap, but I suspect this may have been in the days of PS/2 connectors

There is also 3rd. Business decided that IT is just people doing nothing all day, just sitting with their laptops and looking at text. Any fool could do that.

So they allocate peanuts and then hire people straight from a bootcamp for a salary slightly better than they could achieve by begging at their local train station.

I used to lunch with someone in the IT team, and heard this story.

A visitor from the US reported that her laptop had problems, and she was due to give an important presentation imminently, but the laptop had problems - it would not display presentations properly. Two guys were sent to fix it, one took a spare laptop. The IT guys agreed it was not working, and lent her the standby machine while they went away to fix it. They apologised that it might take an hour or two because they had to go to a boring "all hands" meeting, and there was a three line whip.

She said that was fine.

They went to the "all hands", and found the special guest speaker was the Senior Vice President who had the laptop problem.

They got a special mention at the end which gave every one a big boost - and she said "You should always take a copy of your presentation on a USB stick!

When she came to collect the laptop, she chatted to the guys, and later organised an award (£200) each to say thank you.

Now that is exceptional.

Not only did she recognize their work, but she organized money to make it official.

I always appreciate that you say thank you, but if you're putting your money where your mouth is, I give you 5 stars every time.

I know this is an "On Call", but shouldn't it have been categorised as "Hugh Me" instead?

Don't Hugh Me I'm Scared

There are two reasons why you never give someone a public roasting. First, it's just bad management. (It's a sign you're a bully). Two, If there is the slightest hint that your argument might have a flaw, you just look like an idiot.

...you just look like an idiot.

Isn't that the definition of being employed as management?

There are two reasons why you never give someone a public roasting. First, it's just bad management. (It's a sign you're a bully). Two, you just look like an idiot. Fixed it for you :-)

"you just look like an idiot."

“Seems,” madam? Nay, it is. I know not “seems.”

(Ham. 1.ii)

"He moved the cable from the RJ45 socket, where it did not fit, to the RJ11 receptacle, where it did." - not true, it DOES fit - same height, same latch, only narrower. Locks in place perfectly, quite easy to do.

The RJ series was even designed for that.

In fact, as far as I know, any RJ plug will fit into any higher numbered RJ socket. RJ10 into RJ11. RJ11 into RJ12. etc.

And that's why pair 1 is on pins 4+5 (the middle pins)

"Where it wasn't a perfect fit" would've been more accurate.

Depends on your definition of "fit".

I can put on an XXXL Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan t-shirt, but I don't think anyone would say it "fits".

Why? would it still be tight? :p

Hmmm. The term 'doesn't fit' is somewhat ambiguous.

From an engineering viewpoint, the two most definitely don't fit. e.g. there is one particular combination of BA and Metric nut/bolt size which will mate, and in an emergency is usable, but it doesn't 'fit' either specification and the threads make poorly.

In this O/P case, while it is physically possible to plug in, it doesn't actually fit - there's a gap either side, although in some cases it will work - the fact that you are reading this proves the point. The modem I have here requires a lead with with an RL11 on one end and and an RJ45 on the other! I'm currently using a cable an RJ11 on both ends. I've also seen an RJ11 plug without a locating peg put into an RG45 socket offset.

From an engineering viewpoint, the two most definitely don't fit.

Based on my experience with some engineers, any two items can be made to fit...if they don't, then you just need to use your hammer some more.

The phone line has only two leads anyway - so having all of these extra pins is just way overkill. Only the two central pins are actually used.

(yeah, I know, there's other standards, but this one is most common here - and then for different speeds you need different types of cables, but that's networks, CAT5 and upwards...)

This is actually quite common, especially in older telephony applications and DSL lines.

The cable will just have 1 or 2 wire pairs, and the RJ-45 is partially filled. This is simply done to make it fit better into the RJ-45 socket which may actually have the full 4 wire pairs on the other end.

This is not a requirement, but it fits better and prevents dust ingress.

Those extra pairs can be used to add more phone lines, or upgrade to digital or even IP telephony if needed without changing the building cabling.

I used to work with old Panasonic PBXs and we often made cables where we used one RJ-45 port on the PBX and had 4 analog or 2 digital signals spread over the pairs. Sometimes split immediately, sometimes split or daisy chained after bringing it to the room over regular CAT cable.

One of my pet peeves is when people use CAT cable and then only attach an RJ-11, or even worse, an RJ-45 but only connect one wire pair. Just cable everything with 4 pairs and use what you need!

Sockets should always have every wire attached, for cables it really doesn't matter.

Once had a very senior if somewhat unpleasant academic cum administrator who, when kicked further upstairs, decamped on the weekend to his new accommodation with his PC and a length of thin coaxial (10Base2) ethernet with the T-BNC connector thereby disabling the network on the whole floor for the rest of weekend.

The newly constructed building to which he had decamped had the new fangled twisted pair so he wasn't any better off and in any case no one at that point was using DHCP.

Silver lining - not my problem.

I'm guessing there is a whole family of RJxx standards out there, but as just the 11 and the 45 cause enough work on their own never bothered to look that up.

But I am sure back in the 70's someone must have said to their mate 'you know, if we can get this adopted we'll have work for life just swapping them round and round..'

Case 1 - A few years back an elderly close relative called me at wits end - this was the 3rd "faulty" router he'd been sent and needed to get the broadband back up. Now this was someone who had been in computing all his life, the first two systems he installed were analogue. Yes, real analogue computers, before moving into mainframes. But I arrived at the house, instantly spotted the RJ11 plug in the RJ45 socket, as kindly as i could pointed out the problem. Then after a few choice words about the connection choices/design he had the internet connection back up and running in minutes. Now that was a black box with black sockets in it and the relatives eyesight was not what it was, and so I did agree about the design.

Case 2 - About a year after that a sibling called me, his family was about to lose it as he had disconnected the home broadband router so he could decorate. But the next morning when paint was dry and he reconnected it, nothing worked! Again quickly popped up there to see, and no, he had not painted the router, but it was a simple colour problem. The manufacturer of this box had tried to make things easy by colour coding the sockets and plugs - the red plug went in the red socket, the yellow plug in the yellow socket and so on. But said sibling had instead very carefully put them back in what he thought was the order he had pulled them out, not realising the colours were there for a purpose. Again that was fixed in seconds and peace restored - the kids xboxes were no longer ex-boxes...

Of course it may be my family might just be all idiots, but I doubt that. I have seen similar cabling faux-pas numerous times in all the offices i've ever worked in, offices full of very well paid supposedly clever people (my favourite was the RJ11 'network cable' between two RJ45 ports - well it had come with the laptop, hadn't it?) (for the younger readers laptops once had modem cards and came with a cable to connect them to a wall socket).

And I'm always surprised/disappointed we still get new kit with the RJ11's and RJ45's in nice little line hidden in the lower dark recesses of the back of a bit of kit in the hope people might notice that the cable that looks very much like it is plugged in ok is not really plugged in ok at all.

But then maybe, after all, it has kept a good few of us in a job over the years...