A couple more rounds of that fun game saw the boss start hurling F-bombs

Sadly that's often Norman behaviour these days...

Normam last seen "storming" off.

No kidding.

I would have hung around just a wee bit longer though, to get a whiff of the chewing out the moron was undoubtedly going to be subject to.

And maybe even longer, to ensure that he didn't try to shove the blame to me.

I think that on the whole I'd be more likely tohave done the same as Norman, leaving the moron with nobody to blame. Or maybe jst come back a few minutes later to observe the scene from the back of the crowd.

leaving the moron with nobody to blame

The worrying thing is that by not being present he might make it all too easy for the moron to shift the blame on to him.

This. What happened to Norman afterwards ?

Should have gone for the proper fallback - 'If you're so confident, here's the tools, you do it.'

If you can see a problem coming always make sure your hands weren't the last ones to touch it. Preferably with witnesses.

Or document it. Present him with a document stating what you believe the outcome will be and confirming that he wants you to go ahead regardless. Get him to sign it. Make copies. When the shit hits the fan, this becomes exhibit #1.

... you can manage to utter the final F-bomb, and feel good about it.

Once in the rain I stopped and helped a lady with a flat tire. After waving her on her way, I put my jack & lug wrench away, and carried on to my destination somewhat dirtier & soggier than I wanted to be. When I arrived I apologized for my appearance, told the gal at the front desk that I was there to talk to the Boss about bidding on a network upgrade. The secretary spoke into the phone, and the Boss came out to meet me. He allowed as to how most folks bidding on lucrative contracts at least took a little care with their grooming, and told me to fuck off. In those words. As I was leaving, his wife walked out of the office. It was the lady I had helped. Later that afternoon, I got an apologetic call from the guy, offering me the job. I told him to fuck off and hung up the phone.

Reduced to stealing internet jokes/analogies now?

From whom did I steal that, pray tell, o wise and all-seeing Anonymous Coward?

I do recall, many years ago, an Australian TV advert for NRMA Road Services featuring a similar, but fictional, scenario, where a young man on his way to an interview as a road service tech stopped in the pouring rain to help a woman with an (unspecified) engine problem. He fixed it and, of course turned up to his interview oil-stained and soaking wet into a room full of other aspirants in neat, dry, and clean suits. Of course, being the one who showed he was prepared to stop and help regardless of the weather, he got the job.

I suspect this would pre-date any internet variations on the theme - and prepared to accept there may be even older versions.

Depending on how old that commercial is/was, they may have got the idea from me.

Happened about 40 years ago. The network upgrade was to be from Arcnet to that new-fangled Ethernet.

Reduced to cowardly uttering BS? Anyhow, IIRC jake has indeed posted this very story some time ago here on ElReg.

I've posted it here a couple times (the first time in 2018) ... and a couple times on Usenet, long before El Reg existed.

To be fair, a similar thing has probably happened to many other people since the advent of wheeled vehicles.

You can probably double your satisfaction as I can imagine his good lady has given him a good deal of grief over this since then.

If this arsehole learnt his lesson and subsequently modifying his attitude then everyone is a winner. As I entertain serious misgivings concerning the airworthyness of the S.domesticus I suspect he remained unreformed and probably sans wife.

I probably forgot about it completely right after I hung up the phone, only to remember it occasionally when my memory gets jogged as in this story on ElReg.

I tend to make like a cat in such situations ... walk away without looking back, figurative tail straight up.

If you are an engineer/wireman you can use a scalpel to expose the individual cables. Strip the cables to expose the copper. Only then cut the copper.

Then it is repairable. Definitely unpleasant.

You have an obvious fallback position. Get the soldering iron out.

I don't think you have much experience in poorly defined and routed cabling, identification and establishing whether it's live and what voltage is involved.

Your 'possible fix' is a recipe for disaster in the vast majority of situations so have a well deserved Darwin Award!

I told you so!

Those would be an appropriate parting shot from Norman before storming out

Unless things are different in Blighty, I would have thought an electrical engineer (B.Eng. [EE]) would be extremely overqualified to be stripping out cabling - an incompetent irish builder (with or without garden gnome inserted), would be more than capable of performing this task and with greater certainly of the actual outcome.

Rather than stripping out great lengths of cable, I might cut one with a bit of slack to determine whether the sky did fall and in the event Chicken Little is vindicated the cut ends of the cable could be stripped and the doubtless myriad wires temporarily rejoined. With though fiber I guess you are f⊙'d.

A more imaginative Norman, at the first sight of his boss' bridling at his misgivings about the remaining cabling, might have offered said boss the "honour" of cutting those final cables and passed the tool the tool.

In Blighty the scope of the term "engineer" depends on who's saying it. For a BSc (Eng) in might be a BSc (Eng). For a member of the appropriate Chartered iIstitute it might be a member of a Chartered Institute. For others it might be a skilled tradesman. It's not like it is in Oregon.

> an incompetent irish builder (with or without garden gnome inserted), would be more than capable of performing this task

I'm curious why you chose to put the nationality of the builder in...

The garden gnome inserted in an Irish builder is a Basil Fawlty reference - did you miss it or are you American?

2 words: Faulty Towers

Because the builder was Irish and was clearly identified as such in the episode.