I'm pleased that Kent could escape and get back to his Folkstone

It sounds like Kent was pleased it was all Dover

And ferry happy to close the Deal.

At the very least he should have been owed a Sandwich after that.

He could submit the Tale to Canterbury.

> inform me that I was banned from the site

It sounds more like the site should be banned by all future support engineers

One hour and forty-five minutes later, Kent's supervisor called for a three-way chat with the client.

Absolutely outrageous / unacceptable behaviour on behalf of whoever was in charge, probably the client's data centre admin.

And an epic fail on behalf of the dispatcher who should have immediately escalated the issue after getting the call from his engineer.

ie: called the police.

I hope this chap bailed and got another job.

.

Yep, I would have had my phone out and made it clear I was calling the police.

That was my first thought too.

I've been in situations with difficult production managers, but nothing like that.

I think it's the first thought most experienced people would do. I mean for me I'd have marched back in to the gobshite who was dictating I was held and rip him a new one until I was let go. Or the fire alarm. Either or. I also know I'm a fairly confident kind of guy. I haven't always been, but you end up getting the raw deal from enough people you do learn to stick up for yourself. I think from this story, Kent was either still a bit green or the type who didn't like confrontation. There is nothing wrong with either of that, but I can understand why he waited.

Still, it's good that he was banned! Bet he was disappointed finding that out!

I would've suddenly been desperate for the loo and asking which server they'd like me to use.

Or just reaching for the EPO button/fire alarm.

Good! Sounds like future bullets dodged, if you ask me.

I once did an upgrade from Exchange 2000 to 2003 for a company in London. They head of IT has explicitly banned my colleague from going, and I was the only one with experience of clustered Exchange at that time.

Imagine my surprise when I walked in on him, on a call to said banned colleague, complaining he didn't think I was as good as him and questioning what I was doing.

Worthwhile explaining that I'd trained said colleague on Exchange.

Anyway I laid down the law with the customer - either trust me to get this done, or I will back out, pack up and leave, and he can have my colleague back but either way, stop going behind my back. Have a problem with me or anything I am doing, tell me to my face. Funny how he relented.

I was sent back three weeks later because the server had stopped delivering email and no one could even connect Outlook to it. I walked in and on the screen of one of the nodes, the mail cleaner software (I forget which one now - it's over two decades ago) was showing a message that said something like "Upgrade on this node is completed, now move to the second node to complete the installation. NOTE that Exchange services cannot be started on either node until this step is completed". I pointed at it and and he admitted that he had part installed an upgrade then left it in that state. He then stated that felt it was our fault it hadn't been finished and I needed to finish it. Of course it smelled fishy to me (thinking he'd tried and it wasn't installing so he was hoping for some free extra support) so I turned around and walked out.

He tried to block the lift to stop me until I gave him the option of stepping aside or the police would be called. What I really felt like was saying was "or I'd move him aside", but he was exactly the kind of person who would then himself call the police and it would have been career limiting.

I self-banned myself from that site for any future work that came up.

In a former life I worked for a company who provided and commissioned customised software for airport operational systems around the world.

One particularly problematic client in a less developed country was having difficulty with the new system we'd installed, and they managed to get it to catastrophically fall over when the commissioning engineer was about to leave site after several difficult weeks.

The airport's head of operations marched down the jetbridge with local police to the commissioning engineer's flight, and removed him from the aircraft to get him to go and fix the issue, delaying his return to his family by several days.

The next account management meeting and discussions about transition to service were somewhat interesting, and eventually included an apology from the client and a promise not to use such heavy-handed tactics in the future, backed up by a contract modification.

Hmm, sounds familiar. Not a Lxxxx install in Kenya by any chance?

who, after several hours without getting any closer to a fix, called our team manager to ask if someone with more experience on the gear in question could be sent to lending a helping hand and impart some wisdom. Citing our outstanding workload, our manager's counter-offer was that my colleague should leave site and the more-experienced body would arrive shortly.

The customer was not having this, and barred my colleague from leaving until the problem was sorted. Cue another call to our manager explaining the situation, which turned into our manager and the customer in a telephonic standoff, with neither prepared to budge, and apparently got a bit loud and sweary before it was abruptly ended, with my poor colleague still incarcerated.

The next thing the customer knows is our manager arriving on site, striding across the room, grabbing him by the throat and shoving him up against the wall, which had the desired outcome of freeing both my erstwhile (and now petrified) colleague and my manager to go about their day.

How this never resulted in a formal complaint, criminal proceedings or a terminated contract is a mystery to this day…

Early 2000s my day job was doing some complex gas dispersion modelling for a thing called the (UK) Control of Major Accident Hazards regulations. We were called in by a property developer to look at some housing they wanted to build near a site containing large quantities of toxic gas. A development boundary had already been set by the HSE but the developer wanted to build a housing estate within the safety distance.

The developer wanted me to prove that the HSE's calculations were wrong! I accordingly ran the calculations using the same software that the HSE use and my conclusion was that the HSE calculations were correct to within a few meters (if you've ever done gas dispersion modelling the concentration / distance contours are affected by numerous factors).

At this point the client had a hissy fit with me and screamed that that was not the answer they were looking for and I must do it again.

He was then politely informed that my work had simply confirmed that the HSE calculations were correct and that they would not get permission to build in this location and that the HSE would not make any change to their decision.

Another screaming fit and I was told to leave the site. The client refused to pay as I hadn't got the right answer! (That's another story).

He then decided to go to a judicial review with a well known QC who earned in a day what I earned in a month.

They were kicked out of court by HSE,

We passed their name and reputation across to everyone we knew in the area and I personally put a block on our company working for them ever again.

One of the reasons I decided to stick to IT rather than pursue a career in statistics (which I could have done) was the realisation that you'd have to provide the required answer not the correct one.

A former employer had a report done, at an investor's insistence, by one of the major consultancies on marketing and strategy. They'd clearly cherry picked data and facts to support their arguments about what we should be doing when they clearly didn't have a clue about our business. It was things like, "in the four years 19xx - 19xx the business trends matched the global demand for electronics therefore we can use the forecast for the global demand as a predictor for the business." This totally ignored the fact that we were on the edge of the electronics business (making machines for low volume production) and the trends completely failed to match in the years before and after the 4 they'd selected.

Suffice to say the ongoing consultancy contract was terminated with immediate effect but of course the original fee was never refunded.

We were being TUPEd some time ago. I generated some reports from one of our systems but they were not good and our boss wanted "US" (me and my immediate line manager) to change them. LM was going to....

I blankly refused and said, "I give you these, what you do before you give them to ABC is down to you. If ABC then come to me in the future and ask me to run another report I will and it will be accurate. I will send them your way to explain any differences. I do not want to be here, get some data and then have someone from ABC watch me FUDGE them to look good"

Presumably these were gas meters?

Before my time, my employer had some issues on a contract in the Middle East. It wasn't thought to be the fault of the company but in the interests of good relations, one of the Directors flew out to discuss the matter with the customer. On arrival at the airport, he was promptly arrested. It was explained to him that until the company sorted the problem he would be kept imprisoned.

He was released quite quickly after instructing that the necessary work be done.

Not renown for treating employees with compassion, I'm not sure what the response would have been if it had been a lowly engineer sent instead.

More than 2 decades ago I was a newbie desktop type. One of the areas I supported was finance and one of the people there was interesting. She had a third party install some software on her PC and for some reason took it into her head that things weren't working properly despite the support guy insisting it was. Her response was to lock the guy in the room until he "fixed" it. I never heard the outcome but was very nervous when it was my turn to upgrade her personal workstation to Win NT but I managed to avoid being held against my will.