On Call Each Friday The Register offers a fresh installment of On Call, the reader-contributed column that celebrates the fine art of tech support.
This week, a slight variation as we meet a reader we’ll Regomize as “Finn,” who shared a story of a sales call.
“I was working for the European branch of a large US-based engineering company, mainly providing development consultancy, though we had a few products we sold on the side,” Finn told On Call.
The job sometimes involved travel to the US, and on one of those trips Finn’s colleagues asked the most dangerous question known to humanity: “While you’re here, could you just…?”
“They wanted me to visit a promising new prospect that was ‘in the same region’ as the client I came to visit,” Finn explained.
Finn soon learned that his colleagues had used the term “in the same region” to describe a location he could only reach after multiple flights.
“Travel challenges notwithstanding, I journeyed to this prospect’s site, armed with some hardware to demonstrate the product that we were hoping to sell,” Finn told On Call. “Crucially, this hardware needed to be connected to my laptop via USB to operate.”
Finn eventually arrived at the client and discovered that it operated a very strict security protocol.
“They scanned all electronics, cables, and adapters, and affixed tamper-proof labels to all cameras, and also all ports on all electronic devices.”
“So there I was, sat in a meeting room with several senior engineers at a major potential customer, having traveled out of my way to be there,” Finn wrote. “They were all waiting for a demo of the Next Big Thing. So with an admittedly slightly jet-lagged flourish, I whipped out the anti-static bag from my rucksack, slipped the PCB out, connected one end of a mini USB cable to the device, and…”
You can probably guess what happened next, because the USB ports on Finn’s laptop were not exempt from the client’s security protocols.
“Fortunately, the potential customer was able to see the amusing side – they were fellow humans after all – and it certainly wasn’t the first time that visitors had been caught out by their security procedures,” Finn told On Call.
He emerged from the experience with a new question on the list of things he always tried to ask customers before a site visit.
“I never found out whether we ever sold our whizzy new technology to them, though,” Finn lamented.
Have you ever been asked to do one more thing while you’re here? If so, we have one more thing to ask of you now that you’ve read this far: click here to send us an email so we can share your story on a future Friday. ®
