IT Guy Travels From US To London To Install Toner Cartridge

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Eric Lund
Aug 1, 2021 6:00 PM EDT

Get enough technology-phobic people involved in a profitable industry, and boy you've got yourself a recipe for wasteful shenanigans like this tale of an employee who traveled thousands of miles to fix a printer on Christmas. As long as someone else's incompetence and wastefulness ends in your own impromptu vacation, things aren't too bad. For some more rare pleasantness from the world of IT, here's a wholesome IT bro who fixed a guy's destroyed laptop.

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  • 01
    Font - Posted by u/Flighterdoc 19 hours ago O 3 User couldn't install toner, got me a Christmas in England. Medium Decades ago, I was the IT purchasing person for one of the very largest law firms in the US...we had offices across the US and in England, and a couple in ASia as well - I had to arrange for all their IT equipment (this was in the days when law firms were just starting to put a computer on everyone's desk, and everything was done on Word Perfect under DOS.
    via Flighterdoc
  • 02
    Font - So, it's a couple of days before Christmas, and I got a call from the office manager in the London office...Their laser printer needs a new toner cart, and they're out. And, they have a HUGE (Multi-billion dollar) acquisition deal going down, and needed to get it fixed... So, I asked who usually replaced them and she said they had a deal with some local guy who would come and install them when needed - for some outrageous amount of money (he charged GBP350 for the toner cart and another 1
    via Flighterdoc
  • 03
    Font - Long story short, the only alternative was for someone to fly to London with a toner cart and install it. We tried to find someone at the NYC office but none of the techs had a passport. Well, I decided that if that's what they wanted, I'd do it. I wasn't the tech, but I could certainly hum the tune and dance the steps... So, I grabbed a couple of toner carts (after verifying the model - I think we had Laserjet II and Laserjet IIIS in the offices), and the fastest way for me to get to Lon
    via Flighterdoc
  • 04
    Font - Except, I'm stuck in London. On Christmas weekend - not just Christmas, but Boxing day as well. And there were no flights back to the land of free...all booked up. Called the IT director, and told him I'd be delayed - he said no problem, just get a hotel and stay available for any issues that may come up. So, three days in the Mandarin Oriental hotel...Room service. Had to buy some personal items, which went on the company.. The flight back home? The first seat I could get was on British
    via Flighterdoc
  • 05
    Font - All in all, the toner carts that I would buy for maybe $45 each cost the firm well over $150,000 - those bizjet flights aren't cheap. Considering the client paid for it, no problem. The firm billed in excess of $10 million for the work (mine, and of course the lawyers..)... And when I got home, I was on vacation anyway since it was between Christmas and New Years... Not all Tech Support issues are horrible - just most of them! :)
    via Flighterdoc
  • 06
    Font - Frazzledragon · 16h And nobody thought of finding any local printer techs? Probably could have gone to any half decent electronics repair shop, offered a good price for emergency help and be fone within the hour. After all, you said it was a couple days before Christmas at that point. Management being management, I guess. 442 Reply Share Report Save Flighterdoc OP - 16h Exactly - technophobic office manager with much higher priorities... But we did find a more rational local service, afte
    via Flighterdoc
  • 07
    Font - ascii122 · 14h Ha! that's great. They could have literally yelled out the window '200 quid to anyone who can change a laser printer toner' and had it done 1 71 Reply Share Report Save Flighterdoc OP - 13h This was when the firm was just transitioning from IBM Selectric Typewriters on the secretaries desks, to computers on everyone's. We had networking but it wasn't 10baseT ethernet standards, we had email that worked over 56k modems and dial- up gateways, and we had a hell of a lot of peo
    via Flighterdoc

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