So this is a story from my time at middle management at the IT company I currently work at.

Its funny how the little simple things in life tend to cause the most headaches. At the IT company I work for I tend to be the jack of all trades type of guy, this particular sunny day I was fortunate enough to get to leave the office and go on-site to help one of our techs wire up a customer's new office, a couple miles worth of cat5e cable in one day with two people...a story for another time. But unfortunately like any other time I get my joyous breaks from the office the shit tends to hit the fan.It was about half way through the 13 hour day I would be putting in wiring up this new office when my company cellphone started ringing off the hook, it was one of our road technicians (we'll call him J). As I was half way in the ceiling, in an office that had no AC running yet on this wonderful 97 degree day, and covered in spray insulation, I decided that the person covering me for that day could handle the situation just fine and went back to pulling cable. When the fourth phone call was from the girl covering for me (we'll call her R) I figured it must be something serious.

R: J just called and said he can't get in touch with you!

Me: Well I'm on-site right now and not really able to answer, aren't you suppose to be handling everything?

R: Well yea...but J said the new computer he just took out to a customer is completely dead!

Me: Ok I'll handle it

Now to fill in a bit of the back story, this customer had an very old XP machine. The hard drive had finally decided to die and he had decided to purchase a new computer from us and have us set it up. Now he wanted to upgrade to a larger hard drive so we threw in a new drive and re-installed the OS, something that was actually very helpful as the original drive came DoA, and installed programs etc.

Me: Hey J, whats going on?

J: The new computer wont work!

Me: What do you mean? What is it doing?

J: Well I got to the customers house and turned it on and it tried to re-install windows, so I pulled the drive and tried another one and it tried to install windows again!

Me: Ok, are you in front of the computer now?

J: No the guy threw me out of his house, R told me to bring the computer back to the office and you would look at it.

Me: How? I'm not at the office. I'm on site today.

At this point I had given up on trying to logically reason out any of this, and needed to grab some lunch anyhow, and figured I could drive back to the office and check it out while our tech installed LV boxes in the walls. Plus I already knew what the issue was and since J had recently been a real ass to me I wanted to have some fun with this.Finally I made it back to the office to find R, J, and the CEO and COO standing around looking at this computer.

J: 'Bout time, why was I given this computer before it was tested!?!?

Me: It was running fine before you picked it up. Actually you powered it off and packaged it up when you picked it up

J: Deer in headlights

CEO: Well clearly we can all see that its not working now! How could you let this go out to a customer!

At this point I walked over the the computer and opened the DVD drive and pulled out the windows install disk that J had left in the computer when he packaged it up. A quick reboot to the computer and it instantly boots into the OS. At this point all eyes are on J.

J: Why would the dvd have anything to do with it not booting?

Me: facepalm Have you ever heard of booting from a cd?

At that point J stormed out of the room, I sat there laughing my ass off, and thoughts of why we hire technicians from big retail chains that never properly train danced in the CEO's head.