Fixing An Upsidedown USB Plug: A Case Of Supporting The Insupportable

On call ! Welcome to The Register 's On Call Friday quiz festival, where readers share their stories of being asked to correct the mistakes made by fools.

This week, meet a reader we'll call Dennis, who in the early 2000s worked for a company that decided they were so good at technical support that they could just as well outsource their employees.

Dennis's primary role was to support within the company, but one day the phone rang and he was called to his employer's third-party client, the local chamber of commerce, an organization he remembers mostly as jolly middle-aged employees.

“It was the most friendly group of people that I have ever had the pleasure of supporting - they always offered me a cup of tea and cookies when I came in and never complained about their computers,” recalls Dennis.

The cry for help came from an unusually angry man, who was in a completely emotional state, since the request began with the words: "Smoke and a burning smell are coming from my computer!"

Dennis literally drove a mile to the client's office because the employer didn't have a spare car and the client didn't have parking!

After a mile of effort to get to the reception area, Dennis couldn't help but watch his nose for small puffs of smoke spewing smoke over the work area.

Two questions pointed to the cause of the failure: the user was trying to connect a USB scanner.

But the user, like many before and after, mixed up the USB-A plug, and therefore had problems connecting the scanner.

However, he insisted. I even managed to connect a cable to the port.

At this time, 5V was connected to the wrong wire, the cable between the USB port and the motherboard burned out, and smoke began to appear. Luckily, the damage was limited to the ribbon cable, so Dennis was able to fix it fairly quickly.

But in doing so, he noticed something else: the user's computer was running an older version of Windows 95 that didn't support USB.

If you have ever been asked to support the Unbearable, send an email explaining your story on On-Call. More entries can be used in a mailbox in a column, so feel free to. ®