The IT manager’s decree to “think outside the box” wasn’t a cliché • The Register

History, they say, is told by the victors. Why The registry Each week, On-Call features stories from readers who have triumphed in providing tech support to the clueless, foolish, or just plain ignorant.

This week’s offering is a history of the latter state, beginning with a reader we’ll regomise as “Remus,” who worked at a dot-com company that made a leap into the enterprise software market in the late 1990s.

Remus signed on as an IT Manager and as the company grew, he came across some jobs in the Quality Assurance department that were on a carpeted floor.

Remus is a bright spark, so his synapses connected, deducing that the carpet and computer combination would make static electricity a threat.

So he spoke to the QA manager about buying some anti-static mats to place under each workstation. A few dollars spent on mats could save thousands in hardware while protecting productivity.

The mats arrived duly and the QA director delegated their installation to a junior.

Who put them under the workstations… without removing them from the boxes they were shipped in.

“A few days later I walked by the work stations and had to laugh,” Remus said The registry.

So he took the QA lead aside and said, “Next time you have a job like this, give it to an engineer who can think ‘out of the box’.”

The registry I can’t think of a more apt or grander use of a vile corporate cliché.

If you did just as well or better, click here to email On-Call and we can share your success story here another day. Feel free to push the envelope in your quest for low hanging fruit to create a win-win situation for all of us. ®