One day a few years back, a fault comes in from an office that has a computer malfunctioning; nothing was appearing on the screen. This was a legitimate fault that after troubleshooting was pinned down to being a faulty graphics card. The computer was temporarily put out of commission and a replacement graphics card was ordered.
The new graphics card turned up three days or so later. As he unpacks and pulls it from the box, our Boss asks the latest trainee to go and fit it for us without supervision. He was sure there would be no difficulty in this as it was just a quick hardware swap. I have to say I admired his optimism, but not his judgement.
The boy had been there about three weeks. He was a tall, rather large teenager with a smarmy expression and the ability to irritate everyone just by entering a room. He was not known for his common sense and the rest of us in the office winced as he was given instructions on how to fit the graphics card.
Here is a boy that knew everything about everything apparently, but very little about technology. Yet he would argue a point even when he had been proved beyond a doubt that he was completely and utterly wrong.
The boy leaves armed with a screwdriver, the new graphics card and a gentle swagger. He's about to meet his public. They are about to wish he hadn't.
20 minutes later... The phone rings.
"IT Support" I answer.
"I think you had better come over here." A mysterious voice tells me.
I ask who is calling and it turns out to be one of the ladies from the office we had sent our trainee over too.
"What seems to be the problem?" I ask her.
"Erm well, that guy you sent over seems to have blown himself up." She says.
I did a double take and exclaimed loudly "WHAT?" down the phone. This sounded more like a job for the bomb squad than for me. Still it had been a rather dull day and now things were looking up.
"He almost electrocuted himself." She continues.
I held back the urge to laugh as I hung up the phone and rushed over to the office as fast as I could. I did not want to miss this; it comes once in a lifetime.
I was not disappointed. As I walk in I see the boy still leaning over an open computer on a desk. He is not looking too happy. He had a dazed expression on his face, his fingers are slightly blackened and there is a strong smell of burning in the air. Two women are standing next to him with concerned looks. The boy seemed oblivious to everything as he continued to tinker inside the open machine.
"What's going on?" I ask him.
He doesn't say a word, but the women look at me and one of them looked downright scared. I looked back at what the trainee was doing and realised he had his hands in the open computer and the fan was whirling around. The computer was switched on. I then noticed the new graphics card we had sent him to fit was lying flat in case amongst the mass of internal cables.
I asked him to stop what he was doing and I switched off the computer by pulling out the power at the back. A small, black stream of smoke floated upwards and I asked the boy again what was happening.
"The graphics card didn't work" he told me.
"No s**t!" I thought.
"I thought he was going to kill himself" one of the ladies volunteered.
"How?" I asked.
"He blew the computer up" she said.
I turned to the trainee. "How?" I asked.
It took a while but I eventually found out what he had done. It was nothing short of idiotic.
The computer had been switched on first thing in the morning by one of the ladies, out of habit, even though there was no output on the monitor and they had been told not to. Our trainee had come along, opened the computer up and tried to fit the graphics card without turning off the power. For some reason he had overlooked checking to make sure that the computer was off. Apparently the green flashing lights, the moving fans and the whoosing sounds had not been enough to convince him otherwise.
He had managed to remove the old card. But the sudden electric current from plugging in the new one had caused the slot on the board to pop loudly, billow out a little smoke and in turn fry the nice new graphics card and the computers motherboard. It was like a scene from a roadrunner cartoon with the boy sitting there blackened and bewildered after receiving a small electric shock; none the wiser as to why a simple install had literally "blown up in his face."
Needless to say the entire computer had to be replaced and the new graphics card was money down the drain. We tried to get it changed on warranty, but we were not covered for stupidity or incompetence.
The guy stayed with us for over a year, he gradually got better with his IT skills, but a lot less could be said for his common sense. There are something's that you just can't teach.
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