Well I've had my time with clueless techs too. I worked for HP ES for sometime.
We were administering servers all around the world and had to rely on onsite techs or Sun/Dell/HP foot soldiers for any actual repairs. Just some of the things:
- One Sun engineer stole interconnect cable since as he told us there were two of them
- HP engineer unplugged the only good disk in 2 disk mirror in order check the serial number, in his defense he said that he was going to plug it in really quick...
- HP engineer unplugged the 2nd power cable on some system while removing the 1st power supply, he was resting his hand on the 2nd one
- Dell engineer went on site and said he will need to take out the MB and get a new one form local storage 2hrs later we noticed that he took the MB from the wrong system
We had fun times too. I remember one engineer refused to go to remote Canadian DC since the security guard was on sick leave and there were bears around.
So my point is that it goes both ways, incompetence is not specific to sys admins or system engineers.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
