Re: Press the button
I may have met your trainee but probably not, a very similar thing happened here. They person in question was given a demonstration of what they needed to do. He’s shown how to plug patch cables in, which for most ain’t exactly rocket science. He’s also shown the port numbers above each port on the switch. He has a go on a unit on the bench in the IT room and he’s okay doing it. He’s told it’s vital to plug the patch cable into the correct port. He’s then tested in the ground floor room on a live unit and seems ok. Told that these ports upstairs will currently be empty so no need to unplug anything. He’s got the correct port on each unit downstairs, so is he confident he can do this on his own? Yeah he barks.
He’s plugging in a patch cable into a switch on one of the higher I.e. management floors and one a floor below. He’s then sent with a list of port numbers and patch cables upstairs. The switch rooms are all in the same place on each floor so it should be as easy as pie. A call comes in minutes later though that a management PA has lost connection to the internet. Two of us go to check and discover he’s not looked at the port numbers at all. He’s used the same first port in the switches in both rooms.
He doesn’t seem to understand that it ain’t going to work like that. Tells us it’s the same ports we used downstairs so what’s the problem? The fact he’d had to unplug things hadn’t worried him at all, but it worried us. We had to be gentle because his dad was in senior management and this was supposed to be a work experience day. He was given less difficult tasks to do under heavy supervision for the rest of the day he was with us. Made a good coffee though.
His dad came down at the end of the day to collect him. He said he hoped his offspring hadn’t been a pain despite not being the sharpest tool in the box. “Won’t be applying to Oxbridge” was the phrase that stuck in our minds.
Anon obviously.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
