Attempting to continue with the funny IT support stories, I thought I’d bring you another good one tonight.

Tonight’s story involves a confused woman operating and administrating a local IBM 3270 mainframe controller that seems to be having some difficulty. I get the call in on a Friday night at 4 PM that a controller is down. To make a long story short; if your controller is down on a 3270 mainframe network … you aren’t working. This meant it was a high priority call; multiple users… no an entire office is down. This is something that needs to be fixed right away. Looking at my clock, and realizing that the downed office is 3 hours away, I’m very disheartened that I’m about to start a very bad weekend.

Obviously, my first thought is to attempt to call her and save myself the time and energy of driving for what could be a quick fix. I get her on the phone and she’s a very polite woman with a very sincere since of urgency in her voice. I ask her what’s wrong and to describe what’s going on. She responds that the entire network is down and she’s tried the normal troubleshooting techniques of rebooting the controller, trying the other 5 1/4″ floppy, etc. Now I’m really upset. This is definitely turning into a long trip and a bad weekend. With one more attempt at a phone support fix, I ask her to go into the controller room. This is when she gives me the classic line that I make sure to share with every IT person that I come in contact with:

“Hold on, let me get the flash light.”

I respond as you would think, “Flashlight?” Yes, you guessed it. The building power was off.