Under-trained techie didn't claim overtime for mistakenly failing to phone it in

WHO, ME? Welcome once again to "Who, Me?" - The Register's Monday column in which we celebrate the things you get wrong at work, and your skill at emerging unscathed. This week, meet a reader we'll Regomize as "April," who told us that early in her career, she worked for a company that operated several medical clinics. April admitted she did not feel she was a great candidate for the job as she had recently completed her CompTIA A+ certification - one of the most entry-level certs - and had only tangential experience supporting doctors as they struggled to use a single application. That resume was enough to score a job imaging new PCs, deploying them, and handling whatever other tasks popped up. "One day I received a task to convert an unused space into offices, so I loaded an armload of PCs and a dozen VoIP phones into my car and drove the 45 minutes to the clinic," April wrote. "The deployment went smoothly - or so I thought - because at each of the desks one of the people who knew what they were doing had already put two network drops, one for the phone and one for the PC." April was therefore able to methodically get through the job, then slow down to tackle the slightly tricky elements. "Some of the desks needed two computers," she wrote. "On those, I was expected to use the secondary Ethernet port on the phones to get internet to those PCs." April hooked everything up with time to spare and decided to put her feet up for the 15 minutes that remained until 5pm - meaning she would glide into an unusually early end to her working day. "My paid respite was interrupted quickly by a nurse who found me and let me know none of the computers in the entire clinic could access the internet," April wrote. "I wasn't trusted with any tasks that could actually break anything, so I was convinced that something major had happened like a fiber line getting cut, or an outage with our ISP," she told Who, Me? She investigated anyway and found pings produced no results, so in a panic called head office and hoped colleagues hadn't already left for the day. "I spent maybe an hour running around frantically searching for anything with one of my superiors giving me commands over the phone until someone who knew what they were doing could get to the site and take a look in person," she wrote. That person eventually arrived and quickly spotted the problem: April had made a single mistake by plugging both of one phone's Ethernet ports into the network, which disrupted every other connection. "They unplugged one and everything came back up almost instantaneously," she confessed. "I was genuinely surprised they weren't absolutely furious. They just clapped me on the back and said: 'Well, you won't do that again.'" April was so upset by her mistake that she amended her timesheet to record that she finished work at 5pm. "If anyone deserved an hour and a half of OT, it wasn't me," she wrote, adding that she soon took it upon herself to acquire a networking certification at her own expense. "I kept working there for a few more years until I became one of the people who at least somewhat knew what they were doing," she said. Have you been asked to tackle a task you weren't properly trained to complete? Or been hired without all the necessary skills? In either case, feel free to demonstrate your storytelling competence by clicking here to share your tale with Who, Me? Let's shine a light on the shoddy bosses who dumped you into these messes! (R)