tldr; half of my job would go away if people read the messages they got on their screens

Over the past few months we’ve been slowly building up one of our field offices as they’ve been hiring people which means sending out the occasional new workstation/monitors, etc. for new users to login to. They get the PC, plug it into the switch on-site, and go. Pretty standard and no issues up until this one. One day a ticket comes into the helpdesk from the office admin out there that says “Can we please unblock port X on the switch so the new guy can access the internet?”

Immediately I raise an eyebrow because we don’t “block the internet” on any of our switch ports at any other sites and it wouldn’t make any sense for just this ONE port not to work when we’ve been sending them new machines for weeks now. So I grab the ticket and do a bit of investigative work by opening up our remote access software where I can see the PC clearly showing as online as well as logging into the firewall and seeing the PC connected to the switch port in question. I responded back to the ticket saying things looked okay from my end but figured I might be looking at the wrong PC and asked her to confirm the name of the machine (we stick a label with the PC name on every PC we send out). Crickets.

Five minutes later, the foreman for the site calls my coworker annoyed saying “you guys need to fix this, this guy is just sitting here unable to do any work” and moments after that the user himself sends in a ticket with the same description as above: “please unblock port X on the switch”. So now I’m getting annoyed and after finally tracking down their phone number (that everyone neglected to give us) I give the guy a call.

I confirmed the PC name with him, remoted into the machine and then saw the Windows login screen. I thought “oh, he must just not be entering his password correctly, I guess I could see why they thought it was the internet”, so I asked him to try entering his password again to see what would happen. He says he doesn’t see anything, just a blank monitor that has the word English on it.

And then it clicked. We have been sending them newer Dell monitors that, when you first plug them in, you just have to use one of the physical buttons on the monitor to, you know, select your language. As instructed on the screen itself. He reads the message, presses the button it tells him to, and WHOA, everything works! Go figure.

Now like a lot of you I’m sure that when someone describes an issue like “the internet doesn’t work”, you run down the mental checklist of other stuff that might actually be going on that they lack the tech literacy to describe but this was a whole other level that I wasn’t prepared for. How you get from a “blank” monitor to “the firewall port is blocked” is such a baffling big stretch that I’m still not quite sure how they arrived there.