Glitchy taxi tech blew cover on steamy dispatch dalliance

When 'pickup' means more than just a ride

On Call The week has ebbed away with embarrassing speed, so here we are again with a fresh installment of On Call, The Register's reader-contributed column that immortalizes tech support stories.

Today, we meet a reader who asked to be Regomized as "The RF Guy" and told us about the time he was called on to investigate a glitching taxi dispatch system.

The dispatch system relied on human operators who took calls from customers and then recorded their pickup location in an application. A Unix controller took that info and sent it over a private wireless network to mobile data terminals in each cab.

The RF Guy was called in to investigate the Unix controller and, as he entered, noticed a room full of busy taxi dispatchers. His attention then focused on the Unix machine, which seemed to be working just fine – it happily picked up messages from the dispatch system and squirted them out to terminals.

The backup controller, however, couldn't do the job.

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The RF Guy decided to apply a packet tracer, which meant he was seeing decoded packets.

And those packets revealed an intimate encounter passing over the airwaves between the pool of dispatchers and one car in the fleet. The RF Guy knew this discovery had to be handled carefully, but had no idea what to do.

"I called in the customer's techie and showed him what was going on. He ID'd the driver and dispatcher, then assured me he knew how to handle this."

The RF Guy was then led into the dispatch room, where his client stood up to make a short speech. Apparently, he did this sort of thing all the time, so the dispatchers thought little of it.

On this occasion, he explained that The RF Guy was here to do some system maintenance, and for a short time all messages between dispatchers and cabbies would be visible in plaintext.

The dispatchers all took that in their stride. Except for one whose face The RF Guy saw "getting redder and redder, so red I thought she might swoon or fall over."

Thankfully, the blushing dispatcher's health was not affected. And The RF Guy fixed the problem, which was related to shared IP addresses and fixed with some MAC address spoofing.

Have your tech support efforts seen you encounter conversations best not conducted in the workplace? If so, click here to send On Call an email so we can find a sensitive way to share your story on a future Friday. ®