Tech support team won pay rise for teaching customers how to RTFM

Documentation was so substantial, staff measured it in feet

On Call Welcome once again to On Call, The Register's Friday column that shares your stories of helping confused, caustic, and curmudgeonly customers to crank their computers into correct configurations.

This week, meet a reader who we'll Regomize as "Marvin," who once held the title "field engineer" at a company that provided outsourced maintenance and repair services for a minicomputer company.

As is usually the case in any story about minicomputers, this one took place in a time before use of the internet was common, and also before vendors placed product documentation online. At each customer site Marvin visited, he would therefore find a huge stack of manuals – he told On Call they measured about five feet (150 cm) in height.

Most of our calls were not to actually fix the system, but rather to fix the customer

"While the documentation was extremely thorough, it was sometimes difficult to know where to look for any particular piece of information," Marvin wrote. "Things were always correctly cross-referenced but sometimes the process of tracking the flow of any particular function could take you across many of the dozens of manuals."

The poor state of the documentation, and the impressive resilience of the minicomputers, meant that when customers summoned Marvin for help, he rarely found faulty hardware.

"Most of our calls were not to actually fix the system, but rather to fix the customer who was either unable or unwilling to follow the decidedly challenging documentation to discover how to make things work," he told On Call.

So many calls involved teaching customers how to RTFM* that Marvin's employer decided to change field engineers' titles to "customer engineer."

Marvin didn't much care about the change until he realized it wasn't just cosmetic.

"It came with a substantial pay increase," Marvin told On Call.

"I often miss that place," he reminisced. "It really was one of the most employee-focused companies I ever worked for, even after three more decades in the industry."

Have tech support troubles caused your boss to bump your pay? If so, click here to send On Call an email so we can tell your story on a future Friday. ®

*RTFM = Read the fucking manual