I lead the engineer into the living room to inspect the offending IoT device which is sitting lifeless on the floor. She rests the toolbox next to it and, after passing me a torx screwdriver for a few moments, calls up a maintenance manual on the laptop. Her actions leave me no opportunity to make any further cheap sexual innuendo. None whatsoever.Inconceivable though it may seem to Generation Z, when I was little, we used to be visited every now and again by a what we used to call a “television repair man”. He would drive up in a van clearly marked “TV Repairs” and enter the house dressed in a boiler suit. He would throw down rubber mats, tether the TV to a cable leading directly to the Earth’s core and insist that everyone stays well back or, preferably, leave the house altogether and stay in a hotel while he completes the life-threatening process of “re-aligning the electron guns”.This sounded so exciting, like he was in Star Trek or something. In my childish imagination, I remember wondering whether, if two TV engineers should ever turn up at the same address by mistake, they would spring into a fight to the death like Kirk and Spock. Lord knows what I would have thought if any of them had ever turned up at the house wearing a red boiler suit: a gonner for sure.
Over the years, the TV repair man has vanished. Modern TVs are more reliable and relatively cheap to replace, and the options for fiddling around the back of an LCD, LED or plasma unit are not as varied as they were for gigantic CRT sets. TV repair men retrained as satellite dish installers, then got sick of technology repeatedly ruining their careers and ended up retraining as licensed taxi drivers.
However, the commonplace sight of the suburban electrical maintenance engineer similar to the old TV repair man could be about to make a comeback thanks to the groundswell of interest in IoT devices in the home. As with connected and autonomous vehicles, before we know it, IoT will rapidly switch from magazine-article silliness to real-world implementation in everyday domestic items.As those of you who already work in the hardware site maintenance sector, the IoT equivalent of TV repair men will be called “field service technicians”. Instead of labelling their vans “IoT repairs”, they will adhere to the modern tech conceit of idiot hipster startup branding that combines an inability to spell with an inexplicably compulsive fetish for dropping vowels – such as TekRpr, GajFix or BggrAyshn.And they will be in competition with each other in more ways than one. At least the old TV repair man only had to contend with standards such as UHF and domestic current, common to all TV sets. With the IoT, as I’ve mentioned before, there are no standards that manufacturers are prepared to adhere to. Every bloody unit will be using proprietary software components jealously guarded by patents and spewing out radio noise that will conflict with all the other devices in your house. To solve such conflicts, field service technicians can just increase the signal of the devices they have been called upon to fix so that it drowns out everything else.
I can see this ending up with fisticuffs between field service technicians. So perhaps my childish Star Trek-heightened imagination wasn’t far wrong. My advice? Wear a blue or yellow boiler suit and you’ll probably survive.The engineer in my living room has finished rebooting my IoT device. It was simply due a replacement for a slightly worn hardware component, she tells me. But not to worry, she has updated the firmware and next time this kind of issue arises, the device will contact the maintenance centre to put a replacement on order while messaging me a reminder that a maintenance visit might be due shortly.This works by the manufacturers keeping a virtual 3D working model of my unit back at the field service centre, the virtual device mirroring the real-world one.Same as for my self-driving car when the tyre tread is running thin, I think to myself. That’s a good thing. On the other hand, I’ve always hated the way printers force me to replace toner and ink cartridges that aren’t quite depleted. I hope I can choose when and how to replace these things, rather than virtualisation being used as another excuse to extort more cash out of me.
Another professional job done, the engineer sends me my invoice from her laptop and begins collecting her implements. In a plain and thoroughly innuendo-free manner, she asks me for me to hand back the screwdriver.ON-CALL Welcome again to On-Call, our Friday frolic through readers' experiences of being asked to sort things out in the office, or outside it and outside office hours.This week, a pair of responses to recent On-Call stories in which readers confronted secret directories full of decidedly Not Safe For Work images.Reader “Dave” told us about the time he worked at a financial services company and was asked to rebuild a PC.Mere minutes into the job and Dave says “a picture of a lady in a compromising position” appeared.Dave was “called over by the excited teenage build guy who couldn't believe what he had seen.” As a wise older hand, Dave told his underling to just delete the image and arranged for a quiet word to be said to the user when the PC was returned.Said user was having none of it and declared “It must have been the IT guy who downloaded the image.”
“By the time the guy had got back to his desk, his login wouldn't work,” Dave says. “He had to return his PC (which he wasn't happy about) as 'we must have missed a step.' As soon as it was returned, I then started work and the user's manager was subsequently presented with a list of the user's dodgy Netscape history and the names of some images in his cache.”Dave didn't tell us what happened next, but it doesn't sound pleasant because he told us the consequences “Served the guy right for not accepting the slap on the wrist.”Reader “Shawn” has a similar story. Shawn works “at a large multi-national corporation, in IT” and that was recently privileged to make the acquaintance of “a new manager, young and just out of college.”Said manager had a problem with his laptop, so Shawn and his crew backed it up before trying to fix it.That process took rather longer than expected, given that the chap hadn't been on the job for long so shouldn't have had much data to back up.
The cause? Shawn says “those types of files names started scrolling by.”“Long story short, we felt obligated to report it. He had over 8GB of smut on his laptop, and even had them in the same My Pictures folder along side his wedding photos.”“Needless to say, he was terminated that day and walked out by our security folks.”“Just goes to show, some folks can earn a degree, but still be as dumb as a rock. LOL.”You'll get no complaints with that one, Shawn. I've got a degree and look how low I've fallen – Reg hack. So help me out by clicking here to send your tale of odd jobs you've been asked to do at odd times. Good 'uns will end up in future editions of On-Call, all appropriately anonymised of course. The architect of China's Great Firewall was forced to use a VPN to bypass his own creation in a lecture this week on internet safety.Fang Binxing was speaking at his old university, the Harbin Institute of Technology in Heilongjiang, China, when he attempted to access webpages hosted in South Korea as a way to illustrate a point about internet sovereignty.