New hire fixed a problem so fast, their boss left to become a yoga instructor

On Call Change is a constant – and so is On Call, the reader-contributed column The Register runs every Friday to share your tech support tales.

This week, meet a reader we will Regomize as "Carl" who in the late 1990s worked at a university and made the move from the desktop support team to the network management group.

"Just before I started, we installed two new servers running Novell NetWare," Carl told On Call.

Software running on the new machines soon started to lock up and reboots and reinstalls became frequent chores, but a full fix proved elusive. Tempers frayed as email faltered, network drives became unavailable, and logins lagged.

Carl watched from the sidelines because only the two lead network admins were allowed to get hands-on with the boxes to find a fix.

Their efforts proved futile, so the university escalated the matter to Novell and the server maker ...