Desktop tech sent to prison for an education on strange places to put tattoos

On Call By the end of the working week, it's natural to feel the walls closing in a little, which is why every Friday morning The Register frees things up a little by publishing a new installment of On Call – the reader-contributed column that shares your tech support stories.

This week, we present another story from a reader we recently Regomized as Carl, who in the early 1990s took a job doing desktop and local area network support at a US police department that operated a prison.

Carl arrived to find an enormous to-do list and a very busy IT team who were strangely unwelcoming.

Not long after starting, Carl was assigned a job in the prison. As it was his first visit, a colleague named "Mike" showed him the ropes.

Carl found it disconcerting.

"I was introduced to various guards and went through the first security checkpoint," he ...