Engineer held hostage by client who asked for the wrong fix

On Call Friday has arrived, bringing a promise of fleeting freedom – and a new instalment of On Call, The Register's reader-contributed column that retells your tales of tech support incidents that became memorable for all the wrong reasons.

This week, meet a reader we'll Regomize as "Kent" who told us he once worked as a field engineer and shares a story of the time a client dispatched him to a private datacenter to replace a failed system board in an HP server.

"A straightforward job," Kent told On Call. "Board swap, set serial number and BIOS options, bring it through POST, confirm hardware health, hand it back. Flee."

Kent arrived at the datacenter and made it through what he called "the usual mantrap routine" – the combination of revolving doors and swipe-card barriers that properly secure datacenters use to regulate entries and exits.

Once inside he found the server ...