User insisted their screen was blank, until admitting it wasn't

On Call Welcome once more to On Call, the Friday column in which we share stories of tech support incidents that went pear-shaped until cunning Reg readers stepped in to save the day.

This week, meet a reader we'll Regomize as "Charles" who told us that last century he worked at what he called "The very large German bank."

"My job was architecting and writing programs that automated the network, connecting the bank's mainframe to terminals," Charles told On Call.

He was very good at that job and built a reputation as a go-to resource for anything to do with the bank's networks.

Which is why one day the bank's help desk called and asked for Charles because a user claimed to have a problem that had utterly confounded both first and second level support.

Charles called the user, who sounded quite upset because he was ...