I work at a large manufacturing plant in the IT department. The plant operates 24 hours a day, 365 days of the year. Our IT department mainly works the normal daytime hours, but we also have staff on call evenings, weekends, and holidays to provide support for the computer production equipment.
For after-hours support, the employee calls the IT help desk, which is located in the main office. The difference between the help desk staff and the rest of the computer support staff is that the help desk staff cannot leave the main office. It's their job to diagnose and fix problems remotely, then call us in if needed. The plant is 800 acres, and the non-help desk staff has been trained to know the dangers and layout of the plant and have access to spare hardware equipment. For the most part, it's a pretty efficient computer support system.
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On this day, I received a call from the help desk operator, who said that a call had come in where the person claimed he couldn't read the monitor display because the screen was all pink. The help desk operator stated that he didn't see a problem, but the person who made the request insisted he couldn't perform his job because he couldn't read the screen.
I came onsite and went to the location. Indeed, the screen was all pink and the display was mostly illegible. To determine if the problem was the monitor or video card, I found another monitor nearby and plugged it in. Sure enough, it was the monitor that was failing, as the display with the new monitor was fine. Once I'd gotten a replacement, I installed the new monitor, replaced the one I'd borrowed, and took the defective one to the scrap area.
I called the help desk to report what I had found and done.
The operator was puzzled. "I didn't see anything wrong with his monitor," he explained to me.
"How did you determine that?" I asked.
"Well, I remotely logged into his PC, and the display looked fine to me," he answered.
