Consultant pilot fish who is contracted to handle network issues at a chain of dollar stores is called in by a branch where the VoIP phones aren’t working.

Being a network guy, he starts off by rebooting the cable modem and then the phone mux. Then he checks out the phones themselves.

One won’t power up. The other has been smashed, or possibly thrown in a fit of rage, and its screen is cracked and unreadable. Adds fish, “It also appeared to have possibly been submerged in water.”

Replacing phones isn’t part of fish’s deal, so the dollar store has just wasted several dollars on a network tech’s service call that involved no real service.

Sighs fish: “Sending an assistant manager to the nearest Walmart, OTOH, would restore their phone service quite nicely.”

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