How a manager sunk ever-further into quicksand after replacing me.

Previously, on My First Techsupport:
How I cleared my daily workload in ten minutes flat
The defeat of discord
How I made my manager's week 20% cooler
Programming is Magic
The secret of my excess
For cracking all the locks, take a built-in function, show the MiBs some tricks
[Dear r/talesfromtechsupport, today I turned a manager into a yoyo...](http://www.reddit.com/r/talesfromtechsupport/comments/r58tc/how_i_turned_a_demotion_into_giving_me_power_over/)

Now read on!  

 
The Guy in the Tie
So you all know from the last story that the office manager had bumped me out of the office tech position without actually thinking about the resulting side effects. When he realized that, technically, in an office without a tech guy all the computer problems are the responsibility of the office manager, and that almost 90 people had suddenly discovered that their magic fix-everything icon suddenly wasn't working any more, he immediately leapt into uninformed action.

His first attempt at replacing me was to determine who else in the office had computer knowledge sufficient to address all the common issues. The answer, as I knew he would eventually find out, was that there was ONE other young, technically-minded and hyper-competent staff member on the roster.

What he didn't know was that she was my girlfriend.  

 
His overtures, in an attempt to get her to replace me, were comical enough. And no doubt, she could have done the job - but she was pissed off at his treatment of me, and told him in no uncertain terms where he could stick his excuse for a management style.

Some weeks later, with computers and printers lying stricken all around the office and no-one fixing them, the office manager managed to scrounge up someone from outside. This dude couldn't have been more than eighteen or nineteen, if that, and he had no more computer knowledge than the manager. However, as the position was technically 'filled', the manager didn't have to listen to staff complaining about the busted computers any more, or why he wasn't allowing me to fix them.

The replacement's sole talent, as far as I could tell, consisted of the ability to turn up every morning wearing a tie, which was more than the rest of the non-management staff bothered with. This earned him the moniker of the Guy in the Tie, which I can remember even now despite his actual name being lost to the mists of time.

The Guy in the Tie was helpful, willing, spineless, and absolutely useless at technical diagnoses. Given that amount of free time I had, I even made it worse on occasion by trailing him around the office, sticking my feet up on a desk while he labored fruitlessly over some piece of equipment for half an hour, and when he left stepping over and repairing it in thirty seconds. It got to the point where whenever he turned up, any staff in the vicinity would give him a look which said "Go away so the grinning guy behind you can provide the help you obviously can't."

It probably didn't do much for either his concentration or his reputation. Heh. And of course, every time a staff member cracked and came to me directly to have something fixed, I'd shrug and say that I wasn't allowed to because of the office manager's decision to put Youngster McWearsATie in that job.  

 
Fortunately, while all this was incredibly amusing and gave me a spring in my step each day, it didn't stop me finding new ways to improve office efficiency and save money. Which is how I came up with the Cancellation Detector.  

 
But that's a story for another time.  

 
tl;dr: "I just don't know what went wrong!"
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