I was dispatched to a Sears department store with a replacement motherboard for a desktop back in the warhouse section of the store. Ticket was for a faulty NIC. I replaced the motherboard, but the machine did not boot into Windows, instead it pxe booted an image called abortpxe.img. Changed the boot device, turns out the hard drive was blank, my contact at the store (warehouse worker) said it had been replaced a few days prior. The reason they called in to have the nic replaced was because it was unable to install a new image over pxe. I called Dell (we're required to call them if we can't make the system boot into Windows), explained the situation, they told me to let it ride. I advised my contact to call internal IT, as anything further was out of scope for me.

2 days later I was dispatched again, same store, same computer, new motherboard, bad nic. This time I called internal IT myself and explained how PXE works. For those of you who are unaware, the machine will look for an image that cooresponds to its MAC address. The MAC address changes when you swap out a NIC. If it does not find one, it loads a default, which in this case was abortpxe.img. He told me he understood. He did not.

Next week I was dispatched again. I didn't even look at the system. I called Dell, explained what was going on, and begged them to stop sending motherboards. I instructed my contact to escalate to corporate IT, hoping they had an inkling of an idea how their imaging system worked. They did not. An indian gentleman representing Sears corporate IT called me later in the afternoon. I spent 2 hours slowly explaining how a PXE server works. I made sure to remind him, more than once, that a machine with a bad NIC would be unable to contact the server and boot from abortpxe.img. I explained how to fix it. I prayed to every God I could name that he would understand. He did not. A day later I found another job and put in my 2 weeks notice.

A week later I was dispatched again with a replacement motherboard. I did not go on site, I did not even call. I opened the box, put on the return label, and brought it back to fedex.