While you're here, could you go out of your way to do an impossible job?

Summary

On Call Each Friday The Register offers a fresh installment of On Call, the reader-contributed column that celebrates the fine art of tech support. This week, a slight variation as we meet a reader we'll Regomize as "Finn," who shared a story of a sales call. "I was working for the European branch of a large US-based engineering company, mainly providing development consultancy, though we had a few products we sold on the side," Finn told On Call. The job sometimes involved travel to the US, and on one of those trips Finn's colleagues asked the most dangerous question known to humanity: "While you're here, could you just...?" "They wanted me to visit a promising new prospect that was 'in the same region' as the client I came to visit," Finn explained. Finn soon learned that his colleagues had used the term "in the same region" to describe a location he could only reach after multiple flights. "Travel challenges notwithstanding, I journeyed to this prospect's site, armed with some hardware to demonstrate the product that we were hoping to sell," Finn told On Call. "Crucially, this hardware needed to be connected to my laptop via USB to operate." Finn eventually arrived at the client and discovered that it operated a very strict security protocol. "They scanned all electronics, cables, and adapters, and affixed tamper-proof labels to all cameras, and also all ports on all electronic devices." "So there I was, sat in a meeting room with several senior engineers at a major potential customer, having traveled out of my way to be there," Finn wrote. "They were all waiting for a demo of the Next Big Thing. So with an admittedly slightly jet-lagged flourish, I whipped out the anti-static bag from my rucksack, slipped the PCB out, connected one end of a mini USB cable to the device, and..." You can probably guess what happened next, because the USB ports on Finn's laptop were not exempt from the client's security protocols. "Fortunately, the potential customer was able to se...