Fake IT Guy Saves the Day

Fake IT Guy Saves the Day

By [Zia Urrehman]

At exactly 9:13 AM on a Wednesday, the entire office came to a screeching halt. No one moved. No one typed. No one breathed. Outlook froze mid-send. Slack gave up the ghost. Google Docs gasped its last buffering breath. In short: the Wi-Fi was down.

Chaos erupted like someone had just shouted “fire” in a room full of caffeine-deprived marketing people on deadline. I sipped my coffee, trying not to look as panicked as everyone else. As someone whose job had nothing to do with IT—I was a junior copywriter, emphasis on junior—I had no business being calm. But I was. For one reason.

You see, three nights before, in a desperate attempt to avoid folding laundry, I had spiraled down a YouTube rabbit hole about networking. Not social networking. The nerdy kind. Routers, IP addresses, DNS—terms I barely understood but pretended to. For reasons unknown, I watched a guy named “TechTom87” reboot a router like it was brain surgery. I had no clue what he was doing, but he sounded smart. And that was enough.

Back in the office, my coworker Dana peeked over the cubicle wall like a prairie dog in crisis.

“Does anyone know what to do? The client call’s in fifteen minutes!”

Someone from Sales shouted, “Has anyone called IT?”

“They’re remote today,” someone else groaned.

I don’t know what possessed me—some mix of boredom, caffeine, and an unchecked God complex—but I stood up slowly and said the words I’ll never forget:

“I might be able to fix it.”

Heads turned. I was suddenly Moses with a mousepad. No one questioned me. Maybe it was because I wore glasses. Maybe because I once fixed the printer jam in 2022. Either way, they parted like the Red Sea and ushered me toward the server closet like I was Neo entering the Matrix.

Now, let me be clear: I had no idea where the server closet even was. But I followed the Ethernet cables like breadcrumbs until I found a gray box with blinking lights. The kind of thing that buzzes ominously in spy movies before self-destructing.

I looked around. No manual. No labels. Just blinking, humming anxiety.

Drawing on my recent "TechTom87" training, I muttered to no one in particular, “It could be a DHCP lease conflict.”

Dana blinked. “Is that bad?”

“Not… great,” I replied cryptically, mostly because I had no idea what it meant either. I crouched down, pretending to analyze ports. I poked a few wires. I unplugged a thing, counted to seven (why seven? Who knows—it sounded intentional), and plugged it back in.

The lights went off.

“Oh God,” someone whispered.

The lights came back on.

Someone else gasped. My heart pounded in my ears. I hit the side of the modem gently, like a mechanic in a 90s sitcom. Then I stood up, brushed off my hands, and said, “Try it now.”

The office collectively turned to their screens. And then… magic.

Slack notifications reappeared. Google Drive resurrected itself. The client email sent. A spontaneous round of applause erupted. Dana actually cheered.

“You fixed it!” she said, wide-eyed. “How?”

I shrugged like it was nothing. “Just a minor router handshake dropout. Happens when IPv6 loops get congested.”

That wasn’t even a sentence. I made up 30% of it. But no one questioned me. Someone handed me a granola bar like it was a trophy. By lunchtime, I had three people ask if I could help with their printers, two asking about a VPN, and one guy who asked if I knew how to code in Python.

I didn’t. I still don’t. But in that moment, I was the office’s unofficial Tech Whisperer. For one shining hour, I was a god among mice (and keyboards).

Of course, by the next week, IT was back and I was once again just “the guy who writes those weird headlines for the toothpaste campaign.” But every now and then, when the Wi-Fi hiccups, people still look my way.

I just smile mysteriously and say,

“Try turning it off and on again.”