It is an amusing story from a completely different time and place in IT. Today people would just loudly and publicly complain on Twitter and other social media to embarrass the vendor into sorting it. Sharing a story, not speaking to the nature or the correctness of the solution. I have worked on both sides. Once when I was on the vendor side a very large customer returned a very expensive switch as RMA. A set of 16 ports stopped working. The cause in the end, the customer had gotten an SFP stuck and tried to rip it out, pulling the cage from its solder joints on the board. 3 switches in 2 months. We smiled, swapped all of them and then the sales team had a chat with the customer to help resolve the issue (their 3rd party SFP with a crappy designed latch). Is what it is.