Working in tech support can be thankless when gormless colleagues leave you sleepless. Which is why, each Friday, The Register runs a new instalment of On Call – the reader contributed column which ensures your work to keep tech alive doesn’t remain unnoticed. This week, meet a reader we’ll Regomize as "Tim" who told that while working for a phone company he once rewrote 2,650 lines of C as a six line shell script. He performed that feat after being asked to fix a data transfer program that, strangely, included a bespoke implementation of the venerable File Transfer Protocol (FTP). "Writing the script took eight hours, most of it tracking down the source code of FTP so I could see if it would do what I wanted," Tim wrote. This story took place before the World Wide Web became the way to find information online. To find the code he needed, Tim therefore used a Wide Area Information Server (WAIS) to search remote databases…