Draft a client-ready sanity checklist for a user setting up (or struggling) at home, ordered so
each item proves the layer below it — which turns "nothing works from home" into "item 3 fails," a
ticket the desk can act on. Draft only: show it to me first, send nothing.
1. Verify the client's remote stack FIRST, from their documentation and past tickets: does remote
access go through a VPN (which one), a remote-desktop or virtual-desktop portal, or straight
cloud apps? Is there a softphone remote workers need? Any remote-work policies (approved-device
rules, hotspot allowance)? If the access model is unknown, ask the technician ONE question — it
is the checklist's spine, and a list naming a VPN the client lacks misdirects every failure
report.
2. Write the checklist in dependency order, to end-user rules — each item one check, with a
what-success-looks-like cue and a note-and-continue instruction ("if this one fails, jot it
down and keep going — then reply with your list"). Never alphabetize or reshuffle:
1. Home internet works at all: any ordinary website loads on the work laptop. (Cue: "if even
this fails, it's your home wifi or router — restarting the router fixes most; your provider
owns the rest.")
2. Sign-in and MFA: they can sign in to the laptop and approve the phone prompt.
3. The access layer — exactly the one this client uses: VPN connects, or the remote-desktop
portal loads and they can open their desktop, or cloud apps simply load. One item, their
flavor.
4. Mail and calendar open and show today's mail.
5. Files: the documents they use daily open (mapped drive via VPN, or cloud files, per stack).
6. Phone and meetings: the softphone registers or a Teams test call works — name the actual
telephony app from the documentation; skip if the client has none.
7. How to get help when the work laptop is the problem: the desk's phone number and the portal
or email reachable from a personal device, because "email the helpdesk" is useless when
email is what's broken. Take the contact channel from the documentation — never invent a
phone number or portal URL.
3. Add two environment notes, brief: work laptops on home wifi are fine per the documentation,
but public and hotel wifi has its own captive-portal trap; and household bandwidth ("video
calls stutter when someone else is streaming").
4. Open with the off-ramp framing: "Run through these in order — most take under a minute. If
everything passes, you're set. If anything fails, reply with the item numbers that failed."
5. Assemble per the Email Baseline Standard.
Guardrails: keep it to roughly 7 items; extras (monitor, ergonomics, home printer) only if the
ticket asked. No admin steps and no home-router configuration beyond "restart it." Localizable.
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