IT department incompetencies?

[SSSnail]

You hear it all the time, the PEBKAC, user's errors, ID-10T form for computer users, etc... Well, now here's your chance to fight back. Tell us your stories of incompetencies from your IT department in general.

1. I have no idea what they're doing, but they have to do maintenance EVERYDAY for at least a few hours, and usually end up with outages after the maintenance.
2. Somehow, they allow the exchange server to run out of storage space, resulting in chaos usually.
3. Our VOIP phone system works, sometimes.
4. Hard drive on the exchange server failed, email is down for hours. I don't really know how long it takes them to swap a drive, initialize, check stats...
5. Badge access is iffy, sometimes we have to use another door because the front door just "lost its access control list".
6. They schedule enterprise virus scan during mid day.

 

[AFB]

I work for my city in the IT department (about 55k people in the city) and I have to say that it has one of the best IT departments I've seen. They know what they're doing, and understand that computers are there for people, not the other way around.

 

[Raduque]

Our IT department is so incompetent, they can't even set the correct resolution on an LCD panel. :thumbsdown:

Oh, yea, and they disabled CTRL-N in IE. CTRL-N! I don't understand the mindset of the people who make IT policy. It's like they're on some kind of geek power trip, pissed at getting beat up in high school, so now they take it out on everybody else by setting arbitrary policies that disable the Edit menu and prevent you from right clicking to copy/paste.

I want to smash the head of Apac's IT in the mouth with a brick.

edit: what's wrong with the disgust smiley?

 

[Joemonkey]

1. no idea
2. that is incompetence
3. what brand?
4. rebuilding a raid, depending on size, can take a long time
5. no idea
6. this is a GOOD idea

 

[SSSnail]

3. Avaya
4. Not half a day (also, see #2)
6. Not really, because it usually takes 2 hours for the scan on each PCs, and when the scans are running, people are usually bitching because they can't get anything done.

Edit: El Oh El at the thread ratings.

 

[kef7]

pretty minor but last week the IT support guy swapped out a PS/2 keyboard and didn't power down the pc first

 

[Joemonkey]

would you rather they schedule it for midnight, then when people have their PCs off it kicks off at first boot the next day since it was not done at midnight the night before? I don't know about you, but i'd rather have my PC slow down about lunch time, go to lunch, come back, and it be about done than have 2 almost unworkable hours at the beginning of the day. 2 hours though, is incompetence again.

 

[nakedfrog]

Originally posted by: Joemonkey
6. this is a GOOD idea

How is that a good idea? I don't have the problem here, but at my last company, it would sporadically happen during the day, during which time my PC was pretty much unusable.

 

[nakedfrog]

Originally posted by: Joemonkey
would you rather they schedule it for midnight, then when people have their PCs off it kicks off at first boot the next day since it was not done at midnight the night before? I don't know about you, but i'd rather have my PC slow down about lunch time, go to lunch, come back, and it be about done than have 2 almost unworkable hours at the beginning of the day. 2 hours though, is incompetence again.

Your users turn their PCs off every day?

 

[ViviTheMage]

Originally posted by: Raduque
Our IT department is so incompetent, they can't even set the correct resolution on an LCD panel. :thumbsdown:

Oh, yea, and they disabled CTRL-N in IE. CTRL-N! I don't understand the mindset of the people who make IT policy. It's like they're on some kind of geek power trip, pissed at getting beat up in high school, so now they take it out on everybody else by setting arbitrary policies that disable the Edit menu and prevent you from right clicking to copy/paste.

I want to smash the head of Apac's IT in the mouth with a brick.

edit: what's wrong with the disgust smiley?

interesting stereotype...

A lot of my friends were involved in sports that work in IT now...and were rather good and played sports in college, some were only D3, but sports players none the less.

That stereotype of geeks getting beat up in school is over...in my opinion.

but yeah, what the hell, CTRL N? haha

 

[Canai]

I work help desk on campus, and the IT dept. here is horrid.

All the computers here have Drive Shield, which loads an image onto the comps whenever they are restarted. EVERY single image (there are many of them) is broken. Most don't have flash, acrobat, anything. And I've complained many times, but they don't want to fix them.

The other day, part of the web suite went down, so I called the IT to let them know. They had no idea, of course, and I got a call back about five minutes later from the SAME GUY I talked to before, telling me that he thinks the system might be down.

I have countless stories of the idiots in IT.

 

[Joemonkey]

Originally posted by: nakedfrog
<div class="FTQUOTE"><begin quote>Originally posted by: Joemonkey
would you rather they schedule it for midnight, then when people have their PCs off it kicks off at first boot the next day since it was not done at midnight the night before? I don't know about you, but i'd rather have my PC slow down about lunch time, go to lunch, come back, and it be about done than have 2 almost unworkable hours at the beginning of the day. 2 hours though, is incompetence again.</end quote></div>

Your users turn their PCs off every day?

not all, but then again some take their laptops home and such too. we try to have our full virus scan run every thursday at about 11:30. Never takes more than 30 mins though.

 

[Canai]

Oh, and every time I go into the IT office, they are all standing around the front desk eating candy. I'm dead serious. Every single time I've gone in there they are all clustered at the front of the office eating from a bowl of candy they keep on the front desk..

And they give me really weird looks when I eat their candy too.

 

[GDaddy]

I work in IT in a big company, they working on a project to centralize everything at corporate, I see the goal they are heading to, but corporate wont say the end result. With this project the better i do on it, the faster i work myself out of a job. I understand the reasoning behind it, and it's not incompetence, but it still irks me. The better i do the sooner i will have to look for a new job.

 

[Spineshank]

Originally posted by: kef7
pretty minor but last week the IT support guy swapped out a PS/2 keyboard and didn't power down the pc first

I do it all the time and have never had an issue.

 

[ViviTheMage]

Originally posted by: Gnrslash4life
<div class="FTQUOTE"><begin quote>Originally posted by: kef7
pretty minor but last week the IT support guy swapped out a PS/2 keyboard and didn't power down the pc first</end quote></div>

I do it all the time and have never had an issue.

you can fry the mobo's that way...granted I have never shut down a PC to swap PS/2 keyboards either.

 

[pontifex]

Originally posted by: kef7
pretty minor but last week the IT support guy swapped out a PS/2 keyboard and didn't power down the pc first

did the keyboard work? sometimes it works

 

[Homerboy]

wait you mean people (in general) can be incompetent at their jobs?

 

[pontifex]

<div class="FTQUOTE"><begin quote>Originally posted by: ViviTheMage
<div class="FTQUOTE"><begin quote>Originally posted by: Gnrslash4life
<div class="FTQUOTE"><begin quote>Originally posted by: kef7
pretty minor but last week the IT support guy swapped out a PS/2 keyboard and didn't power down the pc first</end quote></div>

I do it all the time and have never had an issue.</end quote></div>

you can fry the mobo's that way...granted I have never shut down a PC to swap PS/2 keyboards either.</end quote></div>

it can? i've never heard of this.

edit: found this

Older motherboards had a surface-mounted fuse protecting the keyboard and mouse ports. When this fuse blew, the motherboard was useless to the consumer, and non-fixable to the average technician. Most newer motherboards use auto-reset "Poly" fuses that go a long way to remedy this problem. However, this is not a standard and there's still plenty of older motherboards in use. Therefore, I recommend against hot-plugging a PS/2 mouse or keyboard.

 

[Joemonkey]

Originally posted by: Gnrslash4life
<div class="FTQUOTE"><begin quote>Originally posted by: kef7
pretty minor but last week the IT support guy swapped out a PS/2 keyboard and didn't power down the pc first</end quote></div>

I do it all the time and have never had an issue.

same

 

[Xavier434]

Originally posted by: nakedfrog
Your users turn their PCs off every day?

This is often company policy in order to save money on electric bills. The draw back is that the IT department is not permitted to run certain scheduled tasks which suck up resources at night. It can be really tough to explain to an exec that they could potentially make more money with 1-2 extra hours of faster labor per day when you can't prove any numbers.

 

[paulxcook]

Originally posted by: GDaddy
I work in IT in a big company, they working on a project to centralize everything at corporate, I see the goal they are heading to, but corporate wont say the end result. With this project the better i do on it, the faster i work myself out of a job. I understand the reasoning behind it, and it's not incompetence, but it still irks me. The better i do the sooner i will have to look for a new job.

Do they think you don't know this project pushes you out of your own job, or do they not care?

Sounds like you need to ignore the project and spend some paid time on CareerBuilder.

 

[boomerang]

We have EDS. Need I say more?

It took four months, yes four, to get a new (the height of technology) f'ing dot-matrix printer working. They had first tried for four months to get the app to work with our HP laser printer.

The genius that got the dot-matrix working did so by power cycling it. His co-workers nearly dropped to their knees and started chanting. Their new god!

To clarify, it was four months on the Laser and four months on the dot-matrix. Eight months to get a printer working with an app that has been in use for over 15 years.

Don't even ask me about the outsourcing of their phone-based tech support! :|

 

[ultimatebob]

Originally posted by: SSSnail
You hear it all the time, the PEBKAC, user's errors, ID-10T form for computer users, etc... Well, now here's your chance to fight back. Tell us your stories of incompetencies from your IT department in general.

1. I have no idea what they're doing, but they have to do maintenance EVERYDAY for at least a few hours, and usually end up with outages after the maintenance.
2. Somehow, they allow the exchange server to run out of storage space, resulting in chaos usually.
3. Our VOIP phone system works, sometimes.
4. Hard drive on the exchange server failed, email is down for hours. I don't really know how long it takes them to swap a drive, initialize, check stats...
5. Badge access is iffy, sometimes we have to use another door because the front door just "lost its access control list".
6. They schedule enterprise virus scan during mid day.

Here's some thoughts from an IT guy about your ranting:

1. Hey... We IT folks like working weekends just as much as you do! Besides... if something goes wrong with an upgrade during the weekend, good luck finding a smart support tech to help you! Most companies have their third-string support script reading bozos from India on at that time. Every day maintenance is overkill, though. I shoot for Friday afternoons when most people have left for the day.
2. Some bonehead probably forwarded a 50 MB attachment to half of the company. There isn't much you can do to plan for that.
3. Sounds like they got a crappy VOIP system. We're still using POTS where I work, I don't know.
4. Rebuilding a disk array can take hours, which is why you should have a hot spare for things like that. If the bonehead didn't have the server RAID'ed, you're probably waiting that long to restore it from a backup.
5. Your IT folks are in charge of badge access?!? That's security's job!
6. Yeah, that's lame. Set it to run over the weekend when no one is on. Hard drives are too big to be able to run a complete scan over lunch nowadays. They dropped the full drive scan requirement where I work simply because it was taking too long and impacting everyone's productivity.

 

[Golgatha]

The Good - IT decided to implement a password rollover every 90days from a no-forced-change password policy.

The Bad - IT did this without telling the responsible person for the license authentication server that gives out licenses to several gas chromatography instrument's software.

The Ugly - Because of the password revocation a days worth of data was never recorded since the software never gave out licenses to the instruments due to the local computer admin being logged out of the system. The samples cost roughly $1000 each to prep and are unique and irreplaceable, not to mention very possibly susceptible to degradation. 44 of these $1000+ samples had to be reran and wasted several man hours were wasted tracking down the problem.