Tales from the IT world...

[Deviant Grasshopper]

I'll start off with something that happened this morning - I'll add a lot more tonight.

A user made a shortcut to her departments network folder on her desktop. She opens the shortcut, and deletes everything she doesn't need.. <facepalm>

 

[amdhunter]

Eh? That happens on a daily basis in many places.

 

[ViviTheMage]

This is why we have loads of backups

 

[Rachael]

We got an email one day with the title "laptop (computer number) has bugs". Expecting a usual troubleshooting sort of thing, I open it up. Turns out the laptop actually had an infestation of bugs inside of it. Gross!

 

[vshah]

Originally posted by: Deviant Grasshopper
I'll start off with something that happened this morning - I'll add a lot more tonight.

A user made a shortcut to her departments network folder on her desktop. She opens the shortcut, and deletes everything she doesn't need.. <facepalm>

why did she have write access??

 

[child of wonder]

Originally posted by: vshah

Originally posted by: Deviant Grasshopper
I'll start off with something that happened this morning - I'll add a lot more tonight.

A user made a shortcut to her departments network folder on her desktop. She opens the shortcut, and deletes everything she doesn't need.. <facepalm>

why did she have write access??

Probably because she bitched about not having it so told her boss, who told their boss, etc. until it got to the CIO/VP/whatever who then micromanaged the situation and made IT give her write access despite all warnings to the contrary.

That's how it works here.

 

[torpid]

Originally posted by: child of wonder

Originally posted by: vshah

Originally posted by: Deviant Grasshopper
I'll start off with something that happened this morning - I'll add a lot more tonight.

A user made a shortcut to her departments network folder on her desktop. She opens the shortcut, and deletes everything she doesn't need.. <facepalm>

why did she have write access??

Probably because she bitched about not having it so told her boss, who told their boss, etc. until it got to the CIO/VP/whatever who then micromanaged the situation and made IT give her write access despite all warnings to the contrary.

That's how it works here.

Yep. Now when asked she will claim that she didn't have proper training or documentation and that she has never made an error at work when she had proper training and documentation. It will go back to the CIO and then they will have an online training session where they ask you multiple choice questions about how to delete files.

 

[amdhunter]

Originally posted by: child of wonder

Originally posted by: vshah

Originally posted by: Deviant Grasshopper
I'll start off with something that happened this morning - I'll add a lot more tonight.

A user made a shortcut to her departments network folder on her desktop. She opens the shortcut, and deletes everything she doesn't need.. <facepalm>

why did she have write access??

Probably because she bitched about not having it so told her boss, who told their boss, etc. until it got to the CIO/VP/whatever who then micromanaged the situation and made IT give her write access despite all warnings to the contrary.

That's how it works here.

lol, you hit the nail on the head there.

 

[Deviant Grasshopper]

Originally posted by: child of wonder

Originally posted by: vshah

Originally posted by: Deviant Grasshopper
I'll start off with something that happened this morning - I'll add a lot more tonight.

A user made a shortcut to her departments network folder on her desktop. She opens the shortcut, and deletes everything she doesn't need.. <facepalm>

why did she have write access??

Probably because she bitched about not having it so told her boss, who told their boss, etc. until it got to the CIO/VP/whatever who then micromanaged the situation and made IT give her write access despite all warnings to the contrary.

That's how it works here.

Pretty much. I have excellent backups and shadow copies so I'm not hugely concerned with who has write access to general network folders. Sensitive data, however, is protected.



I prefer to work for smaller companies (100-500 employees) and have gone through the change from 'small company mindset' to 'large company mindset' about 4 times. One of the more interesting issues is whether or not a regular employee can send an email to the distro group for everyone in the company.

At my last place the president sent an email to all. An employee opened it and hit 'reply to all' instead of forward, and added his buddy to the To: field - and then made fun of the pres, VP, and a few directors. Sometimes that's what it takes to make the owner of a company realize that this stuff needs locked down.

 

[kedlav]

-Ran a training class once about an application with 'advanced' linux users where one guy couldn't get a simple command to work... he was typing out 'pipe' instead of | in the command

-Had a team try to cut costs by running iptables firewalls on Cent instead of RHEL (company-wide standard) and then bitching up a storm when they couldn't get support on the boxes for OS issues

-Had a guy doing some work on a distribution layer switch drop his notebook (pen and paper variety) on his laptop and crash the switch, which the dumb shit forgot to fail over first

-had a user shut down a production application and then go take a poo, instead of waiting for them to turn it back on. Head of the security team gets called while I was out to dinner with him to disable the user (funny!) access rights

-before my time, but company legend: Had water come in through our flat roof and take out an EMC frame (our brilliant solution: catchpans 1" deep with sensors)

-before my time, but company legend: Had a guy on the loading dock accidently hit the 'emergency cut power switch' instead of the 'open loading dock doors' and shut down the datacenter (said power off switches are now encased in shatter-proof glass with a very hard to manage lock)

 

[SandEagle]

I remember seeing someone open a helpdesk ticket to the IT queue regarding a broken fan in the bathroom. In the ticket he mentioned that someone needs to fix asap because smells are lingering. lol

 

[queenrobot]

This happened to my husband once; he went to fix a users PC and was talking with her about all the issues and what needed to be fixed. She points to the cd rom, and says "I really loved that cup holder feature until the damn thing broke off". lol

 

[GodlessAstronomer]

Originally posted by: kedlav
-before my time, but company legend: Had a guy on the loading dock accidently hit the 'emergency cut power switch' instead of the 'open loading dock doors' and shut down the datacenter (said power off switches are now encased in shatter-proof glass with a very hard to manage lock)

 

[randay]

Originally posted by: GodlessAstronomer

Originally posted by: kedlav
-before my time, but company legend: Had a guy on the loading dock accidently hit the 'emergency cut power switch' instead of the 'open loading dock doors' and shut down the datacenter (said power off switches are now encased in shatter-proof glass with a very hard to manage lock)

"cut the hardline!"

"I cant its locked!"

decepticons win.

 

[child of wonder]

Actual ticket.

(names altered to protect the stupid)

NOW WHAT'S GOING ON WITH MY EMAIL???

Yesterday afternoon I tried to send an email to Bob Johnson with scans of two letters to the FDIC, one was 2.33mb and the other was 2.17mb.......I got an error message and had to send TWO separate emails to get the letters to him.

Now I'm trying to send an email to Wendy Williams with a Notice of Levy......she needs to get this TODAY! It's 4.95mb and the error message says it exceeds my limit of 2.44mb. This just started happening yesterday afternoon after Tim Meadows said he changed the capacity of my email account because I'm constantly getting that message about exceeding capacity.

THESE THINGS NEED TO BE RESOLVED! THIS IS HOW WE COMMUNICATE WITH STAFF AND OTHERS...BY EMAIL AND ATTACHMENTS. THESE CONSTANT ERROR MESSAGES ARE A TOTAL WASTE OF MY TIME AND PREVENT ME FROM DOING MY JOB. I WORK FOR THE REGIONAL PRESIDENT, I'M CONDUCTING THE BUSINESS OF THE BANK. PLEASE GET THESE ISSUES RESOLVED ONCE AND FOR ALL.

 

[Kev]

Originally posted by: kedlav
-Ran a training class once about an application with 'advanced' linux users where one guy couldn't get a simple command to work... he was typing out 'pipe' instead of | in the command

-Had a team try to cut costs by running iptables firewalls on Cent instead of RHEL (company-wide standard) and then bitching up a storm when they couldn't get support on the boxes for OS issues

-Had a guy doing some work on a distribution layer switch drop his notebook (pen and paper variety) on his laptop and crash the switch, which the dumb shit forgot to fail over first

-had a user shut down a production application and then go take a poo, instead of waiting for them to turn it back on. Head of the security team gets called while I was out to dinner with him to disable the user (funny!) access rights

-before my time, but company legend: Had water come in through our flat roof and take out an EMC frame (our brilliant solution: catchpans 1" deep with sensors)

-before my time, but company legend: Had a guy on the loading dock accidently hit the 'emergency cut power switch' instead of the 'open loading dock doors' and shut down the datacenter (said power off switches are now encased in shatter-proof glass with a very hard to manage lock)

riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiight

 

[brtspears2]

I get stuck with the fun battles with high resolution displays and small text and icons. A fun battle where dropping the resolution lower than native screen size results in blurry complaints. Setting the monitor to native resolution and turning up font sizes, large icons results in "well, this thing here (some obscure button in an ancient app like Eudora) didn't get bigger at all, I thought a larger monitor would let me see things larger and clearer!"

 

[Deviant Grasshopper]

Originally posted by: brtspears2
I get stuck with the fun battles with high resolution displays and small text and icons. A fun battle where dropping the resolution lower than native screen size results in blurry complaints. Setting the monitor to native resolution and turning up font sizes, large icons results in "well, this thing here (some obscure button in an ancient app like Eudora) didn't get bigger at all, I thought a larger monitor would let me see things larger and clearer!"

I used to have a user that was in his 70's - his vision was so poor that he used a 22" crt at 1024x768 with large fonts and scaling and all that. It had to be pretty frustrating for him.

 

[lucasorion]

We use a program for filling out expensesheets, which needs to be configured to point to an mdb file on our financial server before a user can use it. There is a text box for the path, with a browse button next to it. Every time I install this program I type in "\\server\share\database.mdb". Today I found out that my unofficial apprentice in the IT department, who makes only about $3/hr less than me (much to my consternation), has been mapping a Y: drive on people's computers to the \\server\share and then filling in that box with "Y:\database.mdb" because he couldn't figure out how to browse to the server and share, and apparently didn't know how to type in the full path (don't ask). Today I was remoting into computers and disconnecting these superfluous Y drives, and putting in the full path in that text box. I don't mind dumb stuff done by engineers and administrative assistants, but when it is done by fellow IT guys, it really bothers me.

 

[kedlav]

Originally posted by: Kev

riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiight

All 6 of those have occurred. A white paper was even written and published about the 4th item and is available on the web. The last two are before my time though, 2-3 happened while I was in Operations during my shift. Anyone who's worked in a datacenter knows some fucked up shit happens at least once every six months.

Originally posted by: GodlessAstronomer

Originally posted by: kedlav
-before my time, but company legend: Had a guy on the loading dock accidently hit the 'emergency cut power switch' instead of the 'open loading dock doors' and shut down the datacenter (said power off switches are now encased in shatter-proof glass with a very hard to manage lock)

Yea, I still don't get how the idiot managed that, the things are two feet apart. Suffice to say, he's no longer employed here. Still, a fun story to hear when you're new to the building or getting the tour.

 

[skillyho]

I *literally* had a worker clean her work area and reconnect the surge protector into itself....she wondered why the PC wouldn't power on. I had 3 work orders from other staff in that wing that went to check it out and couldn't figure it out either.

 

[shoRunner]

Originally posted by: lucasorion
We use a program for filling out expensesheets, which needs to be configured to point to an mdb file on our financial server before a user can use it. There is a text box for the path, with a browse button next to it. Every time I install this program I type in "\\server\share\database.mdb". Today I found out that my unofficial apprentice in the IT department, who makes only about $3/hr less than me (much to my consternation), has been mapping a Y: drive on people's computers to the \\server\share and then filling in that box with "Y:\database.mdb" because he couldn't figure out how to browse to the server and share, and apparently didn't know how to type in the full path (don't ask). Today I was remoting into computers and disconnecting these superfluous Y drives, and putting in the full path in that text box. I don't mind dumb stuff done by engineers and administrative assistants, but when it is done by fellow IT guys, it really bothers me.

not sure this is that big of a deal, it was working right?

 

[BillGates]

Originally posted by: queenrobot
This happened to my husband once; he went to fix a users PC and was talking with her about all the issues and what needed to be fixed. She points to the cd rom, and says "I really loved that cup holder feature until the damn thing broke off". lol

There is a 2.1% chance that this really happened to your husband.

 

[lucasorion]

Originally posted by: shoRunner

Originally posted by: lucasorion
We use a program for filling out expensesheets, which needs to be configured to point to an mdb file on our financial server before a user can use it. There is a text box for the path, with a browse button next to it. Every time I install this program I type in "\\server\share\database.mdb". Today I found out that my unofficial apprentice in the IT department, who makes only about $3/hr less than me (much to my consternation), has been mapping a Y: drive on people's computers to the \\server\share and then filling in that box with "Y:\database.mdb" because he couldn't figure out how to browse to the server and share, and apparently didn't know how to type in the full path (don't ask). Today I was remoting into computers and disconnecting these superfluous Y drives, and putting in the full path in that text box. I don't mind dumb stuff done by engineers and administrative assistants, but when it is done by fellow IT guys, it really bothers me.

not sure this is that big of a deal, it was working right?

it allowed them to open the program, sure, but they have this mapped drive to the directory on the financial server, which they really don't need, and it just bothers me because it betrays a certain level of dumbness that I hate to see in a fellow IT guy.
Logically, it is sort of like the software equivalent of the surge protector story above.

 

[Saulbadguy]

1. Ticket stating that "Computer continues to beep, even when unplugged." When I got there, I noticed the beep was coming from above the computer, not the computer itself. It was a humidifier unit in the dropped ceiling that was beeping. Told her to submit a ticket to the maintenance guys.

2. Many times - Printer won't print. Take the tape off the ink cartridge.

3. User could not figure out the process of moving her floppy disk data on to a thumb drive. This was very trying on frustrating, she would not let me do it myself because of the "confidential" data.

4. Have a user that calls the helpdesk once a month to change her password back to the same generic password, since she can not figure how to change it herself.

Many others over the years, i'd have to give it some thought. I usually just grin and bear it, i'm as clueless to what they do as they are as clueless to what I do.