IT Stories

inthesto · Post by **inthesto** » Fri Jul 18, 2008 12:15 pm

My dad is an IT manager.

He ate his dog once.

Facem@n · Post by **Facem@n** » Fri Jul 18, 2008 4:37 pm

I've been working IT support for a few years.

One time I was working for a district Board of Education's MIS dept. One computer in a classroom said "Broken. Please fix" on a sheet of paper on it. Without even thinking about it, I looked behind it and plugged it in and it was working fine.

I was at a relative's home and took care of his borked desktop. I noticed his laptop was on the floor of a very messy room, and told him to not leave it there, unless he wanted an expensive piece of trash after someone steps on it. A few months later he tells me his brother stepped on it (cause it was on the floor) and had the audacity to ask me to fix it.

I've had to explain to attorneys who make 6-figure-a-year salaries how to turn on the computer and what the power button looks like. People turn off the monitor and think they've shut off the machine. I've heard stories from friends of people who cut cables with scissors to move computers, and then tried to tape them back together again.

Savia · Post by **Savia** » Fri Jul 18, 2008 4:47 pm

Mithroch wrote:For those that haven't seen this yet...
The Website Is Down: Sales Guy vs. Web Dude

You can't go back. You can't arrange by "penis".

Corran · Post by **Corran** » Fri Jul 18, 2008 5:01 pm

Another time back back when I was in Florida some contractors were tasked with relocating a comm closet to the second floor of the jet engine shop... which is fine, except for the part where they neglected to inform us. They started powering down and disconnecting our equipment... near the end of the day, on a Friday, without even labeling the cables, or having all the additional cabling they needed to complete the job. No one in the Network Control Center was even aware such a project was going in that building until they did this... Another tech and I worked 5 hours past the end of our shift to clean up their mess.

godix · Post by **godix** » Fri Jul 18, 2008 11:03 pm

I used to be a hardware jockey with a company that sold all the computers to a fortune 500 company. After their onsite tech support people determined the HD, motherboard, or whatever was bad I'd drive out and switch it out under warranty. There was one tech support person where I'd always take out whatever was needed for the problem she claimed and a hard drive with a fresh image of the OS on it. That must have been a magical hard drive or something because just slapping it in was able to fix problems with NIC cards, mice, cd roms, motherboards, you name it. The magic only seemed to work when it was that one particular help desk person though.

Usually I just shrugged my shoulders and figured I was getting paid either way so who cares but one time she really ticked me off. Some bigshots CD rom was broken and even though my typical response time was to be on site within 2 hours of getting the call that wasn't good enough, she insisted I drop what I was doing that instant to go fix this thing and she was being a royal cunt about it all. Which wouldn't have been quite so bad if it wasn't for the fact I was building a server that was to be delivered and installed the next day. So I drop everything and drive the 30 miles out to the site. Pop in a cd to test the problem and it works fine. So I track down the user and ask what the problem is. When the guy was playing his audio CD it would just play 10 seconds of a song then switch to a totally random song. The end user, alright. He wasn't paid to know about computers. So doesn't know what random and intro play are, no big deal. But the woman who is paid to know computers claiming this was a hardware problem? I came close to committing murder that day.

Not a tech story but a general 'WTF?' thing: The company I referred to is a huge company that had several top secret projects. There was one facility where I had to be met at the door and the person escorting me was not allowed to be more than 5 feet from me at any time while I was there. One day I was sick so they send my co-worker to that facility instead of me. Next day I hear the co-worker was detained and questioned by their security for two hours before he was released and we were told that he could never perform a service call at that building and I should always be the one to do it. The cause of this fuss? He wasn't born in America while I was. That was it. The client even admitted that there was nothing more to it than that. Which is rather odd because AFAIK there wasn't a background check performed on either of us. Although I guess if you got a white guy on one hand and a hispanic with an accent on the other then people are gonna assume.

As a contrast to that, at their world headquarters one time they had a problem with a server. It turned out to be a major enough issue I couldn't fix it on site and had to take the thing back into shop. Now keep in mind, this is the world headquarters. The president of the company is in this building as are all 7 of the vice-presidents. And their headquarters for their worldwide legal dept, which is what department this server was for. And of course lots of documents and shit related to their business, including the top secret place I mentioned above. So you'd think walking out of that building with a $20,000 server who's HD was full of legal documents on their operations worldwide would be kinda a problem right? I wheeled it on a cart to the security checkpoint, who was a new guy. I asked him to watch it while I pulled my car around then I loaded into my backseat and drove off. The security guy didn't even ask my name much less what I was doing. Nice of him to keep an eye on the server for me though.

On a 'damn technology is kickass' note: At a location that did military work (but not the top secret place) I sat and watched as they flew a plane over Brazil, dropped a tractor via parachute, then had the tractor bulldoze a landing strip so the plane that airdropped it could land. Both the plane and tractor were controlled remotely from a tiny ass building in middle of Illinois. I'd find that cool even today but this was actually about 10 years ago when people were still impressed by the blazing speed of a 54k modem which just made it all the more impressive.

dokidoki · Post by **dokidoki** » Sat Jul 19, 2008 12:44 am

(Note: The guy in this first story wasn't particularly dumb, just unlucky)

Back when we were doing PS1 titles, a co-worker burned SEVENTY CDs looking for a problem with his game. It would run on the emulator, but not on the test unit. At one point I asked him, "If the game isn't booting at all, why are you burning all the data too?" After going "oh yeah!", testing went a little faster after that. It turned out that the libraries on the burning machine happened to be corrupt. I was working on another game, but I wasn't quite ready to create a test build yet, so there was nobody else that might have given a clue that something was wrong with the machine. At least they were regular CDs, and not the stupid $25 CDs Sony demanded for sending final builds.

Then there was the time another guy accidentally sent an empty CD case to the publisher.

And this story is pretty crazy...

Mithroch · Post by **Mithroch** » Sat Jul 19, 2008 5:52 am

dokidoki wrote:
And this story is pretty crazy...

Typical... management never thinks about IT when they are looking for a place... and once they sign the lease... it becomes your problem.

Our current facility has plenty of warehouse space... but is a bit short on office space. Since we have several departments that don't really need to be at the warehouse... it was decided that they should look for an office more down town. They found a great place... even has a corner office over looking the College Football Hall of Fame. The problem... no one asked IT what to look for. After they signed the lease... it was discovered that... with out significant cost to ourselves... the best we could hope for was a T1 line The phone company is notoriously slow on installs... and honestly with as much data traffic as our developers and pricers (two departments moving) need... and add our VOIP phone lines a T1 is just not enough. Our busiest time of year is less than a month away... and they expect to be moved in before then.

Several of the other options they tuned down (because they weren't as pretty) had direct access to the same fiber loop as the secure data center that stores our servers. Someone needs some a good ass stomping.

ZephyrStar · Post by **ZephyrStar** » Mon Jul 21, 2008 10:20 am

I remember in like 3rd grade, there was this person everybody thought was a guy, and went by a guy name (not really a name that could be used for either sex) but it turns out that the person was a girl and nobody knew that till like 9th grade. Turns out the name was a nickname.

godix · Post by **godix** » Mon Jul 21, 2008 2:52 pm

ZephyrStar wrote:I remember in like 3rd grade, there was this person everybody thought was a guy, and went by a guy name (not really a name that could be used for either sex) but it turns out that the person was a girl and nobody knew that till like 9th grade. Turns out the name was a nickname.

Is this your roundabout way of telling us that you're really a woman?

ZephyrStar · Post by **ZephyrStar** » Mon Jul 21, 2008 3:35 pm

...mayhaps. Let the yuri commence.