Tales of IT Idiocy 181
snydeq writes "IT fight club, dirty dev data, meatball sandwiches — InfoWorld offers nine more tales of brain fail beyond belief. 'You'd think we'd run out of them, but technology simply hasn't advanced enough to take boneheaded users out of the daily equation that is the IT admin's life. Whether it's clueless users, evil admins, or just completely bad luck, Mr. Murphy has the IT department pinned in his sights — and there's no escaping the heartache, headaches, hassles, and hilarity of cluelessness run amok.'"
Re:Sometimes it's the little things (Score:5, Insightful)
I guess any little thing can spark a fire.
Only when you have enough fuel. Which in this case is probably a metaphor for workplace resentment.
Anyone have a Greasemonkey script (Score:5, Insightful)
Anyone have a Greasemonkey script on-hand that automatically hides stories containing links to infoworld.com, or do I have to whip one up on my own?
the first rule of I.T. fight club is ... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Sometimes it's the little things (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Make it idiot-proof... (Score:5, Insightful)
it kind of is possible, many people have email accounts that direct to several mailboxes, like @familyname.com. If your app was sending to an unknown name at the front of that (instead of 'dave@family' it was 'whoever@family') then its possible it got delivered to all accounts using that shared mailbox system.
Not that I'm saying this is what happened, but something along those lines due to some wacky configuration.
Moral: never disbelieve the user, although what they say is impossible, when you look at it, you find that not only is it possible, it's also happening. If only we could get the users to describe it in terms a tech would understand.
Re:Sometimes it's the little things (Score:3, Insightful)
So, in your mind, absolutely anyone who makes a six figure salary is by definition a "dominant, exploitative jackass". Is it just maybe a little bit possible that you're bitter about your own salary?
Re:Sometimes it's the little things (Score:5, Insightful)
It'd be the equivalent of someone assassinating the vice-president of the US today -- not just some random bozo getting killed.
If headlines read "Joe Biden" assassinated! about 90% of the US population would have shrugged their shoulders and said 'who'?
Re:Sometimes it's the little things (Score:4, Insightful)
You fail at reading comprehension.
You fail at logic.
The context is people who earn on the order of $100k/year, not, say, in the millions. It is discussing "upper-middle-range talent", not one in a million technical or marketing geniuses. The people who earn around $100k/year are the bane of society: they are sufficiently numerous and have sufficient purchasing power to make their opinion known, but sufficiently stupid that they don't realise it's only chance which selected them from a thousand others and that it's only a dysfunctional job marketplace which pays so many people that sort of amount.
I'm not quite sure why there's always a knee-jerk response to criticism of someone gaining something of "UR JUST ENVIOUS". Is it clear that I condemn serial rapists who remain at large because I just don't get enough sex? No, of course not. Is it clear that I condemn the US military because my country's military doesn't have its might? I bet I'd hear more people arguing that. You know when the argument comes up? Precisely when the arguer is so self-centred as to be unable to perceive a moral question. Almost everyone agrees that serial rape is wrong so no-one talks about being envious of the rapist. But when a form of power imbalance is perceived as just by someone, then surely the problem must be that everyone who raises an objection is just envious - after all, that's the position of the former. Those who object to power are just envious of those with power. Yeah, that's it. Slaves just envy the slavedrivers.
Idiot.
Re:Sometimes it's the little things (Score:2, Insightful)
I could probably make the same argument for a salary of around $55k for a guy doing any kind of IT when there are 50 million college educated IT professionals in India who are quite literally starving on the streets. Even if they only do half as good a job, they are willing to work for a tenth of the first world guy, and a company will spring up over there that will exploit that person and turn around and sell his services for a quarter of what it costs to keep the American employed. Even at 50% efficiency they are still double ahead.
Face it, the only reason you have a first world lifestyle is because the idiot PHB type managers making 100k + are not intelligent enough to figure out how to replace you. The only reason any of you have a comfortable living salary is because the first world exploits the third world.
Re:Sometimes it's the little things (Score:4, Insightful)
No one works an Indian IT job where they are "literally starving in the streets", because they'll DIE. They'll do something else that has a better return: NOT DYING. I have an IT job and I don't worry about "exploiting" the third world because my job has nothing to do with what happens in the third world. I am not stealing bread out of the mouth of some Indian guy because I am able to buy sufficient food, clothing, and shelter for my household. Once people realize that life is not a zero-sum game, and that charity means selfless giving, we're just going to suffer from greed and class warfare.
Re:Sometimes it's the little things (Score:4, Insightful)
My pet theory is of the "norm problem":
Every person has a problem of which he thinks it is the most important one. He will scale all other problems according to his norm problem. He will devote the same energy on his norm problem as other people do for theirs.
The norm problem of a) may be that his family is starving and of b) that his neighbor occupies his parking space. Nevertheless they will approach their norm problem with max energy.
If you have two people competing for the same goal as norm problem, you will get a major turf war, no matter how trivial the object is.
Re:Retrieving unsaved data (Score:5, Insightful)
One day a woman came in, worked on a paper for a couple of hours, and then had her computer crash. She went to the lab assistant on duty, who didn't try to be helpful or sympathetic at all -- he just blew her off with a "well, you should have saved".
She blew up at him. Yelled, screamed, made a gigantic fuss. Lab guy thought it was funny, still wasn't trying to calm her down or be helpful at all. The supervisor heard the noise (his office was across the hall from the lab) and came in to see what was wrong. He talked to the woman, got her to go across the hall where she wouldn't be disturbing everyone else who was still trying to use the lab. There, he offered sympathy, offered to help her with retyping.
Once she started to calm down, she started crying. He finally found out that she'd been raped a couple of weeks before. She'd lost a lot of time for getting ready for finals and doing final papers in doing interviews with the police and the prosecuting attorneys -- and then found out earlier that day that the DA's office had decided not to prosecute her attacker, because he was a former boyfriend of hers and they were afraid they wouldn't be able to persuade the jury that it wasn't just her changing her mind after the fact.
He pointed her to the campus rape center so she could get help -- not just with the legal case and the emotional fallout, but also to have them talk to her professors. She didn't need to be trying to handle finals like that.
The moral is: You don't know how bad a day someone else has had. When people get extremely upset over something that seems like it shouldn't be that upsetting, there's a good chance that they were already upset about something else. And, of course, he added that if we had someone in the lab we just couldn't handle, get him or call the campus police if it was after his office hours. We should try to be nice, but remember that our job was lab attendant, not social worker.