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.'"
Sometimes it's the little things (Score:5, Interesting)
It's not really IT related, but in a similar vein to some of these stories, the worst workplace war I've ever seen erupted over a parking space. Here were two college-educated adults, both of whom made over $100,000 a year--at war with each other because one maintained that he had been assigned said space (even though it wasn't marked) and the other kept parking there. Combine that with weak leadership at the company, and bam!, you had an escalation that got fucking crazy. First it was potshots and pranks, then they started keying each others' cars. Then they were openly screaming at each other in the office. It only ended when the cops had to get involved (they were calling each other with death threats and one of them showed up to the other's house with a gun). They both ended up with restraining orders...and also pink slips (when management finally woke up and realized they were both nuts).
When you're in the city, people take their parking spaces VERY seriously. And little things can become very big (in your mind) if you obsess over them long enough.
But, hey, if the assassination of one dipshit Archduke could start a World War and one little fruit vendor setting himself on fire could start the Arab Spring, I guess any little thing can spark a fire.
Way more than 9 elsewhere (Score:5, Interesting)
The Daily WTF [slashdot.org] has a lot of fantastic stories about what not to do. The stories include horrific interviews, code that makes you want to squirm at best, and plenty of IT mistakes.
What about clueless admins? (Score:5, Interesting)
In my time I have seen some amazing examples of idiocy.
I once had to lecture some linux admins as to the nature of ntpd and how they don't have to be constantly logging in to set the time, but here's the brilliant part of that equation: someone had come up with a "login script" idea, that used ntpdate to set the time. So all they had to do was log in to the system and the time would be automatically set. I only got involved when they were trying to develop an automated login system so they wouldn't have to log in to 500+ linux servers, constantly, all to keep the time set. I actually had to argue with them, to show they what ntpd could do. It was unreal.
Then there was the time I found windows admins that thought you had to have a user account for every machine you joined to a domain. A unique user account. A unique administrative user account. And because they had several thousand machines, password maint was a nightmare...or at least would be, except they came to the conclusion that using an easy to remember password on all of these administrator accounts was an easier solution.
140 million dollar contract (Score:4, Interesting)
Fortune 25 contractor promises another Fortune 25 client that they can migrate their entire operation without a single desktop engineer. This was a 140 million dollar contract. Client also promised that their network conversion from 10Mb hubs to 100Mb switches would be finished before we started and then postponed the network conversion.
When everything was said and done lawyers for both companies mutually decided that I was the best the person on the ground with the best insight into why things fell apart. I was told by lawyers on both sides I would be subpoenaed as the primary witness and that the trial was expected to take about four months. I wasn't being blamed by either side, I was just the one who knew what the hell was going on.
When you testify as a witness (vs expert witness) you are limited to a $50 court fee and can't be otherwise reimbursed. I would have been financially ruined for other peoples idiocy and figured out a perfectly honest way to get out of situation their idiocy created.
I told lawyers for both sides that I would appear and testify, and they would neither one like what I had to say. They settled two days later.
Infoworld (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm not trying to cry foul or call anyone out. I'm just curious about what drives some of the patterns that emerge on slashdot. If someone from either Infoworld or slashdot could weigh in that would be great.
IT idiocy? (Score:5, Interesting)
IT idiocy? Is there a more idiotic tech site than IT World itself, with its twenty ad-laden pages for ten paragraphs, after a goddamned splash screen? I refuse to visit those morons. No RTFA this time, folks. Link to a respectable site next time.
Re:Make it idiot-proof... (Score:5, Interesting)
"Never disbelieve the user" is right. One of my early tech support calls (many moons ago) was from a guy who claimed his computer rebooted every time he flushed his toilet.
Yeah. I figured he was yanking my chain, but you can't just hang up on people, so after humoring him for a few minutes we actually set up a tech visit.
We fixed him up, at least temporarily, by installing a UPS for his system.
He lived way out in the boonies and used well water and a septic tank. Turns out when he flushed, not only did his computer reboot, but his lights flickered for a moment, too. Flushing the toilet activated some power-hungry pump in his water system, and the draw was browning out his computer.
Re:Sometimes it's the little things (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Retrieving unsaved data (Score:4, Interesting)
Only distantly related, but ... A long time ago I was writing code on a Perq workstation. The editor had a nice feature - it maintained a transcript of every change, and you could replay it. This became very useful once when I was working madly under deadline, and failed to save the file for ... wait for it ... 36 hours (yes, it was an all-nighter and then some). And the machine crashed - actually I think the power got cut. But with the transcript feature I was able to replay the entire 36 hour editing session, watching myself do my editing. It was rather fun, actually. Of course it was much faster than the original - I think it took an hour or so. And I was redeemed from my stupidity.
I loved the transcript feature - it was useful any time the machine or the program crashed, as it could restore everything up to the last disk write that succeeded. You could also pause and continue, so if you went off on a dead-end, you could replay up to the point where you started going the wrong way and stop, step backwards or forwards to the point where you had something worth keeping, and then save or start editing at that point.
I think it would be great for any text editor to do this.