IT Worker Roll Call & War Stories

[Deacon]

The shoutbox is a great place for thread ideas... most of which never make it here. Today we were talking about IT War Stories

It appears that many of us are in the IT field.

Post your IT field (i.e. security, desktop support, etc)

Post your war story

Network/Security Engineer

War Story
I used to work for a very large web hosting company. One of our customers was ... well, lets just call her Martha. Martha has been known to yell at people who work for her. I can tell you first hand that this is true after being on multiple conference calls with her.

Martha and her company were planning a visit to our data center and I thought that she would appreciate if we spruced things up a bit; after all, nobody likes a drab server rack right?

So, the night before the visit I place doilies (click here if you don't know what they are) on here servers and firewalls. I also placed a nice arrangement of artificial flowers on top of the firewalls.

When they had their site visit the next day she started screaming at the data center manager who in turn screamed at the CEO... who in turn called me and my VP into his office. After being yelled at for about 2 hours I asked if anyone thought it was funny? Everyone except Martha thought it was hilarious.

 

[Chef Ramsey]

Local Systems Administrator for a local elementary school checking in here. We also go by the title Sys Op.

My position is weird in that all the other Sys Ops are former teachers who thought they could handle it. The average age I would guess of all 25 of us is around 45 with me being one of the youngest. These people have no clue about what theya re doing and over use jargon to sound smarter.

Me being hired to this position is weird because I have so much more experience and ceritifcations than other Sys Ops.

My story would have to be when we were converting from novell based servers to MS Server 2003 I started about 3 weeks beforehand sending out emails saying "If you have anything saved on your computer you need to move it to your H drive which is a shared drive on the network. If you do nto do this you will lose your stuff. If you need help email me." Keep in mind we had to re-image every computer to meet requirements for the new set up.

Responses:

"Will the j drive be wiped out too?"

My response to everyone:
"This is to make a clarification.

Below when I said "[FONT='Arial','sans-serif']If you have any documents or files saved on your computer anywhere but your H drive you will need to move them over or they will be deleted when your machines are re-imaged" what I meant was anything saved on your Desktop or in your My Documents folder. Anything saved to Network drives, such as the H drive or the J drive, will not be touched. Only items saved on your Desktop or in the My Documents folder. [/font]

[FONT='Arial','sans-serif']If you have any questions please email or see me before moving any documents. If you aren't sure when moving something hold off on doing so. I want to be sure your files get moved properly and you do not lose anything! "[/font]

Replies:

"Do I have a problem since Boller put my stuff on the flash from last year? Will I still have all the CPS stuff I use? And my shortcut icons?"

"When you have c chance will come and see if my files are all saved in the H drive ....."

"I do have stuff on the hard drive - programs that will need to be moved - or they may be somewhere else and I don't know where they are."

"What about office computers? Do we get the conversion too?"

"When should specialists expect to have their computers converted? I am using mine for lessons, so some advance notice would be greatly appreciated "

"At what approximate time will this be done for 3rd grade?
So this means that I will not be able to use my computer until tomorrow when it is completed?.?.?.?
Thanks"

"I did something bad. I didn't see this before I tried to use my machine this afternoon. I clicked "continue" when the cloning message said it was done. I think I probably messed up the whole thing...sorry."

Here are my favorites. They all came from the same teacher:

" I opened the internet to get my learning plan, and other web sites I had bookmarked as favorites and they are gone. I had some exceptional sites is there a way to get them back?"

"did all my music go away too?
I had educational songs from Dr. Jean,
I don't like Microsoft. I am glad I have apple at home."

"oh, everything was legal. I own the CD's. It just takes a lot of time.thanks for offering.
I will do a little at a time I guess."

"I tried to play a CD and there is no sound coming out of my computer. I tried the control panel, the volume, etc. nothing"

"one of my computers is giving me a message that it cannot locate AR"

" my emails are messed up with letters"

It is so much fun!

 

[CrankCantankerous]

The shoutbox is a great place for thread ideas... most of which never make it here. Today we were talking about IT War Stories

It appears that many of us are in the IT field.

Post your IT field (i.e. security, desktop support, etc)

Post your war story

WAR STORY
Well, my official title is Senior Network Information Security Engineer, though the truth is that I'm basically a roaming security troubleshooter, covering everything from programming practices to network device audits to server hardening. I'd love to tell stories, but the ones that I would tell aren't eGO appropriate (though they are funny) and the rest are covered by my NDA. So boo.

This one is from before my time here, though, when I was slinging code and managing a development team. At the time, I was the team lead/product manager for a product that, among other thing, posted job listings to sites such as careerbuilder, monster, dice, various local job boards, etc.

We were moving towards a standard deployment and modular architecture with a new version for our new clients, but we still had a lot of legacy clients that had very customized codebases. One of these clients was particularly demanding - she made outrageous demands, lied to her boss and mine about the demands and the time frames, and basically made me miserable for a while - until I caught her in a lie, and sent the evidence directly to my boss and hers. Her boss subsequently told me that she had problems with this employee in other areas as well, and was looking to replace her, and that further communication should go through the boss.

Well, cut to a few weeks later, my life is better, my boss is happier, the client is getting what they expect, when they expect it... and then the client posts the original demon-lady's job to their job board, and marks it to be cross-posted to monster... which requires the demon-lady's approval.

She called screaming, thinking it was someone at our company who did it, to which I told her no, and that she needed to talk to her boss.

The next day, my boss and I were BCC'd on an email that was sent to their company saying that the demon-lady was no longer with them, and any projects she was working on needed to be referred to her boss.

 

[Deacon]

This just in... rare footage of what GardenGroveVW does all day at work:

 

[blackhawksniper]

This just in... rare footage of what GardenGroveVW does all day at work:

lol



That looks like some hard work going on there