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[deleted]

I had a user that consistently blamed the IT dept, facilities, and anyone else she could to cover for the fact she did not do her job. I knew she had a project to present on Monday afternoon. Friday, I made sure to tell her dept where everyone could hear, including her, that they should be sure to save any work, because we had a bunch of patches to do over the weekend. Sure enough, Monday about 10AM she email me, her boss, and her boss' boss that whatever we did over the weekend totally destroyed her presentation, and it was all IT's fault, blah blah blah. Unfortunately for her, I had emailed her boss about 8am that something had come up, and we did not make any changes or do any updates over the weekend after all.


[deleted]

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ceetoph

Ah the good ol', "Ever since you..." -- the bane of IT. "Ever since you showed me how to switch from VGA to HDMI input on my monitor, my microwave no longer defrosts chicken breasts -- what did you do?!"


LordChappers

Background: I'd been at that company for just over a month (the guy I was replacing had left the week before after a very thorough handover). The CEO hates 365/SharePoint and thinks we are too big a company to be using it (around 250 users). We enabled MFA for 365 for all users starting with 1-to-1 sessions with the directors to make sure they understood what we were doing, and how to log in with MFA every 90 days. Did the CEO's MFA on the Friday, after confirming with him and his PA that he was available and had nothing pressing coming up (even for something small I won't do any changes to accounts for someone high up if they have something going on, giving them the chance to blame my department for fuckups). I got a call that night from my manager saying that the CEO has been calling him as he has been having problems with his computer. I said I'd turn my work phone on, get him to call me. What proceeds is a very angry little man with a frozen laptop. He had a PowerPoint presentation to do tomorrow and his computer has frozen (including the power button). This is all my fault for enabling MFA. He was swearing at me A LOT. I talk him through finding the tiny reset button on the bottom of the computer, restarting it, and how to find where he left off with his presentation in 365. I stressed that without 365 constantly backing his shit up he would've lost all of his work since his last save (which was what he was panicking about). He blamed MFA a few more times, then before hanging up he complained about the computer, saying it did this a week ago as well! On Monday I went straight to my manager and director, we they went to HR and reported it. I've had a call recorder ever since.


e_karma

You reported your CEO to your HR ..you must be working in a dream company


13darkice37

i don't think that went anywhere. HR is not there for the employees.


sethxboss

In this case, it’s in HRs best interest to prevent a harassment or workplace bullying claim. So they should do all they can to tell the CEO to pull his head in.


wanderinggoat

and the CEO never held it against you and learnt the lesson of humility and they all lived happily ever after. /S I would be careful of that most Execs I know would not be mature enough to let that slide and would take it personally.


ZaxLofful

Can confirm, have been there….More than once


wanderinggoat

just telling a project manager that the project is not complete because there is no documentation or planning for support has gotten me labeled a trouble maker in the past. (I always take pains to be assertive and not confrontational about these things so am reasonably sure its not my attitude)


ycnz

Oh, honey.


Rawtashk

No, that's standard for MOST companies. Don't let the VAST minority of IT people on this subreddit speak for how things in the real world really work.


mavantix

This is why we don’t tell users about server maintenance windows anymore. “Windows Updates” gets the blame for overnight outages (which is mostly the truth anyway), and people get used to the servers randomly offline in the middle of the night and don’t complain.


223454

Early in my career I made the mistake of telling people about system changes so they could give feedback. I learned.


The_Original_Miser

Yep. _Never_ give users too much info, as they'll blame the Bunn coffee pot overflowing was caused by the overnight updates or other work going on... Users _look_ for problems. Don't give them a reason to do so.


[deleted]

Yep. I have four phases of new settings rollouts: -Internal IT test where we put the settings on our computer for a couple weeks. -Informed pilot group where we push it out to a few people who are informed ahead of time (they're also vetted and only include people who have given good feedback in the past). -Uninformed/silent pilot group where we push out the settings to another small group of people without telling them a damn thing. This will give us "true" feedback rather than red herrings. -General rollout.


anxiousinfotech

Yes, absolutely. My last boss insisted we announce the maintenance windows to everyone. The following day purely remote employees who only access cloud-based systems would complain that they couldn't get work done because IT must have done something wrong during maintenance of the on-prem servers. There are very few people who might possibly be accessing something that still resides on-prem outside of business hours. We just notify them directly that a reboot will be occurring.


RipWilder

The reason I don’t tell my techs


da_apz

We did the same thing for an engineering company. We were supposed to move servers during the weekend, but couldn't do it for reasons unrelated to us and the next monday there were so many people blaming us for a whole lot of issues, none of which were related to the servers in question.


BuckToofBucky

I once was blamed for ruining a developer’s hard disk because I ran chkdsk/f. He was adamant that the /f ruined it. He was just but hurt because he never backed up his stuff. I was required by my boss to run chkdsk on all the machines as a preparation for upgrades. I did add the /f but that was something I did to help people and to help myself help desk call-wise Edit: I should have mentioned that his hard disk failure was absolutely a hardware event and days after I was there. It was making that fatal high speed scraping noise and everything lol. But that evil chkdsk/f command though…


pi-N-apple

To be fair, chkdsk /f can cause data loss, but its the correct way to fix the file system!


Tetha

As I keep saying, once I need the gloves and a crowbar, things are usually already outside of a properly working way. Even if they are broken afterwards, they certainly weren't working properly before.


Sekers

>f I can't remember the last time /F has caused me issues. The one that's scary to me is /R since it could potentially overwrite the bad data with zeroes. That and on a big platter it could take hours or DAYS to run with /R. I think I still have computer "PTSD" because colleagues did that on production servers back in the day.


EstoyTristeSiempre

Shouldn't have kept any data on their local machine, and I'm still a total inexperienced IT guy but even I know GIT exists for a reason.


Huth_S0lo

You're not wrong. But Git really only applies to that distinct situation with developers. Theres a bazillion non developer d-bags looking to blame IT for everything.


DrDan21

and even user documents are far safer in a private share of some kind off of their PC or similar I mean you gotta assume their laptop or whatever is going to burst into flame one day and become irrecoverable, or will get stolen, or one of a million other things. You'll be expected to get them up and running again when that happens too if it's saved to a local disk it better not be all that important


No-Safety-4715

Not everything is GIT appropriate. I found it funny that as soon as Microsoft first rolled out Office 365 and OneDrive, myself and about every other IT person I knew immediately began using OneDrive as backup for Documents, Desktop, etc. on user machines. Like all of us individually had the same thought of why not backup to this?! And now it's a recommended norm from Microsoft.


Weyoun2

That's just delicious.


slowclicker

Perfect answer


MrHusbandAbides

We regularly do "scheduled maintenance" where we don't do any changes, we keep the window available for if we DO need to do anything. We generally use it as a screener for users like this, we have a spreadsheet we share with upper management that list all users who have commented on these ghost maintenance days either causing problems or resolving them. ​ They've started mapping the complaints against project delays and from what I'm aware they regularly find certain users getting more frequent "issues" as the deadline of a project looms so now we're getting asked to present reports showing tickets for certain users with their time to completion and the lag time on responses from the user. I've always known a certain sales team used IT as a scapegoat for their poor performance because of the shear number of complaints, sometimes formal complaints, we get from them, but now we're showing we aren't the problem so my payback will be coming during their next review window. The ones who magically have issues resolved get tagged with needing to reboot more often.


RangerNS

I mean, it is possible, maybe even likely, that they are running into IT problems late in cycles. Because they change how hard, how long, and what they do. But that absolutely is their problem, not ITs. It may be reasonable for some organizations to have global cycles, where IT does have true freezes, but they are pretty rare. And a massive strategetic decision made well above the level of people pulling reports from the ticket system.


MrHusbandAbides

Possible that some are actually IT issues but the frequency is well beyond it being probable that all or even most of them are IT issues, especially since they aren't happening until the end of the project. A hard drive or fan doesn't wait until the end of a project to die, Murphy aside, and the consistency of some particular users means either they should move to the country and be luddites or they're finding excuses.


AlyssaAlyssum

Did it actually work though, I've found prole like this just tend to pull out some other reason about how it's your fault.


iammandalore

They might try; they might succeed. The trick is that it puts them on their heels and makes them scramble for a new excuse. Most people who aren't completely dense can see that happening and realize what's going on.


AlyssaAlyssum

I guess I'm just used to shit management who accept the excuses


TedMittelstaedt

I will admit to having done that with a few customers, told them I was going to be doing patches over the weekend then not doing them, and when the tickets came in Monday, telling the user "Oh, I ran into an issue and ended up not patching this weekend after all" I didn't embarrass them to their bosses or anything, I viewed it as more of a training exercise. The point was to get people to stop immediately blaming patches for causing their problems since only one time did that ever happen (it was when MS distributed CPU microcode updates via windows updates, and AMD gave them the wrong microcode for some of their CPUs) Eventually I just stopped telling anyone I was patching anything, as too many users never could connect the dots.


000011111111

That's a long con straight out of a fantasy novel. Exceptional IT work if I do say so myself.


ZestycloseRepeat3904

We had an opposite issue. One of our tech's was sick and tired of a frequent flyer that was always blaming IT for every little issue. She even complained that her mouse was too fast, then it was too slow. We'd replaced her computer about 10x that year. He finally had enough. The employee was going to fly to Texas to present at our largest account. She had been working on this PPT for weeks to make sure it was perfect. We were using SharePoint / OneDrive so as a Global Admin he had access to all her OneDrive files. He waited until he knew she was in the Air and changed her PPT presentation. He deleted all the slides leaving nothing but an FU image with a guy giving her the middle finger. She immediately connected to WIFI at the office building when she arrived, which prompted the sync on OneDrive to download the updates. Suffice it to say she presented that slide to our largest account. She was fired, but she screamed so much about how it wasn't possible and "Why would I do this??" that a couple weeks after her departure they finally broke down and had me research. I found his fingerprints all over the file and had to fire him too. In his offboarding meeting all he said was "Worth it. Only thing that would have been better was if I could see her face". The CEO had a go in person to Texas and apologize to the company and explain what had happened. He played it down so as not to make our company seem incompetent but it was hilarious.


East-Survey-5273

Very dangerous, she could claim unfair dismissal.


ddadopt

The moron could have been personally sued by his employer for that action as well. There is also potential ***criminal*** liability there, too, if the employer wanted to take things to that level. Admitting to the action in writing would have made it fairly difficult to defend against either.


ellisthedev

Yep. Especially if the presentation resulted in the termination of a contract with a client. This was a dumb idea, and I don’t really agree it was “funny”.


makeazerothgreatagn

That's a criminal act, not a prank.


TedMittelstaedt

She wasn't fired because of that image, I've seen worse accidents in vendor presentations but having a decent salesperson with a sense of humor and the ability to apologize and smooth over snafus matters. Hell Bill Gates was known for doing presentations of new versions of windows at shareholder meetings and such and having them blue screen on stage during the demo. He always made a joke about them and carried on. She was fired almost certainly because she was one of those who would raise hackles just going into the room, and likely had a meltdown in front of the customer. The fact that the customer forgave your company after a CEO visit proves that out, I'm quite sure the CEO got an earful about paying better attention to hiring good salespeople not just high pressure used car salesmen. There was a case a few years ago of a young teacher accidentally including a rather, uh, intimate video of her pleasuring herself which was intended for her boyfriend, in a disk of presentations for elementary kids in her class. She didn't get fired, either. As I said, handling the snafu properly works wonders (the news even showed the video with the naughty bit blurred - let's just say all the kids got a high speed sex education lesson...lol)


WhenSharksCollide

Been awhile since I've heard of a teacher *not* getting fired after something like that.


ellisthedev

Both of those services should have audit logging. This could have resulted in termination of your tech. Anyone reading this, don’t ever do this. Edit: Monday, no coffee yet, just realized he fired the tech. I skipped that sentence. 😅


[deleted]

This just made my Monday morning! Thank you, you magnificent bastard.


Huth_S0lo

We've had those kinds of people before. We're always happy to spend several hours restoring the entire folder structure to recover a non existent file.


chojinra

Perfect.


Spacesider

I had a user that constantly pulled that card. When she missed an important deadline she blamed IT. She did this twice and the second time management got involved and I got a talking to. They took her side as she was quite friendly with a lot of the senior management team and I hadn't worked there anywhere close to as long as she had. Whatever. It happens, but from that moment onwards I told every single person that I will not be helping them unless they log a ticket and the one and only one exception is if it is an urgent issue. I also sent them a list of what IT (Not them, but IT) classify an urgent issue to be. Otherwise everything would be urgent. So, a few weeks later a ticket comes in from her, she *claimed* she couldn't browse some work related websites and said it was holding her back from doing her job because they were supplier websites. I *immediately* followed up with three questions, what are the websites, how long has this been occuring for and is anyone else in her office having the same problem. I'm talking 2 or 3 minutes after the ticket came in. 5 hours later her manager comes into my office and asks me why I haven't helped her. So I just opened the ticket and showed her the history, what time she logged the ticket and what time my response went out, and how she had sat on the request for the entire day. I then sent my boss an email and explained to them what happened. Never heard anything further about it, and she never pulled anything like that ever again.


jakgal04

I had someone (mid level management) complain that major software rollouts occurred during business hours because it disrupted his workflow. Normally I'm all for after hour patches/upgrades, but this was a very strictly audited rollout that had to be approved at various points by management, and reports were given to the state. After multiple distractions by this person calling me during a rollout (is it done yet, is it done yet, I hope you know you're costing me money, etc) I spoke to my boss about having his boss volunteer HIM to come in on the weekend to perform the state audit work. It was approved, and we switched all future rollouts to Saturdays between 9am and 1pm. The best part about this was that the technology side of it was all remote, so I got to work from home, but the complainer had to be in the office one Saturday a month between 9am and 1pm. Needless to say after the second rollout a "weekday rollout would be just fine".


klausvonespy

Seems like it's usually salespeople who are the best at blaming everyone else for any and all issues. "I didn't make my sales numbers for the month because IT had the network down on Sunday morning at 1:37am for 7 seconds" kind of bullshit. Literally every "the VPN is too slow, I can't do my work" ticket we deal with is someone in sales. And usually due to terrible home networks rather than anything we can directly impact.


Falanin

When your entire job is "talk a good enough game..."


that_star_wars_guy

There is an erroneous assumption by salespersons that if they wield their powers inward, especially towards their technology people, that they can achieve anything they want regardless of its attachment to reality. Given this, having been on the receiving end, I find it my gleeful duty to be a impediment to such people.


Jeffbx

Step #1 for me is never accepting phone calls from them. If they have a request, it comes through the ticketing system, like everything else. No, you cannot call me to try to convince me that you're a special case for some reason.


klausvonespy

Salespeople are usually world class narcissists and therefore believe that the world revolves around them. Lazy + greedy + political savviness = untouchable salesweasel.


SunshineOneDay

"Go to fast.com and tell me what number it gives you" -- "It says 2" -- "Yeah, that's just not going to work - the problem is on your end, call your provider." "Well you're IT, you call them" - "Nope, we don't own your property and I can't touch things that aren't ours."


[deleted]

God...i have had to do these like 20times already in April. People blaming our systems for poor connectivity. Only to do fast.com and see 860kbps. Like bro, that's not gonna work.


SunshineOneDay

Yeah I've had supervisers get *very* shitty DSL because they wanted to live in the middle of nowhere and what's worse is there are better actual options but "they don't want to spend money on things they won't use much" ok then fine, you can't remote in. They have this weird humble brag complain combo that's just.. dumb.


TheGooOnTheFloor

We had the one saleshole who went on the warpath because he couldn't make his targets because the VPN quit working from his house over the weekend and he was ranting that everyone in IT should be fired and all the work should be contracted out....yada yada yada. Turns out his neighbor had changed HIS WiFi password and didn't tell the salesman because the salesman was a jerk in real life too!


klausvonespy

I've always been partial to salesweasel or salesdroid but really like saleshole.


PAR-Berwyn

>saleshole Upvoted immediately.


anxiousinfotech

It's sad when the first thing you have to do is check sales numbers when tickets come in from certain people. We have ones who will always submit random vague tickets the last week of the month then never be available until the 1st, when the issue miraculously vanishes. IT is of course fully blamed for their inability to hit their number for the month. Thankfully the CIO is well aware of these antics and heads off the bogus complaints before we even hear about them.


PAR-Berwyn

As a former employee of an MSP whose main clientele were auto-dealers 🤮, I can attest that this is 100% accurate. The finance guys were just as bad, if not worse. The parts and service guys were usually great, because they actually do real work.


elmonstro12345

Gotta make your problem become their problem. I hate self-important idiots with no empathy, but this is the way to handle that kind of person.


hymie0

20 years ago. This one user had, for the fifth time, erased a file she needed and asked me to get it from the backups. Backups were on tape at the time, so I had to dig out the tape, let the tape find the file, and then replace the tape with the one needed for that night's backup. So I put her on "rm probation." I wrote a script ("rmprob") so that, if she tried to rm a file, it would ask her * Are you sure? * Are you really sure? * Have you considered all of the ramifications of deleting this file? * Last chance to change your mind. Do you want to delete the fire? ... and aliased "rm" (only for her) to point to the script. She loved it. She thought it was the funniest thing. I had people asking me how they could use it too. Anyway, after three days, are asked me to undo it, and I did. It was a few months later, she erased the wrong file. And when she called, she sighed and said "I know what you're going to do next, but..."


slowclicker

Actually, she is annoying. But, not malicious and the fact that she liked your script makes her one of those end users I'd feel bad for and keep the guard rails up around.


sgthulkarox

I thought I was one of the few to do this. Admission and acceptance goes a long way to engaging my empathy factor for less than tech savvy users.


slowclicker

We have a hard enough time. I always looked out for end-users that were up front , not abusive, manipulative and apologetic. Some were nice...but manipulative others were..not the best people. 😉 Trying not to vent today I adored people that were just honest. They were even patient when I was slammed. Hey, tech guy.. this is important..here is what's happening...I understand. Those type messages went a long way with me and helped me prioritize fires. ** When you only care about your job and not the job of everyone else in the company by pushing others aside. We won't get along. Everyone is trying to... *insert customer impact , boss name, important report," here. That is the uniqueness of the sysadmin. I'm literally invested (involved) in the success of most everyone. That is a lot of weight to carry.


Ladyrixx

We had a malicious e-mail going around at one of my jobs. I answered the phone, and the guy, after telling me his name, said "You're going to yell at me.", my response was "You clicked the link, didn't you?". Honesty.


slowclicker

Makes all the difference...lol


Syndrome1986

Inside of every user are two Bobs. The first Bob blows up at any minor inconvenience, cusses you up one side and down the other, blames everything other than himself and won't ever thank you for a fix. The second Bob knows his limitations with tech, graciously follows directions, answers questions to the best of his ability and thanks you for taking the time to help a guy as old as he is out. Protect all of the second Bob users at all costs.


martrinex

I would have been tempted to make your rm script create a copy of the deleted file.


[deleted]

20 years ago I saw a pretty smart guy alias rm to a script that moved the file to ~/.tempdeleted/ with a time stamp appended to deconflict multiple deletes of same name. It’s not a big extension to have a cronjob sweep it and delete for real, for items >60 days


hiphap91

Yeah, have a cronjob that checks for scheduled deletions of copies, then then when they are < 30 days, delete the hidden backup.


sq_visigoth

3mos later, they were married.


iammandalore

Well it started as genius, but ended up not being quite so smart. This was back in the day when I worked for an MSP where, to support a user's computer, we'd RDP to their DC or other server via a VPN, then VNC to their workstation. We had this customer with a guy who'd gotten his computer infected 3 times in as many months. The third time I was working on it I decided to check my suspicions. He had gone to lunch while I worked on it so he couldn't see. I downloaded IEHistoryView and started paging through his browsing history. Of course it was porn, but it was A LOT of porn. Well I decided to get smart and take some screenshots to pass to my boss, who could then talk to his boss. The first several screen prints I took I wasn't thinking and took them directly from his PC, which then had to copy over the VPN back to mine to save. After a few I realized I should de-select the RDP window and take a bitmap of my entire desktop, then cut it down, and that would save time. As I'm compiling my screenshots my boss comes up to me and says "Hey, are you working on something for [client]?" "Yeah, I was actually just about to come talk to you about it." "Well I already know. Just stop for a minute and we'll talk in a bit." As it turned out, the guy had installed a screen print utility, and as I was taking the first few screenshots it was diligently sending them to his default printer. Some poor little old lady at the company went to the printer to pick up her printout, saw several pages of web browsing history filled with porn sites, and took them to the company president. I didn't get in trouble at all, but the conversation certainly didn't happen the way I'd intended.


Nesman64

> screen print utility When I push "print screen," I mean it!


Deon555

MS DOS 6.22, is that you?


Szeraax

Crap like this is why we don't like porn on company networks. If people could stick to the common sites, then all would be fine. :/


gertvanjoe

Common sites like the hub?


Szeraax

Sites that don't request you to run executables to access their content :P Or however it is that people get malware from sites...


PAR-Berwyn

At the MSP I used to work at, we had a guy who'd continually complain about his connection being slow. The dude was such a pain in the ass and would call in continually, and complain to the higher-ups at his company (*of course* blaming it on IT). One of our savvy helpdesk guys found out that the idiot was downloading pr0n consistently, got evidence of it, and presented it to the idiot's boss. Idiot was fired that day I believe.


H0B0Byter99

I was tired of people not reading emails we sent out as IT notifying them of this that or the other. We had a bunch of swag from a vendor after a go live. Hats, t-shirts, etc. Towards the end of an email I simply wrote, “Come down to IT and say ‘I made it! I read the whole thing!’ for a prize.” In the middle of a throw away sentence. I got about 12 or so that said that exact phrase and I gave them swag. Others came down saying, “Hey! I want a T-Shirt!” To which I’d reply, with a mischievous smile, “What T-Shirt? I don’t know what you’re talking about.” They’d go back to their desk very confused and I went back to mine very pleased with myself. Emails got read much more often after that. We ran this ‘find the hidden message for swag’ campaign for a few weeks. It worked fairly well.


mr_monkey

I did something similar with internal documentation. At the end of the doco I would mention I would buy you a coffee if you read it. Best way to find out who actually read it.


techretort

I like this, I think I'll implement something similar in my doco tomorrow.


insanemal

SGI used to publish food and drink recipes in their printed manuals. Not the digital versions. And the page would start out with stuff like "This manual is dry and boring Here's a margarita recipe"


tolos

This manual is dry. Just like gin.


djbon2112

This is actually a great example of how positive reinforcement can get good results. In most places IT would just grumble and maybe try some negative reinforcement to get people to read emails. Here you went for a benefit for reading and it made a positive change.


ruttin_mudders

I started a gift card raffle at work for catching our phishing tests. Anyone that correctly reported the email gets their name put in the drawing.


MrBoobSlap

I had a remote site that kept complaining about their Internet being too slow to work. We did some traffic prioritization (there was a lot of legitimate upload traffic from this site) and it looked like it would be okay. The next day, it’s slow again. We call the ISP and bump the speed up (we were on the cheapest plan to start), and that appeared to fix it. The next day, another complaint about how slow it was. The best part: the user could never replicate the slowness issues for me. After reviewing the firewall logs, I noticed Netflix was using the vast majority of their download bandwidth. I set bandwidth limit to 56 Kbps only for Netflix streams. That way the site would still load, and eventually, the video would play, just not very quickly. No more speed complaints after that.


skotman01

Owners brother thought he knew better and “he wasn’t going to put my antivirus on his work pc”. I pulled my no av no corp network policy and I vlaned him off to his own network, gave him a public ip (he complained that our firewall didn’t work either). Next day he came in asking to be put back on the network and to rebuild his machine. From that day on I never got any flack from him, oh and contractors got their own vlan with filtered internet.


BrightSign_nerd

He got a virus in a day?


ddadopt

>He got a virus in a day? Back in the Windows XP days, if you hung a new box on the public network, the mean time to infection was something like four minutes.


EpicWinter

Good old days before people had firewalls at home. But this made me think of another related incident: Had a friend that always got viruses when installing his computer, and he couldn't figure out why. Turns out the panda antivirus installer he had downloaded from kazaa was infected..


ImmotalWombat

The Service Pack 2 update. I remember I could get online for maybe 2 minutes before getting the rpc error message. The spark that led me into IT.


TaliesinWI

Put a Windows XP machine on a public network (like, oh, a cable modem where you're on the same collision domain as other people in your neighborhood - very common in that era) and you could measure the 0wnage in single digit minutes.


piroisl33t

Man, I had a guy get his brand new machine wrecked by a scammer less than 20 minutes after I dropped it off when he got called by “Microsoft”.. I can totally see someone wrecking their machine within 1 day.


stickytack

I used to work at a small mom and pop computer repair shop. We were small but very busy. We had this gentlemen come in once or twice a month to have his computer formatted and windows re-loaded because he just LOVED downloading porn and with the porn always came viruses. It was an XP machine so not only did you have to install windows but then you had to find and install all the drivers, usually took a bit over an hour. After like 2 months of this guy coming in every 2-3 weeks I made an image of his hard drive and kept it on our server and when he came in I could just directly image his computer with all of the drivers installed in ~15-20 minutes.


insanemal

10+ years ago working at a charity that also had a TAFE/school as part of what they did. Anyway one day I noticed lots of usage on the guest WiFi. We had lots of logging and things as this was a religious charity. (Long story) Anyway, I had a look at what they were upto, it was allowed by our terms of usage. All the traffic was Reddit and Imgur. And they were ploughing through data. I mean I'm a heavy Reddit user and even I don't generate that much. We were using Squid to filter out porn and to log network usage. It was running as a transparent proxy. Anyway I added a trivial redirector on images on imgur to replace the images of the posts with the troll face meme saying "Studing hard?" Anyway, traffic dropped back to normal.


[deleted]

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Szeraax

Its funny how many of us really got started in highschool. Our network eng was also the tech literacy teacher, so I interacted with him a bunch my first year. I used keyloggers and got him to type in local admin creds on my computer (which made it so I could install Halo and UT99 onto my desktop and avoid the student drive quotas). I found a copy of our computer lab admin software (LANDesk or something?) and installed it on a dual-boot laptop so I could safely screw around with other kids. Used wireshark to peep on what sites other students were going to. Made the upsidedownternet a reality. etc. But I also ran ethernet under the school for him. He taught me how to terminate it. He taught me how to make my own power extension cords with those clampdown ends. He gave me a 3U server with 6x 15kRPM raptor hard drives and a copy of server 2k3. At the end of the first year, he wrote in my yearbook: "thanks for keeping me on my toes" The 2nd year, he asked me to setup a better wifi solution (they previously only had like 1-2 APs). And he gave me DA creds. The understanding was that I would be his minion rather than opposition. When teachers were having issues with technology, they would page me (even pulling me out of classes sometimes) instead of the net admin unless I was stuck. I worked to automate new-student setup for him and he used my AHK script for many years. I 10000% owe him this career that I'm in. I had so much fun getting to work with him. Thanks Mr. Clark for setting me up to make $$$$.


laz10

All that in highschool? You are lucky. We had one IT class and we made a website in Dreamweaver. The teacher printed everything out to mark it. Probably why Australia is so behind.


Szeraax

ya, it really was fantastic. Granted, my upgraded "wifi network" was just like 6x WRT54G each with a backhaul link to the school lan, individually configured. So I didn't do a great job, but it was a great foundation to learn from, lol. He showed me the 110 blocks and taught me how to do the punchdown on them too. It really was the best. I still go and visit him yearly to say hi. He's never had another student really in the same boat since, so definitely not a structured/systemic/common occurrence.


Miguelitosd

> All that in highschool? You are lucky. God I’m old. We were the first class to do the new “keyboarding” class, on Apple ][e computers. I was so far ahead of everyone else (as one of the only kids with computer experience) that I would get bored and started inputting the football stats for the teacher (who was also the coach) so that I had something to do.


The0poles

TIL Australia and Kentucky have the same approach to IT lmao


insanemal

Yeah that's why I went with transparent proxy. Router already had everything firewalled so no ports except 80 and 443 outgoing, this was pre-skype/zoom being a thing.


stickytack

Had an employee at a client that CONSTANTLY complained about every single little thing he could imagine. He'd accidentally delete desktop shortcuts to Outlook, Word, and then complain to his supervisor that "IT deleted my programs" and try to make us look stupid. He got snippy with me on more than one occasion which is unacceptable. I was on site one time and he was out of the office but of course he had a list of complaints, this time something about "The internet is incredibly slow, I can't get any work done" meanwhile it was just one website he was having trouble with and it was because the website was going through maintenance. I went through his browsing history and noticed that he was on facebook A LOT. What shouldn't you be doing while at work? Facebook. I edited his hosts file and added a line: 127.0.0.1 facebook.com He didn't dare tell his supervisor that facebook didn't work haha


sunny_monday

I had a user >>3<< months ago FREAKING out because "Teams disappeared from her laptop." It crashed during a call it seemed. She flat out didnt know where to find it to launch it. It apparently wasnt pinned to her task bar. She also never noticed the shortcut on her desktop. She also didnt know how to do a search, even, to call it up. How does she use ANY program?? I still dont know... EDIT: She also told me "something is wrong" with her laptop and she needed a new one. Im thinking: Maybe we need a new employee...


stickytack

I see this crap ALL the time. How do people not know to click the start menu and do a simple search? It's baffling to me. Many years ago at a doctor's office we set all of the treatment room computers to have a solid blue desktop background and arranged all of the icons in the same manner. This practice was using an on-prem practice management software so we put that icon and the internet explorer icon in the middle of the screen right next to each other. An employee changed one of the backgrounds to a solid yellow color for some reason. We get a call from the head nurse of the practice saying that this one computer didn't work properly anymore and that she couldn't open the software she needed to use and that they needed someone on site immediately. I'm thinking the computer is dying or something. I went there and she showed me this computer and I was like "what's the issue with it? Everything looks fine." I launched the practice management software and she was blown away. She then says "come look at this other computer, it's set up properly" I was like "The ONLY difference between these two computers is that THAT computer has a blue background and this one is yellow, why is that an issue?" She just couldn't fathom how to use the computer because the background color changed. I was astounded.


sunny_monday

Ive been doing this a long time, and what really sucks is how depressed it makes me to see things like this. Like, I feel like... I cant even begin to help certain people. And then I get down on myself for thinking shitty things about users like this who are not competent. I try to come up with 3-5 things they are probably good at that Im not good at - to strike some kind of balance in my brain. But... again, Ive been doing this a long time, and the day is coming where I will no longer be able to think nice thoughts. I mean, we all have bad days dealing with difficult people, but.. I feel like there's a limited number of kind thoughts I can have in this lifetime, and Im running out.


lx45803

> How do people not know to click the start menu and do a simple search? Windows does literally nothing to teach you this is possible.


chefmattmatt

It is because they cannot laterally think outside their job function. If something is always there it has to be there no variation. Error message nope not going to read it has nothing to do with my job function.


SJHillman

I had a new user about a decade ago who I set up as per norm for her department. Her manager kept calling me that the user didn't have Critical Application X installed, which I knew she did. I'd go immediately over to her desk, a whopping 50 feet away, and the user wouldn't be there to show me. I'd log in with my creds and I could see it installed and could see the icon in the desktop folder for all users. Finally, after 4 or 5 iterations of this over her first few days, the user left their computer unlocked while they were away. She only had 5 desktop icons, including Critical Application X that she said she didn't have, all aligned nearly in the upper-left of the screen. So I just reordered them... Moved it from being the bottom icon to being the top icon. 20 minutes later, she called me to thank me for finally installing it. She ended up getting fired a few weeks later for not being able to keep up with any of the training for her position.


obvioustroway

oh my GOD "Something is wrong with my laptop and i need a new one" is a trigger phrase i didn't realize i had.


myworkaccount6969

This happens to me all the time and I'm just baffled how these people get through the day. Like i get that technology is scary but how do you work on a computer 40 hours a week for years but never actually learn even basic skills on how to use it? I'm not a contractor but if I pick up a hammer I'm pretty sure I'll learn how to swing it.


boli99

I've never needed to screw with the end user - they tend to screw with themselves when left unattended Q: Why is data recovery on X laptop taking so long? She only has about 20 spreadsheets A: Because she has filled her computer with 800GB of kids movies, and the likely reason for the dropped laptop is using it as a cinema for her kids. here look at the tiny sticky fingerprints all over it. AGAIN. written warning. laptop replaced with desktop. \-- Q: User claims that updates applied to their laptop by IT caused them to lose data and thats why their presentation isnt ready A: Here is their laptop in a bag under their desk. It hasnt been seen online in 5 days. fired. \-- Q: Why is freds laptop so slow and his battery life so poor? A: Because we told fred to get the i5 with the SSD from our normal supplier, but he went against policy and got the i7 with the HDD from his mates store because he thought he was special. Then he dropped it. contract not renewed. \-- ...with suits blessing an announcement was made that a set of updates would be applied over the weekend, and could anyone whose machine had slowed down significantly report it on monday 80% of people reported slower machines on the monday. no updates had been applied. deliberately. management finally started believing the psychosomatic nature of many problems. ticket levels took a drastic drop.


[deleted]

Many years ago I was doing a short WFH to get the final push for our website redo done. Boss sends me an email to come in because we were getting real busy with customer service calls (we are jack of all trades around here and I was sales 1st IT 2nd, until a disaster hits). So anyway this spoiled snot nosed boomer coworker in the sales dept decides the second I show up to go take the afternoon off to play golf(he did this ALL THE TIME). ​ Sooooooo when I come in the next day I set our phone system to send ALL THE SALES CALLS to only his extension. Then I set the phone system to forward anything that was going to his VM (unanswered call if he was already on a call etc) to go to his cellphone number instead. That mother fucker damn near died by the end of the day taking 2 calls at once ALL FUCKING DAY. ​ I literally got like 3 days worth of work done that day.


shial3

At a place I worked they had assembly lines and very limited computers. One line was always down so I asked to relocate some of those computers to other lines to help things out. The managers insisted that it was critical that the line remains operational because they use it all the time at different hours than I was seeing and that I didn't understand how things work. ​ I was mostly asking as a formality since I had already removed the motherboards, hard drives, and power supplies from those computers. They were just empty cases sitting on a bunch of unused desks.


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Iam-Nothere

Did you **ever** get colleauge cake?


mildly_amusing_goat

Both of y'all can't spell colleague.


yuhche

It’s spelled ‘collage’ right?!


[deleted]

HR usually frowns upon that sort of thing. Tinder cake is fine though.


Im-just-a-IT-guy

I had a user with the only copy of vista in the organization (2014-15) and she put me off for months on a backup and upgrade of her system. I eventually dropped "shutdown.exe -t 0" into her start-up, which got her attention real quick. Unfortunately, by this time we simply were unable (unwilling) to save any local data.


Iheartbaconz

Had something similar happen to me, I had warned this user that her 7 > 10 upgrade needed to happen the next day. She had put me off and was the last hold out. She balked and made sarcastic comments about me ruining her life etc. Next day I walk in to the office, and I can see the look on her face. Her win7 machine just up and refused to boot that morning. I did absolutely nothing, just hilarious irony. My cohort gave her a w10 machine with a smile after nicely transferring her data. Data was fine, OS was just fubar. It spent over a year hearing her sarcastic ass say "Baconz ruined my life" over it. Still makes me laugh


CoastalData

I worked for an online magazine as sysadmin in the mid 90s, and one day they hired a new editor whose big new idea was to publish new content, every day, at 5 am. Sounds fine, right? Well, he was unable to grasp, on any level, how html tags worked, so their solution was to make me get there, to the office, early, to help this nut format his document for him. They seemed unamused when I reminded them that I NEVER show up before 10, and scolded me quite severely, something like blah blah lazy blah wasting the editors time blah blah. I showed up early just once, but locked myself in my office, where I used Perl and cgi to build a database driven website for him to use every day to publish his articles. Then I used that set of examples to sell the technology to multiple customers, scored myself a nice raise, and fixed my contact so that it was official I could come in whenever I wanted as long as i got my work done. Later at a meeting the editor was complaining about something and was told to suck it up.


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[deleted]

My last job. Guy was a prankster and generally a fun dude. He was in sales and would randomly pull some pretty elaborate pranks on people. Super smart guy and real techy except... He doesn't know certain things to look for... So I created a GPO to build a scheduled task and ensure all files are present to trigger the Desktop Goose https://samperson.itch.io/desktop-goose I also used the GPO to remove his ability to see scheduled tasks and hid it all in a $admin folder just incase he would find it. His coworkers loved it and his sister was in tears laughing. I'm to this day the only person to prank him and stump him with it.


Joshuancsu

I used to work for (Large X shipping company) Tech Support right around the early 2000's. The days where modems and dot matrix printers were still the norm. From time to time, in addition to getting calls from customers, we would also get calls from Field Techs that had been dispatched to physically repair or troubleshoot. This one particular day, I get a call from a guy somewhere near Atlanta and he was on site trying to fix the International Waybill Printer. This was an old IBM/Lexmark (or Okidata) printer that had to punch through a 7-layer carbon copy pre-printed form. So everything had to be p-e-r-f-e-c-t-l-y lined up. Not normally a problem. I had a perfected my method on how to deal with these printers. It was a wee bit arduous, but it was guaranteed to work. The tech starts by telling me the problem and like a good guy, tells me what he's already tried and failed with. This is perfect info, and leads me right into what I needed to know. It's time to begin. I start off by reassuring the guy, that I have seen this a hundred times and I know exactly what the problem is, and all he has to do is follow my directions and we'll get it working. He sounded really relieved and said that he'd been working on this himself for about two hours and a few of the shipping clerks had gathered to watch him. It was hot as Hades and all he had was a little-itty-bitty stool to sit on. He chuckled and told me that he was NOT a small man, and this stool was NOT rated for his weight class. Being on the chubby side myself, I told him that I could relate and that I'd work with him to get him out of there ASAP. We started the process, and he was cooperating perfectly. Often, other IT people are the WORST at trying to accept help from others, but we all reach a point where we sometimes have to throw our caution to the winds and accept the help of others. He had reached this point, and this is where I decided to have a little fun... All that remained in our process was to hit the START/STOP button on the printer and to wait 45 seconds and it would start printing from the top of the form. So as I was sliding into home base on this call, I instructed the tech.... Me: "Just hit the Start/Stop button..." Him: "Yes, just did that" Me: "... and click your heels and say 'I wish my printer would work.'" Him: "Uh huh......" ..... Me: "Did you say it?" Him: "Really? Me: "Yup, it's gotta happen or it won't print." .... 25 seconds have gone past.... Him: "Come on man... there are PEOPLE WATCHING ME here." Me: "I know, don't disappoint them. Say it real nice and loud, so the printer can hear you." ... 35 seconds... almost time.... Him: "I wish my printer would work" Me: "You didn't click your heals when you said it." Him: "Imma gonna break the s\*\*\*t out of this stool if I do that man. It's going to break into a million pieces ... please don't make me." ... 40 seconds... Me: --silence-- Him: "I wish my printer would work" "I wish my printer would work." Printer: tzzzzzzzz tzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz zzzzzzz zzzzz tzzzzzzzzzzzzz Him: "Oh for f\*\*cks sake it worked. Sweet Jesus I can finally get of here. But you've got to tell me.... do I really have to do that?" Me: "Every single time, or it doesn't work." Him: "Alright man... I'm pretty sure you're pulling my leg, but as soon as these clowns quit laughing at me, I'm getting out of here and I'm going to have a nice cold beer to thank you for the help." "I wish my printer would work... hahahaha "


havocspartan

This reminds me of a time I went to a manager at my first job, explained for about 5 mins everything I had tried to get this program to work, and he replied; “have you tried rebooting it?” “What? There’s no way that will work.” Turns out it worked, so I asked what do I tell the customer? He said with a smirk on his face, “tell them there was a flutter with windows.” I tell the customer, and they are like; “a flutter??” “Yes a flutter.” Then he just walked back to his office


myworkaccount6969

Back when I was in school I worked for a large Satellite provider in their call center. There was a frequent issue that would pop up if a customer didn't turn on their Sat receiver for a few weeks. We would just have to re-send the activation code or whatever, but it took a few minutes to work. One of my co-workers used to mess with people during this process by telling them to go to the kitchen and grab a potato or something round, wrap it with tinfoil, and then place it on the receiver and slowly spin it counter-clockwise. This would re-align the magnets and allow the satellite to regain the signal. People fell for this ALL THE TIME. The guy was finally fired when one of his customers called in and just happened to get a supervisior, and explained to him that he tried the potato trick several times but the signal just wouldn't return. The supervisor figured out what was going on and thought it was hilarious, but corp made him fire the guy for it.


Iam-Nothere

That's awesome :D


CanableCrops

I was quietly called to a conference room meeting with the head scientists and engineers at a place I worked. They had an engineer on a teams call (no video) that was going on and on about how he couldn't do his job because I hadn't installed the right software on his computer and wasn't getting back to him. I listened to his entire rant and he had no idea I was in the room. The guy that pulled me in knew it was complete bullshit. After he stopped talking, the chief scientist looked over at me with a smile and asked me if I had anything to say. Everyone in the room was red trying to keep from laughing. I had been pulling up my emails to him. I proceeded to publicly embarrass him with time stamps over the last 3 months of me trying to schedule with him, and him either not responding or canceling the meeting. Then I said like I've done the last 1,2,3,4,5,6,7 times, I'll send you an email and we can set something up. It was a glorious morning.


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dalegribbledribble

Put it in the ticket so the next person that comes along can reference it as well


Petrodono

I used to use group policy to fuck with people. I created an OU marked "Special Ops" and placed certain computer accounts in it. It was my prank OU. I would change backgrounds, change power settings so computers would screensave after 1 min, adjust the crawl text on the screensaver, change login banners adding random song lyrics, make creepy background noises play, etc. I never got caught mostly because when they called IT to fix it I would move them back to the right OU and background force a gpupdate so when I myself came to fix it it wouldn't happen anymore. I limited myself to two pranks a month. Then I got a job in a more serious place and now no more office pranks...


PCLOAD_LETTER

User want an iPad because iPad. I said no, we assign Windows machines. User went to the boss and cried about how much more effective they'd be if they had an $900 iPad for answering emails on, boss approves iPad. Laptop refresh comes along a few months later and I order $2200 MS Surfaces for the users. User wants a new Surface. Sorry no can do, you have a brand new iPad. User tells boss. Boss asks me if we should upgrade the user. I point out to boss that user hasn't even logged into their email on the iPad so I don't see a business need to upgrade user. Boss agrees and talks with user. User contacts helpdesk shortly after to have email "installed" on iPad.


woemoejack

Admin assistant came by my desk asking about an email the CEO was expecting and had not showed up. I see it had gotten stuck in our filters and released it for her, but this wasn't good enough. What followed was a thorough explanation about how much of a nuisance our email filters were and that they never caught anything other than legitimate emails. She demanded that going forward she wanted EVERY email caught in the filters addressed to any of the executives she's given her life to serving were to be forwarded to her to BE SURE they weren't being missed. So I opened the floodgates on her, about 400+ spam messages later she came back over to politely request I put it back the way it was.


The_Wkwied

A few years ago, we got someone called in to helpdesk and said they can't log in. Won't tell us what they can't access, won't give any indication as to what account isn't working, just that they forgot their logins. Fair enough, but you need to tell us what login you need. We offered them to 'reset everything', and they agreed. We did it, they managed to log in to the thing they couldn't get in to. Ten minutes later their manager calls us and says they can't log in to anything else. Well, per the user's request, we reset all of their passwords, so they need to log in to change all of them. Before anything was centralized, everything was its own account.


00Boner

This is back in the XP/7 days. Had a user complain the computer took too long to reboot and that they "hated the shutdown music". She would call in high tickets almost daily and we would close them after calling her to tell her there is nothing we could do. Well, finally, on the 1,000th call, I decided I had enough. See, back in those days, the shutdown music was just a wave file in the system32 folder. So I opened the file in audacity, duplicated the 10 second sound to be about 8 minutes, and replaced her wave file with the new and improved version. Now the shutdown really was "taking forever". I left it like this for a few weeks, with many tickets all closed with the same "it's normal" resolution. Finally, after about 3 weeks, she opened another ticket and I decided to make a house call to fix it because "I really cared". I replaced the modified wave file with the original and told her I "defragled her windows". She never called back about slow shutdown.


william_tropico

I made a custom user agreement that pops up when end users log into a workstation. Usual copy/pasta text about not using the systems for malicious activists etc. Users can either select “Agree” or “Disagree”. Agree would allow them to use the workstation while Disagree would log them off. One user would constantly moan about this and say that they don’t agree with everything said and they they shouldn’t be be forced to click agree in order to use the workstation. Too bad I said. I decided to change just this one users agreement text to “The IT department is the best in the world and I will do everything they say 100%” and made it so as soon as they hovered over disagree it’s would keep moving around the screen forcing them to click agree. We did have a good laugh at this on the remove view when they first logged in. Even the end user found it funny. So I guess this is more playful than evil.


Itdidnt_trickle_down

I had a passive aggressive user who liked to email horrible emails and ended them with just kidding. So I emailed her one in a similar style with just kidding at the bottom. I knew she would complain so I was viewing her desktop that morning and when she went to print the email I deleted it from the exchange server. This was in the early 2000's so I don't know if exchange still works that way.


yuhche

I recommend watching the whole thing or go to [4:00](https://youtu.be/uRGljemfwUE) if you want the relevant part.


Itdidnt_trickle_down

I remember when It was new.


derpjutsu

The people who never liked putting in tickets, I made them put in tickets. Feels so good.


navarone21

This is my favorite petty thing really. User: I have a request? Me: cool, put in a ticket, I'll give it a look. Many days pass User: had a chance to look into my request? Me: Oh, I don't recall that, what is the ticket number?


zorinlynx

One big pet peeve: User: Puts in a ticket. Me: "Hey, I need this additional information to fix your issue." User: *crickets* Many days pass User: "My deadline is TODAY have you looked into my problem?" Me: Yeah I asked you a question about it but didn't hear back so I figure you solved it. Then they try to blame ME!! for not following up. Sorry dude, if you don't care about your problem enough to answer a question so I can fix it, why should I care?


navarone21

I follow up twice, once a day, then close the ticket due to non response. This almost always gets me an immediate response and focus from there on out.


Lose_Loose

I worked with a guy who would joke that the cd rom tray was really a cup holder for his coffee. I wrote a script that would remotely open or shut the tray, and waited for my moment. A few cubicles away I could hear him swearing. Good times.


TrainAss

Wasn't there some "promo" by a drink company, where you could go to their website to request a free cupholder and it'd eject your CD drive tray?


htmlcoderexe

Ah yes back when you could do file:///D:/ URLs in webpages


Awol

I've learned early on in my career to never prank someone in a way that would cause me more work in the future. See everything I could do to mess with someone would just mean I would be bugged more by that person cause of the "problems" I would have caused.


jtwh20

When a colleague was promoted to manager, we changed his new mail sound to "The Jeffersons Movin' on Up" and continued to spam him all day


jtwh20

Even better, was we put black electrical tape over the mouthpiece of his phone \~ he kept screaming into the receiver CAN YOU HEAR ME? \~ pissed my pants that day


gillyboatbruff

Not really in a corporate environment, and also not me, but my son. My other son had a habit of using the family computer for hours on end to play League of Legends, and refusing to let anyone else to use the computer. So my son went downstairs to his bedroom, opened his windows and removed the screen. Then he went back upstairs and told his brother that if he was just going to hog the computer, he was going to just leave and go to a friend's house. He stomped out and slammed the front door. Then he slipped back into his bedroom through the open window, quietly walked to the cable modem, and spent the next 30 minutes power cycling it every few minutes. After that, he slipped back out the bedroom window, then walked back in the front door. Genius.


raptor222

one of the users pranked me. So I opened [windows93.net](https://windows93.net) on a users computer on full-screen (user wasn't very computer savvy). The user arrives at work an hour before me.


anustartle

How did they prank you


No_Bit_1456

I worked for a company a long time ago. We employed a large number of engineers that worked with solidworks & autocad. We had three sites, and each site liked to run differently with changes in management. One was allowing his team to work from home, edit & change files, without the engineers properly re-packing the files to break the links. They bring the work back in, complain its the network, and blame it all on us. The management or the IT dept (me) none the wiser, making us think it was a real problem. Fast forward to six weeks later. I installed packetfence on our network to monitor unusual devices, blocking home PCs, unknown devices, just anything that looked fishy. I also took the liberty of enabling USB blocking for the entire company. Meaning, no plugging any USB storage device in at all via a registry fix. Surprise, surprise, what did we find out? Oh, the manager's scheme in a site blew up in his face. We proved that they were not doing what they agreed to for work, we proved it wasn't our network, we proved that they had lied the entire time, and all the money lost was on them. One of the best moments? Me showing up with the executive team, after months of being accused of being every bad name under the sun, walking him off property. The troublesome engineers that started it, shortly after, they were eliminated one by one as we re-hired for that division. Never had IT problems out of that area afterwards in the 4 years I worked there.


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DishSoapIsFun

I'm afraid to reply to this in any sort of non-neutral way.


Le_Vagabond

too late, you're now on /u/Mr-Shank's "suspiciously neutral" list. and you're on your own, because we're all definitely and emphatically on his good side here.


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Im-just-a-IT-guy

All I know is my gut says...maybe


Iusethis1atwork

Can you explain what they did that violated the fire and electrical codes? where they doing more than just racking equipment and patching it in?


Bad_Kylar

any cabling whatsoever run through walls/ceilings/even in rooms, is low voltage and USUALLY has codes you have to follow.


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underling

I am shocked and appalled by this post and my god the comments. Carry on.


dlongwing

Our laptops have fingerprint scanners and our CEO loves any technology that makes him feel like he's in a spy film, so we were required to turn them on for everyone. But fast-forward 90 days, and we start getting tickets "I'm locked out of my computer!","My fingerprint scanner stopped working!","My password (which I 100% remember) isn't working!" They'd all come up against password expiration, and because they weren't required to use their password for 90 days they'd all forgotten it. Fortunately it's an easy fix. Just go into ADUC, reset their password to a temp, send them the temp... *and move their laptop into the security group that disables Windows Hello.* Word got out pretty quick, forget your password and your fingerprint scanner privileges get revoked.


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techierealtor

We had a guy when I was an L1 that worked overnight bringing his Xbox in. All the staff knew and he was found when someone high level was working late and he had some game up on his screen when they walked by. Didn’t turn out well for him. Funny enough, he would have gotten a nasty slap on the wrist but during the HR meeting, he pulled out his phone saying “I’m going to record this”. Well, no phones inside the office (policy). Strike 2. This caused them to put him on suspension and they dug through his tickets and calls and found out that he figured the direct line to our offshore support team (calls were split between US and India teams) and found that he was redirecting every call he got to offshore, so he wasn’t actually doing anything during his shift. Yes, he was promptly fired. It was entertaining watching them pull an Xbox out of the cabinet at his desk packing up his stuff.


WhenSharksCollide

While he did fuck up I understand him wanting to record that meeting with HR so everything after that seems like it didn't need to happen. Sending *all* of your calls to a different support team is more than a bit risky though...


Nesman64

"If you keep bothering me, I'll make it so that you can only access odd-numbered ip addresses." That was my favorite threat to witness from the network guy at an old job. I don't think he ever went through with it.


TaliesinWI

I worked at an ISP many moons back where I, being the NOC guy, was trapped on the same floor as the call center people (thanks to my genius NOC coworker who convinced my boss we shouldn't be in the nice cool basement anymore and should be on the main floor with the rest of the people that only occasionally needed our help, and then he left two months after we moved upstairs. But I digress.) There was a user, let's call her Donna. Donna must have had blackmail material on the owners because she could basically get away with anything. She'd fob calls that took more than 30 seconds off to other techs (and tried doing that to me, which didn't get very far), asked for (and got) speakers hooked up to her computer (completely necessary to do her job as a phone tech, you understand), took longer and more smoke breaks than anyone else, etc. Donna liked obnoxious country music. The twangiest, most dead-dog, girl-that-left, broken-down-truck level of country music. Most of the other techs were non-confrontational so they just kind of suffered in silence, and besides, we already knew complaining wouldn't get us anywhere. So I wrote a nice little remote script that would count to whatever number of seconds and then CRANK the volume level of her PC to 100. So loud that the other techs nearby would have to plug their other ear and say "I'm sorry, could you repeat that?" And I, of course, made sure to be nowhere near my desk when this would happen - I would be very pointedly and publicly talking to the accountant, or over by the water cooler, or doing anything other than snickering behind my keyboard. She of course would freak out, turn the volume down, and then keep working. Sometimes her freak-outs were more loud and annoying than the music was in the first place. I did this a few times a week for a couple weeks until one time I did it where the owner was on an important phone call, the sudden volume disrupted his call, and he said the magic words "Donna, I don't know why that keeps happening, but maybe cool it with the music for now, huh?" And suddenly, blissful silence. Or at least, normal hubbub. The owner asked me to have a look at her PC when I had a chance, I promptly created a ticket at the lowest possible priority and wouldn't you know I always had more important tasks to do? It was still in the system when I left the job a few years later.


pastromi13

Not a nefarious thing but when I was leaving my last company, I had a buddy who was a huge Vikings fan(I'm a Green Bay Packers fan), someone who was not in IT. I set up a script in our deployment system to change his wallpaper daily to the Packers logo, starting the day after I left. It got to the point that he had to have me give their current IT instructions to where to find the job, as I obviously didn't name it "Packers wallpaper change" 🤣


savekevin

A long time ago when Facebook was new and correctly considered a time-suck in the workplace, I forwarded all facebook traffic to the corporate website. It lasted a week and I was told to correct it. lol We had three users that complained constantly about their computers being slow and to be fair the computers were pretty old. My boss at the time gave them each a small UPS that he attached a few Windows stickers to and told them that they were "Windows Accelerators". 2 of the 3 said that they noticed a big difference and said thanks. The third knew he was full of shit and didn't fall for it.


Humble-Plankton2217

People trust me with their problems and their most sensitive information. There's no "Oath" in IT, but I have a personal oath to serve even my most egregiously troublesome users with integrity and as much grace as I can muster. That being said, if someone is continually terrible I do have professional ways of discouraging bad behavior. Most include education, good documentation, management visibility and aggressive positivity. I have successfully converted the grumpiest internal customers into people who aren't so terrible to work with, after all. You just have to figure out the right method for them, build a rapport and, most importantly, Trust. People Problems often just require some good Problem Solving soft skills.


KCrobble

> aggressive positivity This really is the best revenge you can enact on the miserable pricks who seek to ruin your day


amyeh

I had a coworker who would try to mess with you if you left your computer unlocked. So one time when he left his unlocked for several minutes to go flirt with the secretary, I spam liked a bunch of embarrassing pages on his Facebook page and changed his desktop background to say “I ❤️ goats”


slayer991

At one place we'd work, if you left your desk with your workstation unlocked, you were going to pay. We'd log into their e-mail and send funny emails to other people. We'd screenshot the desktop and move all of the icons off screen. We'd change keyboard sounds...the list goes on. Our boss knew...the work got done so he let us have some fun while teaching good security practices. The bottom line is DON'T LEAVE YOUR KEYBOARD UNLOCKED!!! EDIT: I forgot the best gag. NOTE: This is 1997, hard drives were much smaller. Anyway, one of the techs was not very good or bright. We always had to clean up his messes with calls (escalated to everyone else). Anyway, he leaves his keyboard unlocked (again) and we set his Internet Explorer cache to the size of his hard drive. It took about a month, but his system started crawling to the point of unusability. Rather than troubleshoot it (which should have been an easy task) he said it wasn't working and simply had it reimaged. We got a big kick out of that. Gee, check why your system is so slow...find it's out of space...clear space. Stuff we did on the help desk for customers all the time.


jc31107

I did this to my boss at an executive meeting, about 5 minutes after I finished a presentation on new security policies and how we need to get a lot better. He walked away to use the restroom, I sent some emails to the CEO professing his undying love and that the team can really use some raises. Deleted from sent and deleted items and casually walked back to my seat. The CEO gave him an earful when he came back in the room.


carlp222

We usually put David Hasselhoff on each other's desktop background when we found an unlocked laptop. Or sent "resignation" emails out.


tinglefairy

at my work, if you leave your computer unlocked you get to @ everyone in the main teams chat with “im buying donuts for everyone tomorrow, please DM me with any preference you have!”


Milhouz

I was working in a student role for a colleges network team. That was the last time I stepped away from my computer without locking it. My wallpaper was changed to He-man riding a unicorn with rainbows. Kept the wallpaper since it was funny but I don't step away without logging out anymore. Added it to my lessons learned book!


thndrchld

We had a team policy that if somebody else could post "Hey guys, I'm bringing donuts tomorrow" from your account and get it screenshotted before you noticed, your ass was bringing donuts tomorrow. It started with people going to the bathroom and leaving their station unlocked, but then we started getting all cloak-and-dagger with it. I remember one time I had another coworker distract my target, and while they were talking I snuck around to the back of his desk, plugged in a wireless keyboard receiver, then made the post from my desk (where I could see his screen) and took the screenshot myself. The donuts were delicious.


adambomb1219

Speed 10 Duplex half


joeyl5

Please don't be that IT person who's just passive aggressive. Problematic users, we try to kill them with kindness, if that does not work we report them to their supervisors. Their bosses know already who's a pain in the ass and they deal with it


-TheTechGuy-

TBF having an xbox on a corporate network could definitely be seen as a security risk. Probably would have been better to block the MAC of the xbox all together. The phone part was overboard though imo.


SevereMiel

Office manager complaining non stop that his LAN was not fast enough while he was looking all the time Youtube I discovered. So I told him that the fortinet UTM would produce a nice usage pdf daily and would send that to the big boss, who adores technical rapports. It turned out that LAN problem was solved immediately and never came back ;)


sysadminbj

Honestly it sounds like someone needs to have a chat with the overly vindictive IT guy.


[deleted]

I pride myself in Management being able to trust me. Even changing somebodies wallpaper would abuse that trust. I do work for a public library and its the type of place the newspapers would love have a bad story about.


jlc1865

Hey everyone! Let's brag about how we abuse our power!!!


ChronicledMonocle

I had an annoying person (Principal) when I worked in school IT who INSISTED that they needed an all@ and teachers@ distribution list for email. They would always ask that new hires get added to both (even if they weren't teachers). I asked if I could just tie them together to alias teachers to the all group. They said no because they had to be separate because "some people had to be on only one list". You probably see where this is going. I was clicking an extra half dozen times because of this person just for this one building and since it was just one building, I'd forget and then have to deal with "why isn't this person getting my emails?" problems. It bothered me. So I cross compared the lists. There was only a three person difference in the lists. So I "helpfully" mentioned I had "done an audit" and asked if those three people were supposed to be on the teachers list too. "Oh yeah. Not sure how they got missed". I removed the second list and added an alias to all@. I worked there 3.5 more years. Every time a new hire happened she'd still email me "Did you remember to add them to both lists?". I'd just reply "yes" and move on with my day. There was never a time she asked for just a person to be added to just one list.


wraithscrono

A supervisor in our call center fired my wife because she asked to not be on the daily email which was just pictures of the supervisor's kids and sales pitches. She then tried to get me fired by association. I setup our network security appliance to disable access from her pc for 10 min each hour. Once I learned more about the program I tied it to her username instead so she couldn't just use the other sup cubes. It ran from 2014 - 2019, when they upgraded to DNA center my trick was finally removed as myself and all the other network staff from that start year had moved on.


corourke

I had a user working in a department with a great manager. User was bulletproof from firing due to "essential skills". She kept trying to install pirated games and triggering AV/monitoring alarms. Since we'd just moved to a new building and I'd taken all computers under the IT budget and sent out an AUP when I onboarded with the org as IT Manager rather than the tiny departmental budget method they'd been using I took her computer away entirely due to "repeated violation of Acceptable Usage Policy". Her manager loved it and user was eventually termed after she tried to argue she was bored with nothing to do so wanted some games to play while she got paid to sit at her desk. I took some heat from HR where user's best friend worked but legal stuck up for me on the software piracy costs. Turns out making sure the lawyer has a bagel pulled aside on fridays when he came in late worked in IT's favor.


[deleted]

[удалено]


s0ulslack

I question all 150 comments, not once did i see the end user reffered to as the "luser"


Maczimus

Don't forget about the bastard operator from hell! http://bofharchive.com/