Tales of IT Idiocy

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.'"

Comments

Sometimes it's the little things

[elrous0]

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.

Re:Sometimes it's the little things

[rot26]

Don't tell anybody, but it was ME who keyed BOTH of their cars.

Way more than 9 elsewhere

[dkleinsc]

The Daily WTF 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?

[grasshoppa]

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.

Infoworld

[Spykk]

We get a lot of fluff pieces on the front page of slashdot via Infoworld and I've always wondered what mechanism they are using to get such high returns. Do they have their employees vote up stories in the firehose, or are their articles genuinely interesting enough that they earn their place on the front page? If they are "gaming the system" somehow is that something that slashdot's staff should be policing?

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?

[mcgrew]

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...

[Verteiron]

"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.