Tales of IT Idiocy

Sometimes it's the little things by elrous0 · 2012-01-23 04:56 · 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.

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Re:Sometimes it's the little things by Sockatume · 2012-01-23 05:02 · Score: 4, Insightful

I guess any little thing can spark a fire.
Only when you have enough fuel. Which in this case is probably a metaphor for workplace resentment.

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Re:Sometimes it's the little things by vlm · 2012-01-23 05:23 · Score: 2

It would have been a funny ending if the whole thing had been encouraged by a 3rd party.

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"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Re:Sometimes it's the little things by VortexCortex · 2012-01-23 05:35 · Score: 5, Funny

And little things can become very big (in your mind) if you obsess over them long enough.
Wait, what? I don't think it's gotten any longer.
Re:Sometimes it's the little things by tilante · 2012-01-23 05:55 · Score: 4, Insightful

"One dipshit Archduke"? You do realize that the Archduke in question was heir to the throne of one of the most powerful countries in Europe, and this was a time when royalty still had more than just ceremonial functions? It'd be the equivalent of someone assassinating the vice-president of the US today -- not just some random bozo getting killed.
Re:Sometimes it's the little things by Anonymous Coward · 2012-01-23 06:03 · Score: 3, Insightful

So, in your mind, absolutely anyone who makes a six figure salary is by definition a "dominant, exploitative jackass". Is it just maybe a little bit possible that you're bitter about your own salary?
Re:Sometimes it's the little things by ColdWetDog · 2012-01-23 06:11 · Score: 4, Insightful

It'd be the equivalent of someone assassinating the vice-president of the US today -- not just some random bozo getting killed.
If headlines read "Joe Biden" assassinated! about 90% of the US population would have shrugged their shoulders and said 'who'?

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Re:Sometimes it's the little things by Ichijo · 2012-01-23 06:22 · Score: 2

"I truly believe that when men and women think about parking, their mental capacity reverts to the reptilian cortex of the brain." (Prof. Donald Shoup, UCLA)

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Re:Sometimes it's the little things by tilante · 2012-01-23 06:23 · Score: 2

On the other hand, if headlines read "Prince Charles" assassinated, lots of US citizens would know who that is... which is kind of strange when you think about it. Of course, a hereditary monarchy has going for it in things like this the fact that the heir to the throne stays the same for decades at a time. If we only had a new vice-president every thirty or forty years, a lot more people would probably know who the current one was.
Re:Sometimes it's the little things by luis_a_espinal · 2012-01-23 06:25 · Score: 3, Funny

So, in your mind, absolutely anyone who makes a six figure salary is by definition a "dominant, exploitative jackass". Is it just maybe a little bit possible that you're bitter about your own salary?
Apparently so. The existence of engineers who make that much and more by technical wits alone seems to be a myth in the poster's mind.
Re:Sometimes it's the little things by Anonymous Coward · 2012-01-23 06:30 · Score: 4, Insightful

You fail at reading comprehension.
You fail at logic.
The context is people who earn on the order of $100k/year, not, say, in the millions. It is discussing "upper-middle-range talent", not one in a million technical or marketing geniuses. The people who earn around $100k/year are the bane of society: they are sufficiently numerous and have sufficient purchasing power to make their opinion known, but sufficiently stupid that they don't realise it's only chance which selected them from a thousand others and that it's only a dysfunctional job marketplace which pays so many people that sort of amount.
I'm not quite sure why there's always a knee-jerk response to criticism of someone gaining something of "UR JUST ENVIOUS". Is it clear that I condemn serial rapists who remain at large because I just don't get enough sex? No, of course not. Is it clear that I condemn the US military because my country's military doesn't have its might? I bet I'd hear more people arguing that. You know when the argument comes up? Precisely when the arguer is so self-centred as to be unable to perceive a moral question. Almost everyone agrees that serial rape is wrong so no-one talks about being envious of the rapist. But when a form of power imbalance is perceived as just by someone, then surely the problem must be that everyone who raises an objection is just envious - after all, that's the position of the former. Those who object to power are just envious of those with power. Yeah, that's it. Slaves just envy the slavedrivers.
Idiot.
Re:Sometimes it's the little things by operagost · 2012-01-23 07:18 · Score: 4, Insightful

You forgot to add, "we are the 99%" and throw a bible at a cop.
No one works an Indian IT job where they are "literally starving in the streets", because they'll DIE. They'll do something else that has a better return: NOT DYING. I have an IT job and I don't worry about "exploiting" the third world because my job has nothing to do with what happens in the third world. I am not stealing bread out of the mouth of some Indian guy because I am able to buy sufficient food, clothing, and shelter for my household. Once people realize that life is not a zero-sum game, and that charity means selfless giving, we're just going to suffer from greed and class warfare.

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Re:Sometimes it's the little things by rot26 · 2012-01-23 07:40 · Score: 4, Interesting

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

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To ensure perfect aim, shoot first and call whatever you hit the target
Re:Sometimes it's the little things by mseeger · 2012-01-23 07:46 · Score: 3, Insightful

My pet theory is of the "norm problem":
Every person has a problem of which he thinks it is the most important one. He will scale all other problems according to his norm problem. He will devote the same energy on his norm problem as other people do for theirs.
The norm problem of a) may be that his family is starving and of b) that his neighbor occupies his parking space. Nevertheless they will approach their norm problem with max energy.
If you have two people competing for the same goal as norm problem, you will get a major turf war, no matter how trivial the object is.
Re:Sometimes it's the little things by Anonymous Coward · 2012-01-23 09:43 · Score: 2, Funny

Bullshit's flammable????
Re:Sometimes it's the little things by sam_nead · 2012-01-23 11:38 · Score: 4, Funny

You have to dry it out first, but yes. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cow_dung#Uses
Re:Sometimes it's the little things by professionalfurryele · 2012-01-23 12:18 · Score: 2

I'd also point out calling the man who had been striving for peaceful relations (against the will of much of the military) with Serbia, and who envisioned converting the Austro-Hungarian empire into a federal state with more rights for minorities (thus potentially reducing the risk of ethnic strife in the Balkans) a 'dipshit' is a bit disrespectful. I mean sure the man was very far from perfect (staunchy conservative in the European old Catholic style and exactly as aristocratic as you might expect from someone of the Habsburg line, and certainly fundamentally unlike-able for a number of other reasons), but given the options at the time he was probably Eastern Europe's best hope for peace.

Anyone have a Greasemonkey script by Anonymous Coward · 2012-01-23 05:03 · Score: 5, Insightful

Anyone have a Greasemonkey script on-hand that automatically hides stories containing links to infoworld.com, or do I have to whip one up on my own?

Re:Anyone have a Greasemonkey script by MurukeshM · 2012-01-23 06:37 · Score: 2

Well, better convert them to links to printable pages...

Way more than 9 elsewhere by dkleinsc · 2012-01-23 05:03 · Score: 5, Interesting

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.

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Re:Way more than 9 elsewhere by markkezner · 2012-01-23 05:14 · Score: 5, Informative

This is the link he meant to post.

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Re:Way more than 9 elsewhere by Darinbob · 2012-01-23 08:15 · Score: 2

The WTF part is where the article says "IT idiocy" but then proceeds to be just another "users are so dumb" story. Thedailywtf.com is much more about IT "professionals" themselves being idiots which is much more funny.
Re:Way more than 9 elsewhere by antdude · 2012-01-23 08:19 · Score: 3, Informative

http://faildesk.net/ is pretty good too.

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From an actual helpdesk ticket I have open... by SuricouRaven · 2012-01-23 05:05 · Score: 2

"Document keeps formatting. Tried to go on different machines but still not working"

Where is the document? What program is the document for? Filename? Purpose? Anything? Nothing.... as well as obviously not knowing what 'formatting' means, as neither the computer-sense nor the page-laying-sense fit there.

Re:From an actual helpdesk ticket I have open... by Quirkz · 2012-01-23 09:00 · Score: 2

Aw, you should be thankful they told you what the error was. I can't tell you how many times I get just "I'm getting an error." When I ask what kind of error, they don't know, they've forgotten, or they couldn't be bothered to read it and we've got to recreate it. The exception is the standard bluescreen that everyone should recognize, but which for some reason users quite consistently take the time to transcribe the entirety of the obscure hex code I'm very unlikely to want. It's the stuff like "password invalid" or "your browser is in offline mode; you have to go online to get this to work" that gets glossed over.

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Save your clicks! by milbournosphere · 2012-01-23 05:13 · Score: 4, Informative

Just go to http://thedailywtf.com/

They'll have more tales of idiocy, and you won't feel like you need to take a shower afterwards. Seriously, InfoWorld, SIX pages? That's a WTF in itself.

Tales of Dumb IT by mwfischer · 2012-01-23 05:15 · Score: 5, Funny

Reading InfoWorld is about number 6 or so.

What about clueless admins? by grasshoppa · 2012-01-23 05:15 · Score: 4, 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.

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Re:What about clueless admins? by grasshoppa · 2012-01-23 05:32 · Score: 3, Funny

Given the obvious competence level of these admins, do you think they knew how to make ntpdate work as a non-root user?
Ya, neither do I. And yes, they were logging in as root....with a shared public/private key set. Note: BOTH private AND public keys were shared amongst all 500 servers.
Because ssh keys are more secure, don't you know.

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Re:What about clueless admins? by Hatta · 2012-01-23 05:46 · Score: 2

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.
Holy crap. I can understand being ignorant of ntpd, but not even being aware of cron is criminal.

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Re:What about clueless admins? by ae1294 · 2012-01-23 06:36 · Score: 4, Funny

I can understand being ignorant of ntpd, but not even being aware of cron is criminal.
Whoa, I just looked up cron.. My god you just saved my job man! I couldn't get my sleep script to run in the background right... Jesus I've spent 4 weeks on this job and now I can move on to the next. Getting every system to default saving files to root:root from smb shares!
Thanks for saving me...

140 million dollar contract by onyxruby · 2012-01-23 05:16 · Score: 3, 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.

Re:140 million dollar contract by onyxruby · 2012-01-24 07:41 · Score: 2

The opposite in this case, both of their cases were strong. I got dragged into the contract stuff later on to make sure that I knew what both sides were looking for.
The vendor offered in plain language that they could do the migration without needing a single field engineer. This of course was something a salesman came up with that had no basis in anything remotely realistic.
The client offered in plain language that their network migration would be completed before the vendor's contract started. The client reneged after they found out it would cost $400 per port the vendor that still had the management contract to change things out before the contract ran out.
They both had strong cases against each other, it was two fortune 25's arguing about who was more wrong, not about who was right.
The reason I got dragged into is because I produced reports on a daily basis that explained why things failed in a detailed format. They both looked at my reports and decided that they liked my judgement and would use it for daily penalty assessments. This went on for months without me knowing the repercussions of the reports I wrote each day.

Reminds me of one of our clients. by Chas · 2012-01-23 05:19 · Score: 4, Funny

They were running an older CRM version that still used direct file access.

Because of this, their backup solution (for which they hadn't bought the live file backup module) would fail every night due to someone in the office leaving the program open.

So they "fixed" it.

6 months down the road they had a server crash and lost everything.

So we're like "Okay, let's roll to backups. There's still data loss, but minimal, a day or so."

Uh. What backups?

Their "fix" had consisted of simply deleting that CRM program's directory from the backups (see: NOT BACKING IT UP) so their backup reports were all nice and pretty.

The latest real backup this company had was over 6 months old.

The company that was in place to handle their IT was out on the curb with smoking ears and a boot-print on the ass shortly afterward.

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Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!

Shark Tank. by bmo · 2012-01-23 05:23 · Score: 5, Informative

>only 10 submissions of fail in the TFA.

Someone already mentioned the Daily WTF, so I'll post its little brother.

Always an interesting read.

http://blogs.computerworld.com/sharky

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BMO

Make it idiot-proof... by The+Moof · 2012-01-23 05:23 · Score: 3, Funny

...and they'll just make a better idiot. Two gems I've gotten over the years are:

"I can't log in when I type in my password! It's broken!" - The problem? They weren't typing in their username, they were only typing in their password.

My all time favorite was a customer who was very unhappy with an application we had created for them to send out event invitations and what not. I get an angry e-mail passed to me. The claim: "Whenever I type in someone's e-mail address, instead of e-mailing that person, the system figures out who their spouses and children are, and sends them the notification instead!" I had to repeatedly confirm that what they're describing is not possible. Even then, the person still angrily refused to believe me. If I were to create software that somehow psychically figure out all of that information, I'd be very rich, and probably be working for the government.

Re:Make it idiot-proof... by gbjbaanb · 2012-01-23 06:02 · Score: 4, Insightful

it kind of is possible, many people have email accounts that direct to several mailboxes, like @familyname.com. If your app was sending to an unknown name at the front of that (instead of 'dave@family' it was 'whoever@family') then its possible it got delivered to all accounts using that shared mailbox system.
Not that I'm saying this is what happened, but something along those lines due to some wacky configuration.
Moral: never disbelieve the user, although what they say is impossible, when you look at it, you find that not only is it possible, it's also happening. If only we could get the users to describe it in terms a tech would understand.
Re:Make it idiot-proof... by tilante · 2012-01-23 06:29 · Score: 2

Yep. Although more fun is when users try to describe in "tech terms", but don't actually understand the terminology, so their 'explanation' just muddies the issue further.
Generally my talking-to-the-end user script goes like this:
- What program were you using?
- What were you (clicking on, typing, whatever)?
- What did you expect to happen?
- What happened instead?
If they're getting an error message, I'll get them to send me a screenshot or cut-and-paste it. I've had way too many times when someone's managed to paraphrase the actual error message they're getting into something completely different.
Generally the best, though, is to actually sit them down and get to do whatever produces the problem in front of you. It's the problems that can't be reproduced at will that are the fun ones to figure out....
Re:Make it idiot-proof... by Verteiron · 2012-01-23 07:37 · Score: 4, 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.

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Re:Make it idiot-proof... by craash420 · 2012-01-23 13:01 · Score: 2

Good thing you sent it back, otherwise they'd be one short and you'd have an extra!

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Extra medication for all!

Infoworld by Spykk · 2012-01-23 05:28 · Score: 4, Interesting

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.

the first rule of I.T. fight club is ... by mbaGeek · 2012-01-23 05:48 · Score: 3, Insightful

users who don't know anything aren't the problem - users who don't know anything but think they know everything are the problem ...

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/. Got the Title Right, Original Article, Not by BBF_BBF · 2012-01-23 06:07 · Score: 2

I actually slogged through reading the whole Original Article and it seems like the editors at CIO don't know the difference between USER incompetence and incompetence in the IT department. Most of the "USER" issues were issues with the IT group, others were systematic failures... I particularly like the one where "IT" comes in and saves the day when "IT" diff's a developers' files and finds he's a bad developer, whereas the whole software Engineering department couldn't figure it out... yeah, right.

Re:NAT Leases!!11 by ColdWetDog · 2012-01-23 06:17 · Score: 2

I think a NAT lease is when your home router boots up.

Are you kidding? That router is mine. I paid for it. Mine.

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Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!

Re:Retrieving unsaved data by Creepy · 2012-01-23 06:42 · Score: 2

I have a bunch of those from that era - here's a couple:

User is used to Word Perfect, but has to use WordStar. User wants to print, so presses Control-P. Wordstar erases (p = purge in WordStar, print in Word Perfect) the document and the user hadn't saved it first. There was no confirmation dialog back then, either. An hour of typing a news article gone in a second.

User on a mac using Microsoft Word chooses Revert, but didn't know Revert means go back to the last saved version of the document and loses 2 hours of work. Note: Microsoft changed this from something like "Revert the document?" to "Are you sure you want to revert to the previously saved version" in the next version of Word probably due to a lot of user error and tears.

Unrelated to those, but related to TFA - when I was in college I heard one of the labbies (technically computer lab teaching assistants) was fired and kicked out of school but not details. I was friends with his roommate, so I ask what happened and found out he had been running a million+ dollar a year porn site off of the University servers (and this is the relatively early days of the public internet). If I had any doubts to the truth of it, they were alleviated a few days later when we all had to sign a code of conduct waiver, which included running sites of pornographic nature...

IT idiocy? by mcgrew · 2012-01-23 06:48 · Score: 4, 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.

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Re:IT idiocy? by HForN · 2012-01-23 08:24 · Score: 3, Informative

http://www.infoworld.com/print/184491/

Huh? by MyLongNickName · 2012-01-23 06:57 · Score: 2

Okay, serious question. Is it really a bad idea to make people's email addresses public? the article makes it seem like this is a bad practice. To me, if you are counting on email addresses to be private, that you have some crappy security going on.

""We took the roster of employees of our two largest offices and checked their corporate email addresses to see which were accessible off the Web. Out of 178 employees, 138 corporate email addresses were easily discovered -- like two or three clicks off Google. That alone surprised me."

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Re:Retrieving unsaved data by tilante · 2012-01-23 08:24 · Score: 5, Insightful

I worked in a computer lab back in college, and our supervisor used to tell new hires a story....

One day a woman came in, worked on a paper for a couple of hours, and then had her computer crash. She went to the lab assistant on duty, who didn't try to be helpful or sympathetic at all -- he just blew her off with a "well, you should have saved".

She blew up at him. Yelled, screamed, made a gigantic fuss. Lab guy thought it was funny, still wasn't trying to calm her down or be helpful at all. The supervisor heard the noise (his office was across the hall from the lab) and came in to see what was wrong. He talked to the woman, got her to go across the hall where she wouldn't be disturbing everyone else who was still trying to use the lab. There, he offered sympathy, offered to help her with retyping.

Once she started to calm down, she started crying. He finally found out that she'd been raped a couple of weeks before. She'd lost a lot of time for getting ready for finals and doing final papers in doing interviews with the police and the prosecuting attorneys -- and then found out earlier that day that the DA's office had decided not to prosecute her attacker, because he was a former boyfriend of hers and they were afraid they wouldn't be able to persuade the jury that it wasn't just her changing her mind after the fact.

He pointed her to the campus rape center so she could get help -- not just with the legal case and the emotional fallout, but also to have them talk to her professors. She didn't need to be trying to handle finals like that.

The moral is: You don't know how bad a day someone else has had. When people get extremely upset over something that seems like it shouldn't be that upsetting, there's a good chance that they were already upset about something else. And, of course, he added that if we had someone in the lab we just couldn't handle, get him or call the campus police if it was after his office hours. We should try to be nice, but remember that our job was lab attendant, not social worker.

Re:Retrieving unsaved data by garyebickford · 2012-01-23 09:22 · Score: 3, 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.

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Re:Retrieving unsaved data by El_Oscuro · 2012-01-23 13:39 · Score: 2

Holy fucking shit! I have had issues but nothing like that!

Just today, one of our remote sites was having an issue with an external drive that was causing an issue with a database. Such things are routine and our OPS staff normally handles them without issues. However the problem reappeared and the person who worked on it had already left. The new guy working on it sent a polite but utterly clueless email about it. The client of course exploded. I stepped in and said I would handle it. I have been here a long time and have a reputation of being competent and nice (or at least not being an asshole). You wouldn't believe how fast that email defused everything.

The bottom line is, karma is not just a ./ concept. If you build up your real-life karma by being reasonably good and not an asshole, you would be amazed at how much easier your life is

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"Be grateful for what you have. You may never know when you may lose it."

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