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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No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
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 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 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

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?

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 antdude · 2012-01-23 08:19 · Score: 3, Informative

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

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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 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.

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 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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End of lesson. You may press the button.

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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It ain't what they call you. It's what you answer to. http://mylyceum.us/

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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Free Martian Whores!

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

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

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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