'Trained monkey' from tech support saved know-it-all manager's mistake with a single keypress

Friday dawns with the promise of precious freedom, yet the world of tech support is seldom free from trouble. The Register always finds a way to celebrate anyway, by bringing you a fresh instalment of On Call, the reader-contributed column that tells your tales of breaking away from bad bosses and ungrateful users. This week, …

[Michael H.F. Wilkinson]

All the respect he deserved indeed

The manager seems to be a semi-evolved simian barely able to bang some rocks together, and simply begging for a database normalization warning.

[b0llchit]

Re: All the respect he deserved indeed

barely able to bang some rocks together

No, they have others to bang the rocks together for them. That is why things go so wrongexcellent. Others don't know how to bang rocks together properly.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: All the respect he deserved indeed

There's a sign where I am at the moment asking visitors to "please respect our hardworking staff". As few of them appear to be working hard it's unclear how I'm meant to treat them...

[Eclectic Man]

Re: All the respect he deserved indeed

The manager seems to be a semi-evolved simian barely able to bang some rocks together

Give the manager a break. He'd probably just had an unsatisfying encounter with a Nutri-Matic drinks machine and just needed a nice hot cup of tea.

I'll get my coat, you know what its got in the pocket.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: All the respect he deserved indeed

I once had a senior exec who asked for my help and then when I tried to fix the issue, told me that I was doing it wrong. I told the ‘person’ that I had had extensive training on this system and that was the way to fix this issue. I said as they clearly didn’t need or seemingly want my help, I was going back downstairs and started to walk off. As I left the office their PA told me to stop where I was, went in and spoke to the exec. He popped his head out of the door and apologised, invited me back in and asked me to fix it however I wanted to. I did so, asked him if he was happy with my work and yes he was. His PA stopped by when I was eating lunch in the teen, thanked me and said the exec was under a lot of pressure at the moment. i asked how she had managed to change his mind so quickly on wanting/needing my help. She smiled and said behind every great man there is a woman who knows better, and without her he’d be lost, and he knew it.

[mikecoppicegreen]

Fn + F3? That strikes a distant cord - I had a Compaq laptop that used that combination, if I remember correctly.

[Dabooka]

I think COmpaq too

Was about to post that too although it was early and might have had Harvard Graphics or Freelance back then

[KittenHuffer]

There is only one thing to be said to such manglers .....

..... Oook!

[Michael H.F. Wilkinson]

Re: There is only one thing to be said to such manglers .....

Unless they use the M-word...

In that case a mere "Oook!" will not suffice.

[vogon00]

Re: There is only one thing to be said to such manglers .....

I used to fall back on saying 'Oook' to the guvnor when he was asking for something way above my pay grade. He was a fan of Sir T and understood it, but surrounding colleagues thought I was barmy!

[LateAgain]

Re: There is only one thing to be said to such manglers .....

and, to be honest, the librarian is usually the smartest one in the room.

[hedgie]

Re: There is only one thing to be said to such manglers .....

At least Ridcully is smart enough to know that if whoever it is (usually Ponder) is still talking after a couple of minutes, then it's important and generally time to actually listen.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: There is only one thing to be said to such manglers .....

Ik ook!

[Anonymous Coward]

Managers

Had a manager once who was really nice and I liked working with him

He often went to meetings saying he wouldnl need to ask me. Was then told to bring me into them to save time

Another non techy manager was also great. He knew he could not question us but used all of us to our strengths and if we said "we need this" or " we can do that" he'd battle with those above to get it

Not like this dickhead

[MiguelC]

Re: Managers

I've had a manager I really liked working for, he was hard working, severe and challenging, and would give us the worst bollocking if we fucked up, but never, ever, in front of anyone else. And, when facing customers, we were a team and the only head on the chopping block would be his.

I appreciate how lucky I was and today I try to act toward my teams like he did.

[Nursing A Semi]

Monkey

I was once in a room while a director was having a rant at a manager in which he included the term "40k a year technical monkey". I spotted the moment when he realised I was there and was quite impressed when he didn't mis a beat but completed his tirade before turning to me and saying "No offense intended", I struggled to keep a straight face.

[Fading]

Re: Monkey

Would have been more impressed if he had turned to you without missing a beat and said "unlike this 40K a year technical genius"

[Korev]

Re: Monkey

Did you ask for a payrise?

[Nursing A Semi]

Re: Monkey

To be honest the guy had given me my start in the company and was always supportive and I liked him, but likewise I was not shocked to the brink of a breakdown to discover his less than ideal view of the worth of the technical class "it was a company wide thing, technical folks were generally paid below market rate and company seemed to see itself as a training organisation for all the companies who paid better".

[IceC0ld]

Re: Monkey

isn't this the play for the Richard Branson, and training

but sir, if we train them, they will just leave to go elsewhere

to which, the beardy one is supposed to have replied :- Yes, but if we DON'T train them, they will stay here :o)

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Monkey

You're *always* training them, and after all those _expensive_ mistakes, screw-ups, and pants-on-fire prod-outage training sessions -- it will cost more to let them get away! Give 'em a raise!!

[Nursing A Semi]

Re: Monkey

I saw so many examples of people who deserved a raise have to go elsewhere to get one that I came to the following conclusion as to business model.

Keep a small pool of good people who get promoted and paid at or above market rates, rest are recruited knowing little, trained to be useful and then expected to stay for one or two years before they leave for pastures new. Result is that when bidding for a new contract our people were mostly capable of doing the job and were cheap, competitors people were admittedly capable of doing a better job but were expensive.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Monkey

Texas Instruments?

[Nursing A Semi]

Re: Monkey

Nope, one of the TLAs but not going to say which one.

[andy the pessimist]

Re: Monkey

A long time ago at plessey semiconductors we were all issued with passes with our pictures on them. One of my colleagues didn't like the picture so put a picture of a monkey (possibly gorilla). Security never stopped him.

They were simpler times.

[Nursing A Semi]

Re: Monkey

I worked for a guy who sometimes signed his checks depending on what happened to have been on TV the night before "Yes this was a while ago". He once spent a day sending out checks signed Doris Day , not a one was refused by his bank who obviously never looked at signatures.

[Ken Shabby]

Re: Monkey

Also many years ago, far too many, knew a bloke in the US that did this, and it was a gorilla), same result. However the resemblance was uncanny.

[nematoad]

A nasty piece of work.

I would bet that the manager in question was what is euphemistically called a "middle manager". You know the ones, like a fifth wheel on a car, there, but of no conceivable use and just taking up space.

I always found that when dealing with the workers or the top brass I had no problems. With the workers they were anxious to get on with the job so put no obstacle in my way. With the top managers provided you dealt with their PA or secretary and arranged for a time and place to do the job, again no problems. It was those characters in the middle that gave me trouble, pushy, insecure and always looking to impress. My heart sank when I got a call to one of them.

[call-me-mark]

Middle Manager

Reminds me of an old joke: A man in the careers centre says "I'd love a job where you can just sit around all day doing nothing." The careers advisor replies "I'm sorry but all the middle management roles are taken."

[Inventor of the Marmite Laser]

Re: A nasty piece of work.

Middle management: N. A form of ablative coating for senior management.

[veti]

Re: A nasty piece of work.

Which is important, valuable and stressful work. I for one don't begrudge their pay. Just their interference.

[dmesg]

Re: A nasty piece of work.

A former colleague had worked at a place like that. They would get contracts for big government projects, and the first action of a project supervisor was hiring an assistant supervisor.

Said hire never had anything essential to do, but when inevitable complaints about costs got too loud, or audits were threatened, the assistant supervisor was the sacrificial goat by which they proved they were Doing Something About It.

[Doctor Syntax]

Re: A nasty piece of work.

OTOH senior managers can have a go at each other. Two directors at a client had, from their titles (operations and production) overlapping fiefdoms and had at least one 3.3 on the Richter scale shouting match in the middle of the general office.

[Pascal Monett]

Cockfight !

[may_i]

Agression and shouting

Many years ago, we had a new department manager at a place where I was managing a project. He seemed friendly enough, but had little idea about what the company actually did.

I had been working on the project plan for the project and had earlier that morning distributed the draft plan to the rest of the team to get some feedback. A few hours later, said manager bursts into my office and proceeds to start literally screaming at me about "how dare I show the project plan to the team without discussing it with him first?", along with various choice insults and threats. It wasn't even possible to penetrate the explosion of rage to explain to him that if he read the company's project management manual, he would see that I was acting exactly how our procedures stated I should.

After he left my office, I sat for a while to regain my composure and then headed straight for the managing director's office. There, I explained to the MD what had transpired, along with the fact that he'd previously had a similar, unmotivated, explosion at one of the team the previous week. I explained to the MD quite clearly that his behaviour was beyond acceptable and that I was not prepared to tolerate being threatened and abused at work.

Shocked, the MD said "Let me deal with this." Within the hour, the manager had been relieved of his employment and escorted from the building.

The funny thing was that when I was cleaning up after his departure, I found a document in his home directory on the file server. The document was a self-appraisal that said manager had written at his previous job. Under "strengths and weaknesses" he had listed one of his weaknesses as "having trouble controlling his temper".

[Headley_Grange]

Re: Agression and shouting

I once had a great boss. He was bright, trusted the people who worked for him and did his best for them. People liked working for him and I never saw him coming close to losing his temper. I ended up as sort of his right-hand man for a while and so spent a fair amount of time with him in meetings and such. I noticed some odd mannerisms he had, particularly when things were getting a bit difficult or fractious. I asked him about it in the pub one night when we were away on business. He said he had a very bad and explosive temper that had nearly got him sacked on one occasion and the he'd been sent to a cognitive behaviour therapist. The mannerisms were part of a system to recognize and control his temper.

[may_i]

Re: Agression and shouting

It's a shame that this guy, obviously being aware of his temper problems, hadn't sought the same kind of help. When he wasn't frothing at the mouth like a dog with rabies, he was friendly and supportive. If he'd been able to control himself, he would have probably become an appreciated and respected senior manager.

Personally, I was very glad that as soon as I made the MD aware of the problem, he didn't prevaricate or try to excuse the behaviour, he simply threw him out. Regardless of what you do for a job or how junior or senior you are, there's absolutely no excuse for a manager to unload their bad temper and frustration on you and nobody should be expected to take that kind of treatment either.

[J. Cook]

Re: Agression and shouting

Even better- he was self-aware of his limitations and weaknesses, and had things in place to mitigate those.

[Not also known as SC]

I personally find terms like 'keyboard monkey' a compliment. Without the monley the organ grinder would starve.

[Headley_Grange]

That's OK as long the pay doesn't come in the form of peanuts.

[Antron Argaiv]

...and it's very important the the minkey be leesaunced

[GlenP]

Fortunate

I've been quite fortunate that, for a lot of years as the senior IT person in SMEs, most of my managers have recognised and accepted that I know a lot more about IT than they do and have let me get on with things, with a bit if guidance where needed.

In some cases I think they've actually been scared to interfere, which isn't necessarily a good thing.

[Doctor Syntax]

Re: Fortunate

It's possible that at a somewhat bigger level than SME being in IT brings you into contact with more parts of the business than a siloed manager gets to meet and you can sometimes be able to see a possible impact on one department that another's bright idea might have.

[GlenP]

Re: Fortunate

Very much so - these days where I work is at the higher end of SME but I still interact with all areas of the business from shop floor and warehouse to C suite.

[GeekyOldFart]

Put the zen face on...

The more panicky the phone call, text chat or email, the nastier you know this particular user to be, the more you wrap yourself in zen-like calm before heading out to confront 'em.

Only listen with half an ear to their spew of "having tried everything" unless you pick up on something specific they say they've done.

Once they wind down or run out of breath, a pleasant smile and "OK, let me have a look and I'll see what I can do."

Then fix it. Whatever it is.

They look a lot worse to any witnesses when all their ire runs off you like water off a duck's back.

And, as a bonus, it winds them up beautifully when all their sound and fury clearly signifies nothing.

[Hazmoid]

Re: Put the zen face on...

The bonus is when you can charge them for their rant time. 30 minutes going off about IT always failing at the worst time ( hint only when said manager decides to interfere) is 30 minutes you can charge to them for "analysing issue and developing solution" then charging for the time it takes to actually resolve the issue. Sometimes there is also a PITA charge in there as well ;)

[theOtherJT]

Reminds me of the time...

...that I got dragged up to a conference room because it was Urgent, Extremely important, Can't wait a second, Most important people in the building etc. etc. etc. to "Fix a broken laptop" and all the way up there I had the conference organizer giving me a hard time about how unprofessional it was to let this happen, how much money this meeting would generate, how important everyone was.

When I got there, what was the problem? They'd put our laptop away because it was "Untidy" and replaced it with their own macbook.

...which had gone to sleep.

Pressing literally anything would have solved the problem. I "fixed" it by simply touching the trackpad and it waking up.

[Philo T Farnsworth]

Re: Reminds me of the time...

It's nice to feel superior and all but remember, everyone has a "first time."

Elsewhere in these comments, I've told a story on myself where, in the mid-1980s, I was asked to set up a demo workstation for a photo shoot, being the designated "hot shot" graphics person. I'd never seen the machine before and knew next to nothing about its particular operating system.

While waiting for the photographer to arrive the darned thing kept "crashing" and so I kept hitting the reset button on the back of the machine. . . only to realize a few days later that I'd encountered a "screen saver" for the first time in my life and didn't think to wiggle the mouse or touch the keyboard.

One more step on the road to realizing that I don't know it all and never will.

[Anonymous Coward]

I was a PM in the UK branch of a huge US company and IT was referred to, along with the Quality dept - as the "business prevention unit" and got little respect. When backups ran into the morning's work time because there were 600 copies of a movie of a chimp sticking its finger up its arse (it was around the turn of the century) then IT got the blame, not the engineers storing that crap. My project was doing some work on a military base and we werent allowed to connect to anything on the base, including landlines out, so there was no internet (WAP was just getting started and wouldn't have worked) and it was getting to be a pain having to wait for the evening then paying a fortune on hotel phone bills to get the test results for analysis. The base commander said we could install our own BT line. So I talked to one of the IT blokes - let's call him Phil. He came back and said he'd talked to BT but it would take ages and cost a small fortune and there'd be problems with ownership cos we didn't own the land... .etc. etc. etc. However, said Phil, it could be done with a satellite link. All the the bits were off the shelf and he could cobble something together in a couple of weeks but it would be very very expensive. How much? Phil hadn't costed it up but it could be as much as £5k for the bits plus labour. I can't remember how much the satellite link woulid cost , but the total, in the context of a £50 million project was bugger all and probably cheaper than the hotel phone lines. I talked to the RAF base chief - who was happy given that he'd been OK with our own landline and didn't see a satellite link as conceptually different. I gave Phil a job number and a couple of weeks later a box (covered in grey carpet for some reason) with some connectors plus a small dish appeared and it worked fine. I mentioned it in my monthly review with the board and they were amazed that their IT staff were capable of this. Phil and his guys won a global company prize for just getting on and doing something really useful without making a fuss (it had a proper name, but can't remember it) and maybe a few quid.

You don't know what people are capable of until you ask them.

[J.G.Harston]

I was a PM in the UK branch of a huge US company

So it's admitted, that's what the UK government really is.

[Anonymous Coward]

company prize

I got an award too, for a suggestion which saved time and cost and was implemented. My line manager (with whom I had issues, primarily that she was terminally thick and clueless about IT - or much else for that matter, but was a close friend of her manager) was not at all happy. I got a worthwhile financial reward and a big "award" trophy to display on my desk, that really pissed her off. I was instructed that must not make any futher submisions to the staff suggestion scheme without her approval. So I tried another and as expected she rejected it (on the grounds that it was part of my job to suggest improvements although that was not in my job description).

I passed the suggestion to a colleague in another team, he was happy to share the consequent financial reward and had the glory of a trophy to display on his desk too. In the end, her ignorance of employment law presented me an opportunity to claim constructive dismissal, excellent financial compensation, immediate (very) early retirement and immediate pension (and I got a new job elsewhere).

[Prst. V.Jeltz]

I've been called to the board room a few time to deal with a big panic because "It just went dead in the middle of our very important meeting " . On each occasion the suit has plugged their laptop into a power outlet that is switched off ( they have switches on them in the UK )

None as openly hostile as the assclown in the story though.

[Phil O'Sophical]

suit has plugged their laptop into a power outlet that is switched off

Well, let's be honest, we've all done that. At least being techy types we (usually) notice what the problem was...

[Doctor Syntax]

... but only when the battery runs down.

[Richard 12]

This is why I really liked the old Dell laptop PSUs that had a glowing ring on the laptop plug. Can see whether it's properly powered from the other side of the room.

The USB-C ones have a far smaller LED.

[Anonymous Custard]

Except when you then try to have the thing plugged in to recharge overnight, and the resulting glow is like sleeping near a floodlight...

My old Dell PSU nearly got "replaced" by IT at least 3 times due to the bit of duct tape over the LED ring being mistaken for a knackered cable.

[diguz]

old Apple laptops (powerbooks and ibooks) didn't just have an LED ring in the charging plug, but it glowed orange when charging and green when fully charged

[Mr Fix.]

deja vu.

I've had the exact same experience 20 years back working at the Helpdesk.

The CEO secretary called me telling me that I'm needed asap in the auditorium because of a technical problem.

So I went down and was greeted in the hallway, told by the secretary that its an emergency as the CEO was having a presentation "that wasnt working correctly" in front of a crowd.

Turns out that pretty much the who's who in the telecom-sector of our part of Europe was in attendance.

So I went into the meeting to be greeted with about 150 people staring at the podium and the CEO looking quite nervous.

Went up to his laptop, remember til this day it was a HP NC8000, did my ninja moves on the keyboard, big-ass projector lit up, powerpoint blasting in all its glory.

Discreetly showed the CEO the keycombo.

CEO said infront of everybody "Thats why Im running the business side and we make sure we got skilled guys like that for the tech".

Crowd applauded and I went back to cursing at some VBS macros or something.

[Erythrite]

Re: deja vu.

I retired from a large public university in 2018. I had a great working relationship with my boss, who was a professor.

The last few years, for every large meeting we had, he would set the first item on the agenda to be "Invevitable Futzing with Technology" with my name next to it and a time of about 5 minutes. I guess I could have been offended, but in the end I was a bit honoured.

The reason for the agenda is that the boffins would inevitably show up at the last minute with their arcane piece of technology (laptop, thumb drive with XXXfs etc.) that had the only copy of their presentation. Or the projector would be broken since last night when I tested it, or had to be swapped for a brighter/higher resolution/xxx one.

It was great. We all got a laugh. I got to save the day first thing. Eventually, many of the boffins started following instructions and getting their presentations in early or using Google Shites (tm) and updating them on the cloud in real time.

Good times...

[C R Mudgeon]

Re: deja vu.

That reminds me of my high-school algebra teacher. He knew the material, but when it came to the mechanics he was error-prone. He'd write a "-" instead of a "+", or some equally small but fatal mistake. His saving grace was that he knew it and seemed to have accepted the fact. He'd be solving an equation on the board when someone would raise their hand and call out his name. With a weary tone, Mr. R. would turn to us and ask, "What have I got wrong now?"

[A.P. Veening]

Re: deja vu.

CEO said infront of everybody "Thats why Im running the business side and we make sure we got skilled guys like that for the tech".

Classy with style, I like him.

[I could be a dog really]

Re: deja vu.

I had a boss like that many years and several work hats ago.

Medium size business, family owned at the time. The directors had an open door policy and were real "people people" - not technical, knew it, but happy to use the strengths of those that were.

TBH, at times I felt a bit embarrassed when he'd introduce me with a description along the lines of "I don't know what he does, but he keeps all this IT stuff working". I guess the old "anything sufficiently advanced looks like magic" syndrome - except that nothing we (I wasn't the only one in IT) actually did was in any way special, and we certainly weren't on the bleeding edge of anything.

He could be blunt - if you f'd up he'd give you a bit of a bollocking (but not in a vicious way), and then you'd get on and that was in the past. Some struggled with that, but once you knew how he worked, you learned to just take it (it was very rarely unjustified) as a natural consequence of f'ing up.

Eventually they got replaced with beancounters after we got bought by a US business, and sadly they got killed in a light plane crash while on holiday in Tanzania.

[C R Mudgeon]

Re: deja vu.

' "anything sufficiently advanced looks like magic" syndrome - except that nothing we (I wasn't the only one in IT) actually did was in any way special, and we certainly weren't on the bleeding edge of anything.'

Yeah, "sufficiently" carries a lot of weight there. It's highly context-dependent: go back not that many generations, and the device on which you're reading this would seem like magic. A couple of generations before that, it would be an electric light: "You don't have to light it, just flip that little thing on the wall! It's so steady; it never[1] flickers! And it doesn't burn down!"

For me personally, quantum computing is magic.[2]

[1] For a value of "never" that people who live in brownout-prone areas grumble at, but that would have astounded our forebears, for whom open flames were the only source of light once the sun went down.

[2] And CSS. I hate CSS.

[ColinPa]

"I'm not stupid you know"

One of my bosses was in tech sales before he became a manager. I worked on the mainframe down in the bowels with the really technical stuff.

With my managers I used to say "there is a problem with customer ABC it is really technical... so I wont explain it" - and most managers were happy.

This manager said "I was in tech sales - so I'm not stupid, please explain the problem".

So I did - there is a timing problem between this widget, and that widget resulting in.... I knew within seconds that he was totally lost, but he kept nodding.

After I finished he said immediately "I'd also like to talk to you about..."

I heard he asked one of my junior colleagues about the problem, and got the answer "you don't want to know ... it is deep shit that no one round here understands".

He continued to think I was deliberately making it complex to make him look stupid.

[Boris the Cockroach]

Had a few

bosses like that

One stands out because he gave me a dressing down in front of everyone about how useless a technical person I was because I took 3 times as long to do something as the late shift did

Swiftly answered with some fairly choice and honest answers about who exactly programmed the job, ran the testing and set everything in motion for the late shift.

Got fired later(not unexpectly though)* , but the rest of the staff were amazed because no one ever stood upto the self entitled prick and told him exactly what he was .. until they hired me

*my successor only lasted 6 weeks before saying "fook this I'm off" ... although the self entitled prick did get interviewed by the BBC when he complained no one wanted to work any more .... well work for him that is

[Anonymous Coward]

Does Not Compute?

So, his _first time_ using the projector was at an off-site meeting with a large group of people? despite showing off powerpoints etc to his local company execs? (did that happen after the large off-site, after he learned the key-combo trick?)

Does not compute.... Apparently he hit the key combo to switch to the external port, and his computer died, but he knew it wasn't dead, but didn't know it had switched ports, and couldn't switch it back, so ...??

Good story, largely reflects reality, some managers are asses. But plot holes. :-D

TBH, in my time as support, no one ever treated me like this. I got feedback from my boss that he loved having me around - I'd always be to the point and fix the problem, rather than file-a-ticket or have to spend a long time looking things up. I gather he really appreciated it, and my boss was head of finance, where I was doing IT -- so he rarely stepped into my business aside from, "Can't we do this cheaper?" That was good for me. :-) (It probably helped that I saved my yearly salary the first year I was with the company, to no ill effect that I'm aware of -- having stayed there four years. He knew that I was cost-focussed, so when I gave numbers - choices of features vs prices - that I wasn't asking the world.)

The CTO of the company got annoyed with me sometimes. He was technical, he *liked* knowing what was happening, and following along, and understanding the fix. He's an academic load-stone in his field, experienced and respected. Unfortunately his problems (especially: he was using a Mac, which I have little experience with) were a bit confusing to me. My method is do the my usual thing: bounce here, there, thither, and hither. Gather facts and build a model in my mind. Three things are fixed by the bouncing around, toggling things back and forth (and I don't even know what I've changed vs reverted) but it's all of that plus the other places that lead to the "Ah hah!" moment: I click a box and things work. "How did you do that?!" he'd ask, and sometimes my best answer was simply: "I'unno." It ruffled him a bit. Sorry! ;-D

[Richard 12]

Re: Does Not Compute?

A lot of people run these things "by rote". They've no idea what any of the incantations actually do - or even if they're necessary.

Much like the tick-tock man, if one thing isn't what they expect, they can't make a cup of tea, and end up with a furious cup of cat.

[Emjay111]

One of my line managers thought he was the God of things technical. He wasn't, he'd just been with the company so long that most people thought he MUST know what he was talking about.

As a new employee, I found out that if you challenged any of his thinking, you found yourself on the receiving end of some highly subtle, passive aggressive crap that was designed to break you. An example of this was being tasked to produce a detailed status report of all the kit in our transmission suite (broadcast video) - equipment age, repair history, current issues etc. I produced said report, printed it out (this was in the days before e-mail was commonplace in business) and handed it over.

Said line manager thumbed quickly through the pages, then dumped the whole lot in the bin.

Now that's what I call an a**hole middle manager!

With regards to IT equipment and presentations, a few years ago (at a former employer) I produced a set of laminated 'cheat sheets' to reduce the number of times I got called to switch something on. The top line of each sheet asked the question "What do you want to do?" followed by "show a presentation from your laptop" or "have a video conference call" etc. This worked well, until the cards were lost down the back of the AV rack. Retrieved them and pinned them to the wall after that. As far as I know, they are probably still there and in use.

[Mike Lewis]

I had a manager with an intermittent fault

He was nice and supportive and even told me once "Nobody ever died wishing they had spent more time in the office" when he felt I was working too hard. Then one day, he made a really nasty remark, completely out of character for him. I thought "What?" A few days later, he was off sick with a migraine.

That turned out to be a regular pattern. Every six weeks or so, he'd make a cutting remark and I'd think "Uh-oh, Alan's getting another migraine" and right on cue, he'd be off sick again. I'm not sure he realised what was happening.

[Old Used Programmer]

Two way street...

I was once asked at an annual review about my "loyalty to the company." I replied that I had as much loyalty to the company as the company had to me. My boss didn't particularly like that answer. During an RIF a few months later, the root of my statement came true.

[Pascal Monett]

Management

In my 30+ year career, there is only one person that I would, without hesitation, put on a pedestal.

He was IT Director at redacted, and I was a junior Lotus Notes Certified Professional (CLP at the time). I was working at the company as consultant, on a very important migration-from-mainframe-document-management project.

There were weekly meetings, where all the people who had, what do they call that already ? - oh yeah, "investment" in the project were present. Of course, the Friday before the Monday morning meeting had all the meeting points spelled out and approved.

And regularly, one of the other "managers" went on a rant about something that wasn't in the meeting minutes. It took five seconds for that Man (I'm putting a capital M on purpose) to shoot him down with an acid remark along the line of "that's not in the minutes, put it in the list for the next iteration".

In time, those outbursts became much rarer . . .

I worship his memory still.

[Anonymous Coward]

Ranting Managers... ...I've had a few :-)

Lets call them 'Nick' and 'Gerry'

Nick loved to agree to any additional work that the IT Director wanted doiing and that fell on the Help Desk could do, but obviously he didn't do any of the additional tasks, nope that was down to us to somehow fit these extra duties in but he loved taking the credit when these extra tasks were completed on time. But be prepared if something went wrong. Then it was Mr Bloody Angry with a love of throwing things to see how many walls he could bounce something off. 3 walls was the record.

Gerry... ...looking back well over 25 years and this bloke probably had serious mental health issues. He took ranting too a level where you seriuosly had to consider if he was going to attack you. If he had done that today he would have been walked off site and told not to come back. You couldn't do anything right. Once a fire door swung open and smacked me between the eyes spliting my forehead. I made my way to the IT office with blood trickling down my face. First thing I was asked when smebody saw me was, 'did Gerry attack you?'. I was lucky I found another job and left. Another guy wasn't so lucky, he was driven to a full on break down and had to leave.

Gerry nearly drove me off the road when I was driving home one day a whole other story. Stable he wasn't.

[Anonymous Coward]

You don't promote your best engineers...

...that's a well known fact in IT.

If you've been offered a management role, it usually means you're a liability in front of clients and not capable of problem solving.

Managers are supposed to understand what techies do, but they aren't necessarily techies themselves.

See: Jen from the IT crowd.

If you want the big bucks management roles in tech, you need to be quite average at tech. If you are a very good engineer, you will likely never be a manager...but that's ok...because very good engineers tend to skip over being managers and end up as CTOs or CEOs.

Management is the final resting place for a career in tech. You are in the coffin at that point being lowered into the ground.

[OzBob]

Had a manager who kicked off in a meeting

about some performance issue. When queried about the validity of his query, he replied "I know this stuff, I used to be a DBA". And the head DBA (who has worked alongside him during that time) replied "Yes, but you weren't a very good one". Burn!

[Shooter]

One day, Mark was monkeying about at work...

I see what you did there!

[OmulSolar]

Cheers from another worlds

As a 'Trained monkey' peasant, working in another industry, not in IT, I can say the stories about arrogant jerks getting what they deserve are universally enjoyable. This one is really charming; delivering the Death Blow during a public PowerPoint show (AKA The Pinnacle of Humanity) is infinitely more satisfying.

[MoveTheButtons]

Wrong Hole

Some years ago I was called to the office of the factory Operations Director, she was totally useless with tech (and potentially shoelaces from everything I saw). She also had no patience with anything. I went in and was immediately subjected to her rant about the laptop being completely useless, NEVER working etc etc. The problem this time was she could not get it to turn on, despite it being plugged in AND (smugly) turned on at the wall.

Once I removed the power supply bullet connector from the Kensington lock and moved it to the power socket...

I smiled and left.

[Geck O'Temple]

This story gave me flashbacks to Large Gaming Company, and being emergency-right-now-go called to one of the row of presentation rooms where all the execs were giving their presentations to the visiting President of Nintendo (he was demonstrating his company's new console, a dev unit called "The Revolution", later called the Wii), and one of the studio GMs was trying to get his laptop up on the big screens, and as I walked in the door to a tensely silent room (silence is SO LOUD when there's 20 people not making any noise). GM rushed to me and half-whispered "You have about 30 seconds to get this working, or you're fired."

Turns out he'd pulled the VGA & aux cables out of the media rack for the room, and plugged those ends into his laptop, thus connecting his laptop to the computer built into the room, not the media rack/screens. In about ten seconds, I reversed the cables, the screens lit up, I got the dismissal hand-wave from the GM, and I left the room.

[Anonymous Coward]

As the parent got deleted.

A certain director of IT decided, in front of everyone at the staff conference at the NHS called all of IT "Box Monkeys. I could just replace you tomorrow if you don't do a good job or don't come in on time". Then proceeded to tell all the band 5 engineers he was looking to downgrade them to a band 4 (a large pay drop).

Sadly he was still there when I left but many years past and I was told he got cancer but survived. He was such a massive arsehole that, shame of him for behaving so poorly to his staff, that made me say this - "Shame he didn't die from it".

He was also a corrupt cunt.

Don't ever hire steve orman.

[RobDog]

Yep managers like that

Encountered them over and over, seems to me they can’t compete with years of solid technical knowledge and their only weapon is to belittle and condescend.

[Kuang]

A simple door was the difference between leaving and being fired...

The last time I worked as a tech was for a college with a bizarre mix of PCs, a large Mac network, and various legacy devices for controlling printing presses, pattern cutters and all manner of design machinery. Our renewal schedule was intense and usually carried out during the summer break, leaving me with the job of swapping out up to a couple of hundred machines on my tod. Making them work with the rest of the weirdness when none of the veteran peripheral specialists were around to ask was a challenge.

One of the new campus directors was an absolute pain in the hole and divided most of his time between walking around looking important, and endless smoke breaks in front of the building. He immediately appointed an assistant who followed his lead, making him effectively twice as useless. They were like Jabba the Hutt and Salacious Crumb, only not as good looking and twice as slimy. I'd run into issues with them both a few times as they tried to tell me that I didn't know what I was doing, or that everything I did must be easy because they didn't understand it.

One summer we bought a metric shedload of new PCs from a new supplier who promised to build them identically so we could use a standard image and push packages through based on subject area. The licensing and installation procedures for some of the engineering and design software was arcane at best (five parallel dongles in a specific order...) so the more time we could save on the baseline setup the better.

Reader, they did not do that. All of the machines were comparable but with different enough guts to require a lot of manual massaging of the image, assuming it deployed at all. On top of that they all arrived with contaminated Seagate Barracudas during *that* time we've all agreed not to speak of, so that meant doing the installs at least twice. We were replacing them by the crateload.

This pushed a lot of the new director's pointless vanity projects back a bit, so one day he called my office to shout at me. I wasn't in (see above) but the answer phone picked it up. It also picked up his and his sidekick's conversation when he didn't put the phone down properly. It's interesting to hear an assessment of the issue you've been fighting summarised as 'I don't know why he acts like it's all so difficult. he just pushes a few buttons and walks away. He's just lazy'. It's extra spicy when you've just put in a solid month with lots of unpaid overtime to make sure the students had when they needed when they came back, and you're feeling a little bit frazzled and underappreciated.

I didn't know it was possible to ascend two floors from a sitting position in under 30 seconds, but I do know that if his door hadn't been locked I would've been fired instead of resigning that same day. It would have been satisfying, but I quite liked the cleaners and they shouldn't have to deal with that sort of thing.

I'll just enjoy the memory of their faces through the glass panel, and how shocked they looked when they realised that my limit had been well and truly reached.