Poor Ted
Being overworked to the point of having an actual mental breakdown is no joke. I'm glad to hear it made Ted a stronger person and i hope he's doing better now.
Frustrated consultant 'went full Hulk' and started smashing hardware
Welcome to Monday morning and another installment of Who, Me? For the uninitiated, it's The Register's weekly reader-contributed column that tells tales of your greatest misses, and how you rebuilt a career afterward. This week, meet a reader we'll Regomize as "Ted" who joined a nonprofit company that ran a small consultancy …
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Monday 27th October 2025 10:25 GMT Pascal Monett
This is all because we continue to be good little sheep, accepting that "employers" and "management" have the right to never stop asking us to do all the efforts they refuse to do.
Fuck them.
You pay me eight hours a day, I do eight hours a day. That's a 48-hour week. If you need me to do a 70-hour week, it's because you need to hire someone else.
So do your fucking job and spend the money instead of running us into the wall.
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Tuesday 28th October 2025 13:18 GMT David Hicklin
Re: Poor Ted
I never reached the level of Ted but my first job was descending into a "you will work as long as it takes to get the job done, including taking it home to work there" status when I decided to get out. It was an office job, salaried but no overtime. They even withheld a pay rise one year as I was not doing the above, kind of like the beatings will continue...
Getting out saved me and from there until I retired my career just improved all the way, even the odd blip turned out to improve things long term.
There really were/are some shit companies to work for.
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Monday 27th October 2025 07:52 GMT Anonymous Coward
I was contracting at a company and one of the people I was working with went off with stress due to overwork, he came back just before I finished my contract (I would never work there again) and two and a half years later is still there.
If that happened to me I would have left the company and not come back again
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Monday 27th October 2025 13:41 GMT Anonymous Coward
Sometimes getting another job would be out of the frying pan and into the fire. It would also be a considerably overwhelming prospect for someone who has just had a mental breakdown. I've had two at work, not solely because of work, but they've pushed me over the edge on each occasion. I'm still here after 5 years because it's better the devil you know for me.
Unfortunately I've seen (not on purpose) that they're having conversations about outsourcing my department. So that's ruined my mental state and is something to look forward to again.
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Tuesday 28th October 2025 20:07 GMT Anonymous Coward
Sometimes getting another job would be out of the frying pan and into the fire
Very much this.
Also consider that a high proportion of autistic people end up in IT, and we suffer even more than most from the stress of having to change jobs - not to mention a recruiting system geared up to disadvantage honest people (use autistics tend to be rather literal, so don't tend to do the "I once put a disk in and kept hitting return until I saw a login prompt" -> therefore tick the "$system admin experience" box and hence get rejected by the "didn't tick all the right boxes so binned" first pass filter.) I've been through at least two autistic burnouts in the past, and both triggered changing jobs - something that was both very stressful, but also in hindsight absolutely essential. But in both cases, I'd been unable to change jobs myself - a combination of the fear of change, and the rigged recruitment system meaning I rarely even got an interview (and those I did get, I flunked.) I know everyone needs time to settle in, but I reckon I take a minimum of 6 months to start getting comfortable, and in reality a year or more to feel like I actually belong.
It's sobering to read the stats : Just 3 in 10 autistic adults are in work, compared to 5 in 10 for all disabled people and 8 in 10 for non-disabled people (source: The Buckland Review of Autism Employment, via National Autistic Society
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Tuesday 28th October 2025 12:39 GMT FIA
If that happened to me I would have left the company and not come back again
It depends why they were overworked.
I have seen the other side of this, where someone will just work all hours god sends because they think they should, there's no actual pressure on them to do it. These kind of people can be the worst kind too, as they're only trying to be helpful, but it can have a negative effect on the rest of the team as it can either pressure them to work overtime, or make them look worse, when infact it's just one mad bugger working all the hours.
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Tuesday 28th October 2025 14:15 GMT Anonymous Coward
Yeah, or those who end up with loads of complex jobs that only they know how to do, and naturally (because they're always busy) never have time to document those jobs so others can do them.
Can be tough getting to recognise that some of their jobs may be complex, but they're not difficult (eg if properly documented even the PFY could do them), so let some jobs get delayed, take the time to properly document some appropriate jobs, and let them be handed off to other staff. Then once that's done they'll have more time to 1) catch up, and 2) focus more on the jobs that need their skills.
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Monday 27th October 2025 08:33 GMT An_Old_Dog
I'm Not THAT Guy!
As a newbie on one job, I visited one of our satellite offices with my lead tech and some other techs to replace some older computers. I went inside to get the lay of the land while the lead and the other two techs started unloading the new PCs out of the van.
I walked up to the front desk, gave my name and said, "I'm with IT."
Hearing this, two other workers quickly walked from other parts of the room to behind the front desk. "Show us your badge!" I did (at that time, they were non-photo badges. They had IT's logo, and the techie's name). "Who's your supervisor?!" I gave my boss' name, and my tech lead's name.
My tech lead walked in just then, said that I was okay, just a new hire. They recognized him on sight, and after some soothing words, the staffers settled down.
We upgraded their PCs, put the old ones in the van, and headed back to the shop. On the drive back, my lead explained the suspicion and hostility.
Just one month ago, a man not from IT claimed to be from IT, gained admittance to the server room, and began smashing the walls with a short-handled sledgehammer he had concealed beneath his coat. Staff called the police, who scuffled with the man, subdued him, and transported him from the scene.
The staff there jumped from overly-lax to very-strict in their ID/admittance procedures.
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Monday 27th October 2025 09:20 GMT Like a badger
Re: I'm Not THAT Guy!
Just one month ago, a man not from IT claimed to be from IT, gained admittance to the server room, and began smashing the walls with a short-handled sledgehammer he had concealed beneath his coat. Staff called the police, who scuffled with the man, subdued him, and transported him from the scene.
That's unusual. Normally we* of the tech world are more than capable of fucking things up good and proper without any outside help. Look at Amazon's recent f*** up. Had a madman broken into an Amazon DC with a sledgehammer and trashed the entire DC through one or two lucky strikes, I'll wager that the impact on service would have far, far less than we've just seen.
* For many years now I've been very much a former-techy, but it's one of those things that you are either in or you're out, and if you're in then that's for life. Curiously none of my current colleagues have the slightest inkling of my career history, or that under this mild-mannered exterior lurks a BOFH.
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Monday 27th October 2025 16:10 GMT John Brown (no body)
Re: I'm Not THAT Guy!
"The staff there jumped from overly-lax to very-strict in their ID/admittance procedures."
That seems to be the general pattern for all forms of security. The C-suite won't pay for it, the staff don't get trained, and if they do, they don't see the point and see it as an imposition of extra work and try to work around it. Until it happens to them.
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Friday 31st October 2025 19:50 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: I'm Not THAT Guy!
A colleague and I were once at a site doing an install in a relatively high crime area (South bank in Middlesbrough). The security guard who was there when we arrived was happily telling us the tale of somebody who managed to break in, climb over the suspended ceiling into another office and steal a CRT monitor. I was quite impressed at this feat.
The job went on past shift change, so there was a new security guy at the front desk when we were leaving. He very helpfully assisted us with loading all of our kit into the van.
As we were driving off, it must have suddenly dawned on him that he had no idea who we were, and he had just helped us load a bunch of quite expensive stuff into our van. He came running out of his office to note down the number plate.
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Monday 27th October 2025 08:36 GMT Anonymous Coward
Get out while you can
I have left two companies that replaced me with two new employees, and one company that replaced me with three new employees.
Still in a job that is requiring 50 hours a week to - almost - keep ahead of the 20 people at one site and 50 at another pulling on my technical work and requiring my almost constant support (because they are off-shored and not competent, but the Finance Dept....)
Only still here as my child's University accommodation fee is nearly half of my monthly take home, bills are going up and who would take on a 60+ year old! And I have f**k all money in pensions as I have done interesting rather than well paid work all my life!
Anon because many of my US peers have been "let go", "as they are no longer needed as it's cheaper to off-shore", and Finance and upper manglement do not want to see how much time my peers were having to burn supporting the off-shore teams (with constantly changing staff). It is going to come home to roost, but not in this quarter and so Finance are not interested in listening to the people "at the coal face"! Too big to fail? I think not!
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Monday 27th October 2025 09:38 GMT KittenHuffer
Re: Get out while you can
Myself, and another guy, left our roles at one place within a month of each other, mainly because they piled everything onto us and didn't pay anywhere near the market rate.
The other guy already had something lined up, and I found something paying twice the rate after 6 weeks.
They interviewed to replace us ...... and failed.
Three months later they tried again ...... and failed.
Finally they shifted the jobs to a different pay scale that was at least 50% more than we had been on. Oh, and had to recruit three people to cover the variety of work that we had been doing.
I always wonder if they wish that they'd actually taken our salary complaints seriously.
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Monday 27th October 2025 11:10 GMT GlenP
Re: Get out while you can
I declined a relocation option with a former employer and took redundancy largely because they made it clear I would be working on my own, despite the fact we'd had three people in the department not long before. There was a salary increase but simply not enough. They ended up with two people working there before I'd left and they still ended up bringing me back in as a contractor as frankly neither of them had much clue.
I reckoned I was well out of the place and the money I came away with comfortably paid the deposit on a house!
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Monday 27th October 2025 08:42 GMT Anonymous Coward
It was the late '90s and I was working at a place in W Sussex who did control and safety systems. The IT services were supported by a couple of really pleasant guys plus one short fused nutter who was also evangelically religious, not averse to occasionally criticising people for otherwise normal language/behaviour/opinions etc., which was kinda ironic given ensuing events.
Short Fuse had been working at his desk, set up in front of a window. He was using a top computer and getting frustrated with a knotty problem. According reliable sources, his temper got the better of him. He stood up, grabbed his (CRT - this is the late '90s) and pitched the thing through the window
He didn't work with us much longer.
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Tuesday 28th October 2025 20:19 GMT Anonymous Coward
With me it's the Windows systems I have to use at work, Fortunately for everyone concerned it's not happened, but (for example) a while ago they realised that having led themselves down the O36
543 route, found the licensing was getting a tad pricey (large gov. dept.) So they had a bright idea of shifting people to the cheaper "online apps only" licence based on an arbitrary test fo how many emails they sent a month. If people wanted the full licence, they had to submit a request with a business justification - and no, "to do my f***ing job" wasn't enough. I did wonder if "it will be cheaper than replacing multiple laptops when I test their aerodynamics through frustration" would be considered enough.Interestingly, they've silently dropped that idea and I think we're all back to the full licences now.
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Tuesday 28th October 2025 09:30 GMT Peter Gathercole
Distructive tendancies
For the first couple of months of my tenure at IBM, it was touch and go whether the keyboard of the 3278 terminal that was on my desk would end up in the screen.
This is how long it took to provide an AIX/UNIX system I could log in to, in the newly created AIX Support Centre I, as a 10+ year experienced UNIX specialist previously working at AT&T, had been recruited to (with quite a few others) when the RS/6000 was being launched.
I remember talking to my colleagues who had come from other parts of IBM, who assumed that it was normal for people supporting a product to not need access to the product they were supporting!
Mind you, when we were provided with limited source code access (for which, even as IBM employees, we had to sign additional NDAs), we had to use a 3270 session onto a system that was connected to a PC/RT 6150 running AIX in the US. Trying to use a scrolling session through a page-by-page 3270 session made it unworkable.
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Monday 27th October 2025 08:56 GMT Anonymous Coward
I have walked out of three companies, one after being asked to commit fraud and perjury (I didn't, instead I showed the authorities where the graves were), another after the owner lost his shit over a client cancelling a contract and threatened me with violence, the last one I left because the MD tried to implicate me in software piracy and had demoted me in favour of a mercenary idiot who went along with his scheme.
All three collapsed into bankruptcy shortly after I'd left and the last one ended up in court alongside the mercenary idiot, the owner lost his house, his business and his wife who he'd also implicated (without her knowledge) and was less than happy that he'd been screwing his PA as well.
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Tuesday 28th October 2025 20:28 GMT I could be a dog really
Re: You surely know how to pick them!
Funnily enough, many years ago I was out with some friends. One in particular had a reputation for being a bit accident prone - across a variety of endeavours.
I casually asked on of his friends "aren't you a bit worried about being near him ?". "No, if anything's going to happen, it'll be him it happens to - so we're safe" was the jist of the reply.
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Monday 27th October 2025 09:21 GMT Sam not the Viking
Make a stand
I had a stand-up argument with the QA man from our sister company who were now responsible for our processes and procedures. He was only interested in procedures.
"I found this transducer. It is out of calibration!" he gleefully pronounced pointing to the sticker attached. "It was in the instrument cupboard."
"Is it being used?"
"It might be, by someone who needs it."
"Who would that be?" (Me).
Much shouting ensued. When I pointed out our approved procedure was that only instruments in-use had to be checked/calibrated he stormed off only to return with a 'new procedure' he had just prepared for me to approve and sign off. This called for everything to be in calibration at all times.... We had hundreds of transducers for different purposes but only a few in use at any one time; this proposed procedure would require a full time employee and was clearly unsustainable. Without explaining, I phoned the boss and said I was leaving to go home and I might not be in the next day.... The QA man would explain.....
I did return the next day fully expecting to pack my bags but instead I was summoned to a meeting with the boss and QA geezer who was told in no uncertain terms to back off. He never bothered me again. But he tried.
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Monday 27th October 2025 11:22 GMT GlenP
Re: Make a stand
Another reason I left the company mentioned in a reply above was the guy who was running the place believed he knew everything and that we had to do what he said. After arguing with him over the use of Kanban* for all our stock control I finally got fed up.
I sat in a meeting where he raised the subject yet again, and confirmed that he believed sales orders should not be taken into account in production planning. I asked him what minimum stock level he'd put on a particular product based on historical usage and he came up with an answer which was as I expected so I asked him, "What about Customer X?" When he basically asked, "Who?" I knew he'd fallen into my trap as they'd just placed an order for about twice the stocking level of that product.
I was already leaving anyway so didn't really care but he got sacked shortly afterwards.
*A system developed largely for controlling line stocks which has advantages provided demand is reasonably steady.
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Monday 27th October 2025 14:13 GMT Sam not the Viking
Re: Make a stand
Kanban is all very well for products which have a regular turnover of components. I've been through several attempts to introduce it and even though I am trained in the topic, I have never been asked to use it as the sole system for 'making things'. We make small numbers of high-value, bespoke products of widely varying content with a high proportion of bought-out components.
Our new boss impressed the owners with his talk of Kanban and took over product production. He wasn't expecting anyone else to have any knowledge of it at all and he, with the financial people, immediately scrapped a substantial proportion of our stock. Items which hadn't been used in the past six months went to merchants who buy up old stock. He failed to take into account the very long lead-times for some components; some items which were only made in batches every two years, we needed to hold sufficient for that period.
Almost immediately we needed a specialist product that we used to hold, but now no longer. Nor did our supplier, and the item was on a very long delivery. We ended up paying 10-times the purchase price to buy one back from the merchant to whom we had given them away.
All the accountants were interested in was the reduction in stock-holding and consequential 'tied-up' monies. I suppose it freed up a bit of space for our part-time storeman to place his sandwiches.
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Monday 27th October 2025 14:39 GMT imanidiot
Re: Make a stand
Stories like this is why I am so opposed to concepts like "lean" and JIT production when it comes to low volume production work. Certain persons at my job also keep pushing these concepts, entirely failing to grasp that when you're building 4 (or even 40) of something a year, concepts of how you organize your logistics and production lines are entirely different and sometimes stocks are necessary when lead times are measured in years. Similarly numbnuts throwing out test equipement because of "lean" and "clean desk policy" and "but you never use it"... Yeah, sure it's rare, but when I need to bypass something I used to have the cables necessary to bypass basically anything to anything else. You threw that away, so now we get to play the "swap parts until it works" game. Womp, womp.
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Monday 27th October 2025 14:57 GMT Steve Hersey
Re: Make a stand
A startup I worked for had a new engineering manager who insisted the embedded engineers get rid of "that junk in your cubes." 'Scuse me, but that junkbox saves untold time and cost when I need to build or fix something, and the cost of not having it on hand when needed is extreme. It's a wellspring of creativity and ideas.
We dutifully hid our junk boxes for a few weeks until we got a NEW new engineering manager who had a clue.
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Monday 27th October 2025 19:45 GMT Stevie
Re: Make a stand
Heh. One of my managers told me to get rid of all my paper manuals.
So I took them home.
Turns out some of the paper manuals were discontinued before being ported to CD/online versions.
Including the Cobol Supplementary Reference that contained the only references to the umptytump COMP formats use to make ancient IBM tape readable with UNIVAC-derived equipment.
Fast forward two years and I am at a new job, being laughed at for the one big binder I keep locked up so no-one can helpfully throw it away for me. We get a lot of Federal Govt-related work. Mysteriously, I'm the only person in the office who can tell people how to read a 1960s-era IBM tape format with 2000-era equipment without doing a complete rewrite (and buying all the problems that come with that).
Typical phone convo:
Manager: "We need to read seven track odd-parity tape written in EBCDIC and copy it to standard 2200 format!"
Me: Does the customer even have the equipment to do that?"
Manager: "It's <redacted government department>! So, YES!"
Me: <flipflipflip> "COMP-7*""
Manager: "HTF do you know that?"
Me: "Just lucky, I guess."
* No, I don't know if that is correct. The manual is buried in my garage now.
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Monday 27th October 2025 15:44 GMT GlenP
Re: Make a stand
The same person tried to insist that we should stop selling 80% of our products, "No business needs more than 50 product lines, most of these we only sell a few a year!"
What he didn't grasp was that we were the market leader and sold a lot of product overall simply because we dealt with the more unusual fittings. If we didn't have those customers would simply go to the cheaper suppliers. I think the sales management put a stop to that one as we'd have lost a lot of big money supply contracts.
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Monday 27th October 2025 09:22 GMT Jeff 11
"One of the services the nonprofit provided was a certification lab, and Ted's bosses told him to take over its backup systems. To do so, he logged into the organization's server virtualization platform, saw a list of VMs not mentioned in the pile of notes, and deleted them."
Was Ted new to the industry? I ask as I can't think of anyone who, in their right mind, would delete something they do not know the purpose of without at least making a backup of it first...
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Monday 27th October 2025 12:04 GMT The Man Who Fell To Earth
Agreed
Anyone with an ounce of common sense, even if new to any industry, would not delete a bunch of anything without knowing what it is, whether it is used regardless of documentation status, would back it up before doing anything, and would only disable it for some period of time (weeks/months) before removing it. Makes the rest of "Ted's" story suspicious.
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Monday 27th October 2025 13:06 GMT ColinPa
Delete is a two stage process
I learned early on that if you need to delete something. Rename it or move it. Then a week or so later delete it.
I learned this the hard way deleting a file. We easily recreated the file but is was missing some special attributes we hadn't noticed, and so it didnt work.
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Tuesday 28th October 2025 20:46 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Agreed
Anyone with an ounce of common sense, even if new to any industry, would not delete a bunch of anything without knowing what it is
At a previous employer, once I'd left (after they'd engineered redundancy) the manager went into the server room and removed everything I'd built - partly because it wasn't Windows, partly because I'd built it, but mostly because he didn't understand it (after all, VMs under Xen, and VLANs on managed switches are so high end.)
I suspect he patted himself on the back ... until a week later. The TTL for most of the DNS was a week, we ran a primary server on site, and public secondary servers rented in as a service - he'd just assumed that the secondary servers would just keep going. I still wonder what lies he told clients to cover his backside when all sorts of stuff fell over, because he sure as hell won't have told the truth. Best of it was, it was only a few clicks to change the secondaries into primaries while keeping the records - if he'd done it in advance of them expiring.
That time was a difficult one - one one hand I really wanted a good laugh about it, on the other I felt bad for the clients who suffered outages.
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Monday 27th October 2025 16:49 GMT Throatwarbler Mangrove
This was my first thought as well . . . why did Ted delete those VMs? The counterpoint, of course, is that we were all young and inexperienced at some point, and today's bitter experience comes from previous bad judgement. "# rm -rf .*" anyone?
That said, Ted clearly had some latent anger issues, and hopefully his loss of control prompted some self-reflection.
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Monday 27th October 2025 09:23 GMT ComicalEngineer
I took a job without meeting my manager at the interview because he was "off ill". Turned out he had been signed off with stress and had been away for almost 3 months. I got stuck in on the job and spent over 2 weeks putting together a spreadsheet which automated the performance calculations for a number of our key processes (5 in total). Needless to say that the calculations were identical but the inputs were different for each process.
On his return part way through my work my boss decided to re-check all of my calculations individually by printing out the spreadsheets and going through them with his pocket calculator and a pencil.
Fortunately I had written the spreadsheets such that they could be easily understood so it only took him 10 days to go through the numbers during which I was given a series of "makework" jobs to keep me busy.
Need I say that all five calculations were accurate?
Further need I say that I was out of the company like a stabbed rat?
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Monday 27th October 2025 11:00 GMT IGotOut
Not smashing..
....but very sweary.
Can't go into to much detail as it will easily identify me to some readers of The Reg who witnessed it.
I worked for the internal IT department of a large multinational IT services company (think multi billion pound turnover).
One day our entire <Redacted> system went down due to a perfect storm of a pan-european multi 3rd party cascading outages. I'd noticed the issue within seconds and had the top engineers of two of companies involved on a conference call on my mobile whilst frantically helping to trace the issues.
All hell was breaking loose as dozens of team leaders and managers started to gather round mine and my colleagues desk to see what was going on. The screen with red flashing images all over it should of been a clue. They all kept interrupting me whilst trying to collaborate with the 3rd parties, who no doubt were getting the same at their end.
After a few minutes we'd identified the issue and started to come up with a workaround when the department director and effectively 3rd in command and whom most were terrified of, came stomping over and demanded a list of all our clients who were affected by the issue, how long it would take to resolve it and what's being done to fix it.
At this point I completely lost my shit and yelled at big scary boss man.
"I can either come into your office and spend twenty minutes explaining the problem, or you can get the fuck out of my face and fuck off back to the office and let me do the job you fucking pay me to do" and promptly turned my back on him and carried on with the workaround.
1 minute later everything was back online and then I noticed no-one was standing around me anymore.
No one dared talk to me for the rest of the afternoon.
Next day I was expecting to get my marching orders, but instead the managers had been in a meeting and it was decided that all major incidents should go through a single point of contact who would handle all the politics, whilst us techies did our jobs.
So it seems my little tirade of abuse to the top man actually improved the process.
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Monday 27th October 2025 11:59 GMT Anonymous Custard
Re: Not smashing..
Ah the old classic "do you want me to spend the next hour making PowerPoint presentations with fancy graphs to explain the problem to you, or should I just spend the time actually fixing it?"
As I think I've said here before, that has become something of a mantra around this place and I'm getting quite well known for being respectfully disrespectful to manglement who think that their own understanding is more important than letting those who already do get on and solve things...
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Monday 27th October 2025 12:44 GMT blcollier
Re: Not smashing..
To extend, and therefore torture, your metaphor even further...
The best generals are the ones who have been there themselves, who have experience of being in it right up to their necks in the trenches. Because those are often the generals who will trust their front-line troops to do what they're best at, and will support them when it's needed without even being asked.
I've served under a couple of generals like that, but they are quite a rare breed.
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Monday 27th October 2025 16:37 GMT RMclan
Re: Not smashing..
We got hit by a ransomware attack, one of my users actually spotted files being renamed so I was able to kill the server while the ransomware was working its way through all our PDFs and JPGs on our file share, before it got near anything of real value.
As we spotted the attack only about 1 hour into the working day we decided to just roll the fileserver back to the previous night's backup while all workstations were being scanned for viruses/malware/ransomware.
We were back up and running by about 3pm
As the only member of the IT department I was very busy that day but thankfully I had the very patient support of management, one of the directors kept me supplied with cups of tea and the MD went and bought me lunch from Tesco to save me having to go out.
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Wednesday 29th October 2025 13:47 GMT RMclan
Re: Not smashing..
The file server was one of 4 VMs we had on 1 physical server.
We backed up the VMs from the hypervisor each night to a NAS which was on a separate network address space to the one the VMs ran in.
We just restored the previous night's VM backup into the hypervisor.
The user that the attack came in via had no way of accessing the hypervisor or the NAS.
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Monday 3rd November 2025 11:43 GMT Peter Gathercole
Re: Not smashing..
You were also lucky in that the backups had not been infected.
Something that seems to happen nowadays is that the ransomware sits dormant for a number of days to ensure it is present on the backups as well, to be reactivated again if the systems are rolled back to a previous backup.
If this happens, you're left wondering about how far you can go back, and whether your oldest backups are also infected.
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Monday 27th October 2025 13:02 GMT ColinPa
Great manager
I had spent a week at a banking customer abroad, and had a free day at the end before I flew home.
My phone rang at 0700 on Saturday, and my "boss" asked if I could help with a problem to which I said yes, and he gave me the contact number of the technical team. He said if I get unwanted calls phone him. If I need >anything< phone him.
I worked with the customer's teams agreed the problem and the plan to fix it. I told our boss what the plan was, and updated him as we completed each step.
I phoned him "we need access to ..." 2 minutes later we had access. "We needs someone to..." done.
All systems were back by 10am. I found that the bank had been down since 0400. The outage had the attention of senior managers (and the board). They had a plan for when this happened. One person would act as the focal point getting all the phone calls from people who cannot help. Only this person can phone the technical team.
It worked a treat - and let the technical folks handle the problem without the distracting chaff.
A great manager to work for. It was good we did not know the scale of the problem... we just got on and fixed the problem(s).
As we executed the plan my boss could tell interested parties the progress we were making, so everyone felt it was under control.
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Monday 3rd November 2025 12:42 GMT Peter Gathercole
Re: Great manager
I had a similar experience. I was helping my extended team with a problem that had taken down and completely corrupted the SAN storage for all of the office systems, including the change management and code repositories (none of which, I hasten to add, were my responsibility), and we were in the process of attempting to recover from the tape backups. But the procedure for the recovery of the backup server (which had also been taken down - all the eggs in one SAN basket!) from tape was not working. The restore of the backup system's database was failing, rendering the tape backups useless. We were 4 days into the problem, and had hit an apparent brick wall.
At about 2AM, while we were waiting for some politics with our supplier's support team to be sorted so we could talk to higher levels of support (they couldn't find the support agreement!) I made a breakthrough, almost by accident, and was finally on the way to a position where I could start recovering the backup server. I reported this progress to the IT lead and the PM who was shadowing me (they were doing 24 hour cover as well), and the PM then acted as a shield, literally sitting behind me to warn off others, and a supplier of tea while I worked on through the procedure. All he asked was that at appropriate times, chosen by me, I call out to him where I was so he could pass the information on.
Slightly more than a few hours later, with the backup server functional and proved to be working (it was about 6AM in the morning by this time), he told me to dump the progress notes I had been keeping as I went along into a quick write up, and go home and get some sleep, and he started calling in the rest of the teams who's systems needed recovering to continue on with the further work.
I remember the IT boss sitting with his head in his hands when I first approached him to report the progress. The look of relief on his face, after days of failure was indescribable.
Ironically, about an hour after I started making progress, the supplier's level 2 support team finally agreed to help, and called to engage in the problem. They asked what I had done to get over the problem, and then said that they had come up with an action plan that had effectively been what I had done, and to get back to them if I had further problems!
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Monday 27th October 2025 14:29 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Not smashing..
Late 80s, just during the big storm that caused Michael Fish so much grief, I worked for BT. The storm had loosened metal cladding on the tower at the Martlesham research labs and had it come loose it would have decapitated any poor soul passing nearby.
The site safety officer declared the site shut, and had staff turn away anyone who arrived at the gate. All was ok until a director arrived, and when refused access blew up with the "don't you know who I am" approach. The safety officer's normal job was as a technician, so relatively junior, bur as safety officer he was effectively God, and did not appreciate a director trying to pull rank. In the resulting frank exchange of views the safety officer ended up telling the director to fuck off and go home.
The director immediately complained to the CEO about this jumped up technician giving him orders, and to the great delight of the technicians' union he was smacked down, the CEO giving him a bollocking for refusing to obey the fully justified orders of the safety officer. Alway nice to get support from above.
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Monday 27th October 2025 17:37 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Not smashing..
It's best to be known as a calm person. That way when you explode like that they know that you mean it. It helps if you apologise afterwards and explain what tipped you over - they can then improve the processes that led to that point.
Several company directors now have much more respect for me as they know I can be trusted to focus on the task at hand when needed.
Just don't be explodey when it's not needed or you just get labelled as aggressive and it looses the attention-grabbing power.
(the best example that I've done was gesticulating with one finger at someone whose net worth was at least £9-digits - we get on really well now)
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Monday 27th October 2025 12:56 GMT goblinski
The streak of fired ones continues :)
I think Bill Burr's words - "...We were the last electable generation..." are becoming quite universal...
He jokingly states that his generation was the last one to NOT have every single word and thought from a very young age published in social media and staying there forever - making them less targetable in their adult life, as every youngsters says and does dumb things at some point in their early life. I feel there was some universal leeway - a one-time pass if you will, for dumb things to do when young.
Drive drunk once, say stupid stuff once, etc. You might not make it, or you might make once. Do it repeatedly, and statistics will catch up and bite you.
I have had outburts at my first jobs, nothing involving smashing hardware as I revere hardware to a god-like status. But I still feel Ted allowed that pustulent wound to fester long enough in the first place.
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Tuesday 28th October 2025 18:29 GMT Not Yb
Re: Non-Profit
If the NFL's main org makes a profit, they'd have to pay taxes on it. When it's simpler to avoid posting a profit, this is frequently a good move to make in the USA.
Our tax laws are notoriously arcane and complex once you start trying to run a nation-wide business for profit. Sales tax differs per state (and in some edge cases, city), and that's just one minor issue.
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Monday 27th October 2025 14:39 GMT Sam not the Viking
Stress
I was working for a small company and found that although others could cover for me when necessary, holidays etc, they had their own function which was separate from my task which was essentially completion, testing and verification of the product. This was OK but I found it was causing me concern; I would wake during the night and have to make notes about things "I mustn't forget to do....". I told the boss this was making me uneasy and that if I got run over by a bus, it could put the company in a difficult position. A good boss, he immediately started looking for an assistant. This was good because as we were expanding, we needed to take on and train graduates and other clever people.
My first graduate 'assistant' was useless. I'm sure he didn't have the qualifications he claimed. The next was excellent, not qualified in the same way, but a good learner. He was methodical in getting things ready for process which I realised was an issue causing me a lot of anxiety. His previous employment: Bomb disposal.
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Monday 27th October 2025 15:39 GMT spuck
Ted's first red flag
'They asked if I could get into the servers, I said yes, and they handed me a huge pile of old notes.' With that 'documentation' to hand, Ted managed to wrest control of the servers, a feat that earned him the job.
Working for free, under the guise of a job interview...
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Monday 27th October 2025 17:13 GMT old_n_grey
Have you exploded in a fit of rage due to the frustrations of work?
Twice, on the same large project, although the details are long since lost in the mush that was once my memory
I was the functional team lead at the time and one of the test team came down to tell me that one of the tests had failed. We discussed the issue and I thought that the test used incorrect criteria/assumptions/curse my memory. So we discussed the issue and for some reason his attitude really annoyed me. We were in the main office and our voices gradually increased in volume until we were shouting at one another. My patience snapped and I told him to "Get out of my sight before I f*cking punch you!" Luckily he did and as soon as he was out of the office I got a round of applause from a number of other consultants, both functional and technical, who had had problems with him. I did subsequently go and apologise to his and his manager as I knew that, as justified as it was, it was somewhat unprofessional. He and I had a much more amicable relationship thereafter.
The other time was with a member of my team. I hadn't worked with him previously but he was highly thought of by many. One problem he had was that we were building a very large bespoke system over the standard ERP modules. He seemed to have a problem with this and one day I asked him to to do something. Again, no details can be recalled but not only did he not do it he started arguing about whether he should do it. After a short while I loudly told him to "Just do what I f*cking well asked you to do!" Amazingly, that worked and he did the task asked of him. We then totally ignored that little contratemps but he never again didn't do what was asked of him.
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Monday 27th October 2025 17:16 GMT MickeyLane
It gets worse
I've been retired these 10 years but I remember an incident in my early career so almost 50 years ago. I was working for a computer equipment manufacturing company. One night, I guy I didn't know entered his computer lab and shot a lot of the equipment up before turning the gun on himself.
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Monday 27th October 2025 17:42 GMT IGnatius T Foobar !
Seen it
Ah, the summer of 1990 ... when I got to witness an employee who had enough, quit by pouring a full pot of coffee into the main processor complex of an IBM ES/9000 mainframe.
That was a fun phone call.
"Do you know what time it is? Something had better be on fire. What's on fire?"
"Your computer."
"[...]"
(for the record, the former employee was arrested later that night)
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Monday 27th October 2025 19:13 GMT trevorde
Secure hardware destruction
Worked for a company who sold software to the military, law enforcement and intelligence agencies. Our software was dongled to reduce piracy and enforce licensing. Tech support got an inquiry along the lines of: "If we ran over the dongle with a tank would that destroy it?" Yes, that would pretty much destroy it!
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Monday 27th October 2025 21:55 GMT Grunchy
Non-Union
I worked at a union shop once, and bragged a little about solving someone else’s problem that they couldn’t figure out. People exchanged glances and before long the shop steward showed up. I was taken away to a private office. There, I was informed that 1. we don’t work extra time 2. we don’t take on extra duties 3. we don’t trespass in other job descriptions. In short, don’t get your coworkers fired by taking away their work. Then, the shop steward asked how come I never come to union meetings (the reason was because I was working to pay for college, which took ALL of my other time). He said, hey you should come to the union meetings. Eventually after awhile the union was asked for a concession which they voted on at the union meeting: all student employees were getting a 50% pay cut. What!!! Well how many workers are affected, oh what good luck: only 1 single individual would be affected. But Franky the shop steward only smiled and said, see, I told you that you should attend the union meetings. Luckily my boss said, hey don’t worry about it, I can keep you at your same rate as long as you give me your notice. So I said, how about 18 months? “Sure thing!” my boss replied, and I got to keep being a renegade WITH full pay for the next 18 months. At the end of which, the shop steward made sure I cleaned out 100% of my desk and would never come back again.
(They went bankrupt a couple years later, oh well!)
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Tuesday 28th October 2025 18:37 GMT Not Yb
Re: Non-Union
Collective agreements can be modified with union approval. Apparently this show steward was a bit of a "my way or the highway" type who didn't like college kids, and put it through in one of the union meetings the kid didn't go to because of wanting to graduate with good grades (or something).
Fully believable, given the usual type of person that can get themselves elected to shop steward. Some of them are NOT very nice people.
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Tuesday 28th October 2025 06:58 GMT richdin
In case of Emergency
Recalling a departed friend - Mendi, RIP.
Mendi had a short fuse. Multiple times he'd throw his desk phone across the room and storm out...
At one point in M's career, he was sent "on assignment" to a US site where that behavior would be frowned upon.
We had recently replaced our old analog phone system with one of the first IP phone deployments in the company.
So we packed up a few old extensions and sent them to him in a box marked "in case of emergency".
We heard that these were put to immediate use...
Thanks for bringing up the memory.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
