Re: I can believe it!
Long ago, the fellow I worked for decided to branch out from the core business into the utterly, totally, absolutely unrelated business of being an ISP. He had no skills or knowledge of the business whatsoever. To accomodate the ISP operation lab space was broken up and a server closet was built to for the routers and oher other necessary hardware and their racks. To oversee this, he initially hired a very gothy young fellow whose apparent ambition was to become a BOFH. The boss had decreed that the entire office be tied into the new system and for some obscure reason, the tie ran through the machine we used as a print server. The side of the business we worked on (when not answering "hell desk" questions) had reports that needed to be printed, deadlines to be met and all the other daya to day things such businesses are faced with. However, our young WBBOFH (would-be BOFH) decided that security required that when he was out of the building direct access between the office side and the ISP side of things had to be cut, which he accomplisged by the simple expedient of powering down the print server, leaving us stuck without an available printer. Within a couple of weeks of this after fruitless complaints and explanations that if he really needed the security he need to install another break point, my partner worked out a work around involving booting the print server from an alternate bootable floppy.
This worked fine from our perspective but played merry hell with the link to the ISP side since it left the NT file system in an unstable state which required some work by the WBBOFH every time he started the system "properly." Even though "the boss" told us not to circumvent the little twerp's measures, we simply offered to let him - the boss - explain to his other clients who paid for the majority of the opreation why their work went begging, and continued to "circumvent." Young WWBOFH quit within about six months.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
