Posts by Turkey_Bender

Techie pointed out meetings are pointless, and was punished for it

Had a co-worker who would rarely join weekly team meetings, but any time he did he would immediately jump in with "I hate to derail this meeting but..." followed by a question to the team that would of course derail the meeting.

I finally got fed up as I was leading the meetings (and he was technically above me in the company), so I responded with "You know- that's a good and pretty involved question that is worthy of its own meeting. I'm going to proceed with the published agenda, but feel free to schedule a separate meeting with the relevant members of this team to cover your topic."

After a couple of times of that, he stopped interrupting the meetings but he never scheduled those other meetings either.

User said he did nothing that explained his dead PC – does a new motherboard count?

I've been the family tech support for decades, and even though I work in IT, I have long since moved on from the front lines of direct user support. This of course means nothing to my family. However, I was overjoyed this year when my niece and nephew decided to gift grandma with a new iPad, and then proceeded to do ALL THE SETUP FOR HER! This means she won't call me! Happy day!

Yes, I am being intolerably smug – because I ignored you and saved the project

Occam's Razor FTW

Guess how much stored data is ever used or accessed

I used to work for a company that specialized in storing and indexing documents for law firms relating to discovery. We called it "write once, read maybe"

DBA made ten years of data disappear with one misplaced parameter

Re: Walking on the live rail

Remember- everyone has a test environment. Some people are lucky enough to have a dedicated production environment too!

CEO arranged his own cybersecurity, with predictable results

We had a developer that thought the "ILOVEYOU" virus seemed interesting, and he wanted to examine the code.

Unfortunately, he executed it by mistake.

But because the universe loves to punish us, he also had a drive mapped to a production volume containing thousands of photos. (yeah- things were less strict in those days)

Took us over a week to get all the image files back from tape. (yes- tape. a different time)

The developer was the only person who understood a key product, so he just got a slap on the wrist.

*sigh*

Sysadmin's favorite collection of infallible utilities failed … foully

The old NT Manual Defrag

I seem to recall that at one time, the M$-approved method for defragging Windows NT was "Take a backup, format the disk, then restore the backup"

Ah, the good old days.

We had tech from a small-shop acquisition who was convinced that his department's slow performance was because we needed to defrag the NAS (which was an Appliance, on the Network). He even tried it once (fortunately the software he was using refused to run against network drives).

Turned out that the users located in the Midwestern US were configured to get AD authentication from London. But it took me 4 months to convince him to even look at that.

Don't miss those days.

CompSci academic thought tech support was useless – until he needed it

Typical

I had a HellDesk job where we were required to support laptops provided to Real Estate agents (not our main job- inherited with a misguided acquisition)

Got a call from a guy on behalf of his mom. First thing he tells me: I'm a Computer Scientist, so I know what I'm doing here.

Oh goody.

Next he tells me "she was having issues, so I formatted the hard drive"- he installed Windows, but now none of the devices work.

I spent the next 2 hours walking him through downloading and installing drivers, which he was completely clueless about. No idea what was wrong to start with, but I'm pretty sure we could have fixed it without a rebuild.

AWS scoops Intel silicon and 8TB of storage into new Snowcone edge box

I don't care what CPU it has...as long as it doesn't SnowCrash.

I'll see myself out.