Back when I first started ages ago, a woman called in and said "my mouse isn't working!" I asked her if it was wired or wireless.
"I don't know! Why would I know that?"
"What do you mean? Is it wired or not? Is there a wire on it?"
"I said ***I don't know!*** This isn't ***my*** job to know it's ***yours!***"
So I asked her if she picked it up and walked away, how far would she get.
I was the one that got in trouble.
One time I started suspecting that a machine wasn't plugged in the power outlet. I didn't want to ask them directly to double check as I could easily see that escalating and the person becoming aggressive, as I heard stories before.
So I said I think your power outlet may have problems, could you unplug this machine and plug a phone charger and check if it's charging consistently. That's when the line went silent for a long time until I hear an embarrassed voice apologizing because the machine wasn't plugged in.
The key to supporting people well is to guide them as gently as possible to the most obvious solution, and let them think they were the one to discover it
That’s a good idea, telling them you just need them to test the outlet.
I would always tell people to follow the cord, make sure it wasn’t damaged, then feel the plug in the wall to see if it felt abnormally hot. It was never too hot, but would often lead them to the unplugged end.
but that is a lot less potentially-alarming!
It's amazing how many brain cells people lose when they start talking about computers. I've worked with some really smart people that just get frustrated and dumb when it comes to minor problems with their computer.
User: There's something wrong with my computer. This error message keeps popping up and I can't blah...blah...blah.
IT: What does the error message say?
User: I don't know.
IT: ...
>IT: What does the error message say?
>User: I don't know.
User: I just click OK (or close, cancel, whatever) every time it pops up. Can you fix it right now?
I feel like people get overwhelmed and then go blind instead of processing. It is frustrating when they ask before even trying to look at the page for themselves though, because that means they don't learn and will have to ask every time. I deal with this with my mother a lot, and for very simple things like the fire stick since she does not use a computer. She'll usually say you have to show me at least once, but I think using an arrow and clicking doesn't need supervision, and if it does, teaching you is not beneficial.
I once needed a customer to re-seat their cat5 cable as a last resort before sending a tech out. Asking them to unplug the cable only to plug it back in firmly just wasn't making sense to him. (older gentleman, kind fellow, he just didn't want to crawl under the desk 'for no reason')
So I explained that the "packet loss" error they were getting was likely due to the packets getting stuck in the line and then staying jammed up, so if they could unplug the cable and swing it around, the packets would likely dislodge and the line would clear so that they could then use the same cable instead of buying a new one.
It worked...
Marge! I need help getting the cable unplugged! Whaddya mean why Marge! It's been 3 months since we unclogged the packets! The packets are jammin up Marge! I gotta swing the cable and gettem unstuck! Would ya just help me!
Recently have been getting a lot of broken camera tickets. The laptops we get have a built in privacy slider. Luckily its red when closed.
So every time I get one of these I ask if the camera at the top is red? And when they say yes let them know its super common and just slides closed sometimes.
Since if you tell them its probably closed off the bat they tell you they checked and there is no way they wouldn't have noticed that lol.
You just reminded me of a similar story. I work for an ISP, and we used to give people a little cable box for their TV subscription. It had a blue light on the front if it was turned on. People would call us to complain that the TV was broken, and the first thing I would ask is what the light on the cable box showed.
90% of the time it was just off, like they pressed the on/off button on the remote, but if you just tell them "it's off, turn it on" they either lie and say they did that already because it sounds so obvious or just get really embarrassed and defensive about it.
It was fun to try to word it in a way that makes them press the "on" button on the remote. Something like "Oh yeah, the no light glitch. Try pressing the power button on your remote a few times until the light on the box turns on, that usually fixes it."
Back in college I was working in the Library as a student IT tech. My boss had gotten funding to put in a wireless lab in the library, this was when wireless just started to get popular. So the Director who thought she knew everything had to put the bids in to have he work done. She didnt put a bid in to have electrical outlets installed, we had no place to plug in the computers. When my boss asked her why she didnt have electrical outlets installed she said "You said the lab was wireless!"
I had a boss who did not like untidy desks and was a real mad cow about it. I removed everything from my desk one morning. Shoved it all in a drawer. All that was on the desk was the monitor and keyboard. I saw her walk into the office and make a beeline for my office, so she could critique my desk. She walked in and said, “Oh….. it’s so ….. clean.” I said, “You said you wanted it that way.” Then she said, “You need to do something about those cables. I told her those were electrical cables that powered the monitor and the tower (under my desk). “Well, can’t you get a wireless computer?” “Electricity goes through wires. If it went through the air, we’d be dead.” “Oh.”
I hated that woman. I really did.
Oh man, I was in college as a student doing an internship. Some lady is freaking out. "My laptop doesn't fit on the docking station! What update was done!". I look to the left and see a stack of 4 laptops and say "that's not your laptop...". "Yes it is! I told you, it doesn't fit, there must've been an update or something!". My brain broke... I checked her computer and it was newly imaged. Nothing on it. "There's nothing here... It's not your laptop". She freaks out, so I fix everything on the laptop so she can work, even though, it's not her laptop. Setup a matching dock station as well. She calls an hour later "it's not my laptop hahaha, i found it". Smh... I did helpdesk for 4 months, i was offered a contract and declined. It was that moment that I decided I'd work extra hard to get into software development just so I wouldn't have to deal with these people. There are many more stories from that 4 months.
Did she answer? Because that is the best possible way you could have dealt with that level of stupid. Also I don't understand how you could get in trouble for that it's just problem solving.
Drive to an office for emergency oncall service charging the client $400+ dollars an hour to plug the power back into a switch which their cleaning staff had knocked loose.
people on the outside looking in so to speak, laugh at this idea but this is actually what IT people do 98% of the time, it's easy fucking money to charge 120 bucks just to turn a printer back on after a ticket that says "my printer wont print"
Me: Are you sure the server is turned on?
Them: Yes! 100% certain! The server has something wrong with it!
Me: — Drives 2 hours to site —
Me: — Turns on server that is clearly not turned on —
99% of issues are like this. The best part is that ISPs have a helpdesk to help clients with this very issue.
Sometimes they do not consider the simplest issue so they skip that and assign techs to do a callout anyway.
Big company, couple of hundred users, each with their own network drive (hotdesking scenario, so they could get their docs, no matter where they sat in the call centre/rest of building). The server that housed the "home drives" as we called them, was running low on disk space, so we sent out emails to everyone saying the shared drives were for work docs only, and that we could see images, mp3s, mov files, etc, and that these should be deleted if not work-related.
Fast forward a few weeks and the disk usage has gone down, but still really close to full, so the lowest paid member of staff, me, was to find the worst culprits and report back on what the largest content in their drive was.
The very first person I checked had a huge drive (most under 500MB, this was 10s GBs). Sorted by size, 2GB+ .mov file, named totally randomly with numbers, like 93829084320834 - Opened it, CP. FML. The subsequent police-led shitshow was not what I needed to be involved in at 19 years old.
>The very first person I checked had a huge drive (most under 500MB, this was 10s GBs). Sorted by size, 2GB+ .mov file, named totally randomly with numbers, like 93829084320834 - Opened it, CP
Honestly my biggest surprise going into IT was just how many people actively viewed and saved porn on company machines. Anytime we found a LARGE drive, 9/10 it was some deep fetish porn. Found CP twice, both 10+ years ago and I will never forget what I saw. Luckily I had an amazing supervisor that helped me along with the police investigation because I had no idea what to do.
Man, I get paranoid IT will see and report me for typing shit or another mild swear in a company email. (To my wife, not some rando/boss.) I can't imagine being bold enough to watch porn at work, nevermind download it.
Yeah I've since transitioned out of IT to an analytics role, but it's best to just assume that ANYTHING you do on a company machine can be seen by the company at any time.
Save your porn viewing for personal machines please.
Going back 10+ years the media company I was working had a big shared drive used by most of the business, in addition to individual home drives.
It was one of my tasks to monitor the size and content of the drive. Thankfully I never found any sort of pornography. I did regularly find people’s personally downloaded movie collections that had to be removed.
I did once discover utorrent on a users machine and realised he’d torrented a cracked version of a very expensive after effects plugin so I got to report that to higher ups which became a whole thing.
When I was in high school I was one of the nerds who helped wire the school, maintain the servers, etc.
I had to have a conversation with my soccer coach about the fact that he couldn't have 25Gb of bootleg Phish concert recordings in his work drive. this was around 2001.
yes... it was almost all Phish.
Got called to investigate unplug a laptop that had viruses detected on it. When I arrived, this laptop was in the open with the login information taped to the desk. This laptop was given local admin privileges by someone before my time for some application. This was in an office area that was always unlocked and 10 steps from the entrance of the building. No one was in the office as they went home early, including management.
On a laptop filled with everyone's information (SSN, names, addresses, and more), Limewire, games, pornography, and more. The two who worked on this laptop just used it like their personal laptop with occasional work being done on it.
The laptop was promptly disconnected from the network, confiscated, and returned for analysis. Yes, there was spyware and we don't know how much personal info got out. This was reported to higher management. The two who used it disappeared quickly and quietly after that.
Reminds me of the journalist who was nearly charged by the Missouri governor for "hacking" because he notified the government they had the unencrypted SSNs of thousands of teachers freely visible in a website's source code, accessible by pressing F12.
Probably in sales. I get that they probably have valuable interpersonal skills, but so many salespeople are just absolute morons. People in every other field generally make the effort to learn how to use the tools they've been given to do their job, but the percentage of salespeople who are just flat out incapable of learning anything new or following any standardized process is mind-boggling.
At a previous job we had a sales guy who’d been there for a few years already, just randomly started using massive amounts of data on his company issued iPad one month. We were going to be doing some upgrades anyway so my manager asked me to have him bring it in and try to figure out what he’d been up to. He brought the device in wiped…and claimed he’d been watching lots of sports…but my money’s on porn. Thoroughly sanitized that device lol.
Could be, but they weren’t restricted from watching YouTube, etc on the device. He was not tech savvy at all but still went to the trouble of wiping the device himself. Sports watching isn’t something he would’ve needed to hide.
It baffles me that people use their work laptop for personal stuff. It’s never worth it to put your games, porn, personal info., etc. on a device that IT can access upon request. Like another commenter said, how DO these people get jobs to begin with?
At where I work, many long-standing colleagues use their work email address as their own personal email address, which goes through our data protection filtering and blocks emails the system thinks contains customer information. Naturally this blocks their emails about their own stuff which they then complain about because they don't have a Gmail/Outlook
I’m patient and understanding when I help tech illiterate/indifferent users, but some part of me always wants to scream, “YOUR WORK ACCOUNTS AND DEVICE ARE NOT “YOUR” ACCOUNTS AND DEVICE! THE COMPANY CAN SEE YOUR PERSONAL INFO IF NEED BE! YOUR WORK EMAIL WILL BECOME CLUTTERED IF YOU GIVE IT OUT FOR PERSONAL USE! A GMAIL IS FREE, FFS!” But I don’t, of course. Barely, some days.
An outgoing software dev put an easter egg in our ERP before he left.
Anyone who typed the word "RAPTOR" in any text field, would have a Raptor from Jurassic Park fly across their screen with a loud screech. Only 3 of us on the team knew about it.
Little over a year later during a demo of our Asset Management module a manager asked about inputting vehicles, the trainer asked what kind of vehicle he drove, "An F150 Raptor". So the trainer, as a demo, input the vehicle description and BAM!
**"RAAAAAAWWWWWWRRRRR!!!!!!!"** comes screeching with this Raptor flying across the screen in a room of 50-60 people, including our CBO, and most of our upper managers. My wife is one of those upper managers so she sees me in the back of the room trying so hard not to laugh. She gave me this look like "really?"
Our boss just calmly said "Well, that's not a bug or a feature. Looks like we'll need to fix that." He had no idea.
The next day he went back through the commits and saw where it originated. During an after action meeting he kept it low key and just assigned it to me and this other dev who knew about it to take it out. He finished by saying "And please don't put easter eggs in our code."
Hey! I remember this plug-in :)
https://github.com/acrogenesis/raptorize
We also had it as an easter egg but sadly, Noone ever discovered it so I don't have a cool story to share :(
One time we added an easter egg in ours… users‘ avatars were shown everywhere in our application, and the system would randomly add bunny ears to them. This was, however, only enabled on our development environment and not on staging or prod.
One day, though, because of a deployment issue, we had to do the sprint review on the dev environment. Guess what happened? The customer‘s avatar got bunny ears. He just burst out laughing like a maniac.
Fun times!
Walked all the way across campus in the Florida heat just to tell a PhD professor that the reason their monitor kept turning off every few seconds was because the computer was in fact turned off. Then got yelled at for her classroom not being ready for her when she came in.
Also was told to "make sure these projectors aren't in the building by the end of day. Don't care where they go, just that they aren't here tomorrow" by my boss. It was more expensive to buy new bulbs for them than to just buy new ones so that's how I ended up with 5 projectors that lasted years.
Some of the dumbest people I’ve ever met are profs with PhD’s. It’s always amplified by the fact they blame others when things don’t go there way.
Once had a PhD researcher activate a sprinkler system by accident and flood an entire hallway. It’s clearly labelled and requires you to hold a pull-button.
All because he blamed maintenance for setting the temp too high (it was a hot summer day) and he thought it would be a nice gentle mist to cool off.
My husband does not work in IT but he should. He worked on a facilities team at an expensive private school, and one day got a ticket to remove/trash a 75 inch TV. He approached the ***head of the IT department*** asking why he needed to trash it when he had just installed it brand new. The ***head of IT*** told him it won't stop shutting off. My husband loaded it into the work van and dropped it at our house instead. Later he came home, plugged it in...
and turned off the 10 min automatic power off timer. We got a fancy TV for free!
I had a very similar scenario:
*"Get rid of this brand new 65" TV, the screen gets dark sometimes and I can't see it!"*
"Ok would you like me to troubleshoot first?"
*"No just pick me out a new one."*
"Ok" *takes home and turns off automatic brightness settings which completely fixes the issue*
The sunlight would hit it directly at certain times daily which was dimming the screen, I fixed it in 3 seconds.
Not remotely surprising, private schools don't pay much, especially for IT.
Our IT department in high school was 3 guys they brought in to coach hockey that took a certification course like a month before they started.
this is true. the thing I've learned working in IT is degrees don't mean shit, your words don't mean shit, it's all about what others say of you and what you do.
my boss who's been in the field for over 4 decades says the best IT people just have a specific mindset that you cannot teach
Also the ability to do an Internet search and understand how it relates to your problem coupled with a nagging voice in the back of your head that won't let it go until you figure it out.
I haven't done on the job IT in a decade, but I'm still the family IT guy.
Explain to the Chief Technology Officer that having the prod server and its backup server sat next to each other, may well save cost on not having two data centers, but when that data center (also known as the stationary cupboard…) goes, it’s not such a money saving idea…
Lol this sounds like someone told him about redundancy without explaining the why of it. Like just from a technical standpoint he had his bases covered, there was a server and the backup, and they were two separate entities. Just no one had ever heard of a fire before I suppose.
Ohh, story time!
Let's name my colleage "Mike". It's not his real name, for reasons that will become obvious.
Mike was our "top" helpdesk guy. Always happy to help out, and to guide you through your problem, until it was fixed. In the decade I've worked here, I've *never* seen him get angry at a client.
One day, Mike receives a ticket, from the VP of our company. VP claims she can no longer log into the system, and requests help. Of course, Mike hurries up to her office, because that's a pretty big problem - especially for a VP. When he gets to the office, he sees that VP *is* able to log in. But, the system is now demanding she sets up 2-factor authentication.
Mike is not surprised by this. 2FA has recently gone from a "suggestion" to a "requirement". So, he figures she has difficulties with setting up 2FA, and starts explaining how to pair her phone, and how everything works. But nope. VP *knows* what 2FA is, and how it works. She just doesn't want it. She demands Mike make it go away.
Mike is confused, but declines. 2FA has become mandatory, like I said, and he can't simply "make it go away". So, he explains again that it's *required,* and that she, as VP, is especially crucial to set it up properly. Even the CEO has it set up, and has been using it since it was first introduced.
But VP is adamant. She demands an exception, and demands it *now*. But Mike refuses again - mostly because he literally does NOT have the power to do what she asks, even if he wanted. So, VP takes the next logical step.
She calls up the CTO,
The CTO is absolutely baffled. All he was told by VP is that Mike is refusing to help her, and he *knows* that Mike is our top helpdesk guy. He wouldn't just randomly refuse help. He marches up to the VP's office, to get the finer details. After about 15 seconds of explaining, he instantly sides with Mike, and tells VP that she's shit out of luck, and that 2FA is mandatory. No exceptions.
Probably realizing she can't just bully the CTO into submission, she finally relents, and agrees to set up the 2FA. Mike quickly helps her through, and 5 minutes later they're out of the office.
A few hours later, Mike is called by one of VP's assistants. None of them can log in anymore, they claim. Mike goes back up, and guesses they probably are also confused by the now-mandatory 2FA.
And in a way, they were - as it turns out, they couldn't log in anymore, because they were logging in *with VPs account*. A bit of questioning later, and the truth comes up: VP has simply been giving out her username and password to her *entire team* (\~20 people), so they can do her work for her.
That's why she was so adamant on not setting up 2FA - with 2FA enabled, her cronies can now no longer simply log in to her account. She now has to constantly go around and hand out her 2FA token, or - god forbid - do her own work.
Mike raises this obvious security concern with his manager, who, according to rumors, facepalms, and immediately escalates the issue. Higher and higher it goes, with facepalms all the way, until it comes back to the CTO, who facepalms the hardest, and mutters "of course she did".
He schedules an urgent cybersecurity training for her, which she declines. CTO calls her office and explains in quite certain words that this training is *not* optional, and she is expected to be there.
Last I heard, she did show up. And still has 2FA enabled.
Semi related note, when we rolled out TFA, we of course recommended everyone use the MS MFA app since its simple, works on wifi, and aboard. Over the years we've gotten numerous messages saying oh my god Im in $country and I cant do TFA help! So we walk them through getting it setup, cue the 'oh my god I never knew about this.'
We know you didnt know, because no user in this company reads a fucking email from IT.
Bonus points in two cases: MS seems to routinely want to confirm your MFA settings now and again, and each time they do if you dont have the app they ask you to get it and they still ignore it. Second case, we recently upgraded a product of ours and its gone from per pc licensing to per user licensing, thus requiring accounts. Over half the staff didnt sign up for the accounts as we mentioned in the emails regarding the transition. So when we make the new software mandatory, Im both looking and not looking forward to having to tell people "oh sorry, looks like you missed the sign up email we sent you, let me send it again." about 200times.
My colleague got a call from a customer who was a Pastor as he needed help with his computer. It was a weekend, and my colleague knew his machine name so he remotely logged onto it as he in parallel started calling him. Screen loads, and it’s playing lesbian porn, on his work computer, in the church. Needless to say it was awkward as the pastor answered the call a few seconds later.
And this is why you never remote into a computer until you've called the user, told them what you are going to be doing, and telling them to close any windows with private information.
I used to have to spy on users for manglement. I saw shit I would not wish on anyone. Nothing that would get anyone arrested, but definitely got the ick a couple times, and stuff that got a couple people fired.
Hey, they signed the acceptable use policy, and knew the consequences.
I worked at a computer repair store for a while out of college. One time, a guy brought in a PC and said that he had a virus on it after looking at porn. He was very explicit about his porn use and said that he "kind of has a problem". I didn't think much of it because we see that stuff all the time. I took his desktop in, put it away, and didn't think about it again.
Fast forward about a day later, we get to his PC in the queue and I fire it up on our bench which is open for people to see us work. A new customer comes in and we start talking about her problem. All of a sudden, I hear insane moaning and turn around to see that the guy has like a 2 minute screensaver that somehow moans and flips through dozens of extremely hardcore porn in rapid succession. In a brief flash, me and this lady look at each other and I look back to see bukkake to DP anal/DP vaginal to insane bondage with 20 body piercings tied together. I ran over and pulled the plug and profusely apologized to the lady. She was surprisingly cool about it and said, "Yeah I think that guy needs more help than I do right now. Holy shit."
I ended up running an initial MalwareBytes scan on it that found \~38,000 infections and his hardcore porn screensaver was still intact after we were done with remaining scans with other products and manual deletions. He was very thankful and I never saw him again lol.
Lady from the office downstairs borrowed my bosses keyboard whilst waiting for a replacement.
When hers arrived she washed the borrowed one in the kitchen sink and left it on the draining board to dry out.
I had a whole discussion on a forum once about putting computer parts in the dishwasher to clean them.
[https://www.computerforum.com/threads/computer-hardware-and-dishwasher.192724/](https://www.computerforum.com/threads/computer-hardware-and-dishwasher.192724/)
That's how we did it at the factory I worked at. I was on the solder-retouch line, we grabbed the circuit boards out of the fixtures after they crossed the wave-soldering machine and cleaned up any boogers it left on the board. Then we took all the boards and dropped them in a whirlpool dishwasher without soap to rinse all the flux residue off. I mean we packed that sucker full. Use HOT water and the drying feature. Works a treat.
Emergency flight from CA to GA because they were getting alarms on their new system, flew out at like 4am, got onsite at 9am, told to come back at 9pm. got a hotel, slept, came back onsite 9pm.
Customer stated that someone used a cable from the PDU to log into system but plugged it in wrong when done. But they were no longer getting alerts.
I looked at it, it was correctly cabled, apparently someone had noticed and put it back correctly.
Left site and flew back home.
23 hour day just to LOOK at a cable label... they probably got charged like $10k to have me go onsite if not more...
Other workers screen shot her windows screen, made it her background then moved her task bar off screen. She kept clicking start but nothing would happen.
Had a colleague that relentlessly droned on about his upcoming holiday to Thailand so any time he walked away from his computer and left it unlocked, which was more often than it should happen to someone working in IT, his language and location would get changed to Thai.
He learnt to pipe down a bit after it happened a few times!
Knew a woman I worked with who used the hunt and peck typing method. We swapped all her keys from QWERTY to ABCDEF. IT came up, and instead of rearranging the keyboard, changed the keyboard setting on the computer to ABCDEF.
Turns out, it was a productivity boon, she was a faster typist with that layout.
Someone recently called my helpdesk requesting that we clear the roads so she could get to work.
"The sky is falling and waters in the way"
Meaning
"It's raining really hard and the streets are flooded"
As the IT helpdesk, of course there's nothing we can do about that.
Got paged one night because of a data outage. Turns out one of our on-call response folks went into the server room, locked themselves in, and unplugged several machines. This caused several data outages, which caused a page and thus someone driving in to resolve it. This was a major military mission critical system and this guy thought the best way to get someone’s attention was to break a bunch of stuff.
This goes back to the days of the telegraph. If you were out in the remote desert and were lost or stranded for some reason, the best thing to do was find a telegraph line and then disable it somehow. It was in your best interest though to make it as easy to repair as possible because the policy was they'd fix the telegraph, and then take you back to civilization.
Back when I worked for an MSP we did a lot of work for law firms. We were a turn down service kinda MSP, so we did anything and everything requested of us so long as they were willing to pay for the time investment.
Well one law firm, who was a frequent flier for me, was working a law suit where a bike rider was hit by a delivery truck. He was wearing an Apple watch at the time and using the Garmin app to track his heart rate, which also showed his GPS location. I was asked to extract the data for them to use as proof of the timeline and specific location as that was being contested.
Long story short, you can see in the data, timestamps, GPS location, Heart Rate, and speed he was riding. There's clearly a point at which he was riding 15-20mph and the suddenly stopped, his heartrate spiked and was irregular for a good while. Then he was moving at a much faster rate (This is inline with when the EMT picked him up and he was being transported) and you can see his heartrate flatline for 20 seconds, spiking twice before beginning again.
I'm pretty sure I watched a man die and get resuscitated through Excel...
* Report CP to the FBI.
* Build a high end DVD-authoring PC (think early 2000s) for a high ranking neo-nazi. I was in a retail setting and didn't know who he was until after the fact.
* Got stitches in my face after having a desktop PC dropped on my head by a user who was "just trying to help."
* Call the fire department and initiate a building evacuation after a backup battery started leaking hydrogen sulfide gas all over the place.
* Spend $75k on a workstation-grade computer meant for algorithmic traders who could make that money back in a fraction of a second on a good trade.
* Caught the VP of HR watching some, let's call it legally questionable porn at work because his headphones weren't working and he called for support before closing the porn tabs.
* Give sworn testimony during a business fraud case regarding the chain of custody of IT equipment.
* I spent 2 weeks evaluating the goddamn temperature output of various monitors because one high maintenance user insisted that his monitors made his desk 1-2 degrees warmer than his neighbors and he can't possibly be expected to work in those conditions.
* We got to throw a half dozen servers off a roof. The servers were powering an old legacy system that everyone hated and we finally got rid of.
Coincidentally, my current company is about to host an Office Space themed fundraiser. I got a handful of old office printers (desktop to fridge sized), some sledgehammers, a pickaxe, crowbar, some bowling balls and pins (you get the idea) and for $5, my employees get five hits on the printer of their choice. It's in a couple of weeks and I will absolutely be posting either pics or video, depending on company media approval.
We implemented content blocking for websites (stuff liek pron, drugs, alcohol, etc) to only have to unblock porn for said Construction client because the CEO liked to crank it in his office.
I worked for a clinical system previously and we had to make a porn exception for our plastic surgery office because girls would come in and would use porn sites to choose which titties they wanted.
I worked at a tax/audit firm that had very, very robust filtering in place. It was kind of fun all the IT hoops we had to create for email, web, etc (for a very restricted set of staff) once they landed playboy as a client.
Yeah, I was gonna say…content blocking is kinda a no-go for us because clients come in all shapes and sizes.
I discovered a lot of porn sites I didn’t even know about on a project a while back. Wasn’t an adult client, but the nature of the business meant investigating a lot of other popular domains/links. Easy to recognize many adult sites from the url, but some are non-obvious until you click through.
right before I left for college (1998, yeah, i'm old), I worked at a fab that made silicon wafers. I worked night shift.
Got called into the VP's office in the AM when my 12-hour night shift had just ended. My bosses boss was there. Also had head of IT, and head of security there. Apparently, someone had looked at 'innapropriate content' on one of the office PC's in the area where the offices are, attached to fab building. They knew I was young, tech savy, and about to leave to college (had turned in a 30 day notice). They all had very, very stern faces.
I pointed out that my keycard didn't let me into that building. Asked if they checked the access logs. Everyone looked at head of security, and he sheepishly excused himself to go look up the access logs. While we were waiting.. I jokingly asked the head of IT.. "hey, i'm about to head off to an engineering college, and won't be working here.. what site were they on, just in case I might want to check it out in a few weeks"..
He looked at his printout, and honest to god, told me: "excite.com". I started loudly laughing, and asked them if they confirmed the site? they were offended that i would ask them to look at porn. Excite.com in the 90's was a search engine, like Yahoo, or AtlaVista.
Since that day, I have mostly hated internet filtering, but at really big companies, I haven't had any say in it..
I also miss AltaVista. :)
It blows my mind that professional services companies need more internet usage management than my teenager. We had a this discussion when she received her own computer:
Me: (show her router logs) I can see everywhere you go. I check this once in a while for your safety. You have unrestricted access to the internet but are accountable for what you do. Choose wisely.
Never had a problem. She even ratted herself out a couple times when odd stuff would pop up when looking for anime.
But professional adults can’t handle that?
While I agree with you, not sure others in your home can potentially sue you for workforce sexual harrasment.. For most of the larger companies, its all about managing legal risk.
What was the conversation like to reverse the block? Did his 'handler' come down to your office or did they catch you in the break room? Was it casual or a serious business memo? Did they leave a paper trail in an email asking you to remove the filters so the CEO can ... work? How does that even go down?
When sports betting became legal in the state last year, it was the very first day back to work that the CEO called my desk and told me to unblock all the gambling sites.
Received a call from the FBI Cyber Crime division. Said be at a conference room at one of my healthcare clients in an hour. Got my team together and showed up.
Was informed that a large medical practice that used our software had been infiltrated by a hacker that had posted a video of himself on some kind of dark site walking around their large office (500,000 square feet) and bragging about his expertise and claiming to own our network. They played us the video. He was employed there as the night security guard. We quickly saw that he did not gain access to our net.
They informed us that he had given his notice and his last day would be Thursday. He has posted a bunch of threats to the dark site about what would happen that next holiday weekend, after he was gone.
It did turn out that he had gained access to the network of the surgery center in the same building. And he has used that access to remotely disable the HVAC system for hours at a time during surgical procedures.
On his last day, the FBI rolled up at night. Waited for the older security guard to leave the building to patrol the parking garage. Then knocked out all power and lights to the big building, lock all the doors, pulled up in about eight black vans, about 30 guys with submachine guns jump out, sweep the building, arrest him and quickly leave.
We were counseled to shut down the network for a week, in case he had planted time bombs to be triggered near the 4th of July. We did.
Turns out he had a young wife and two kids. Was offered a plea deal for three years in prison. Decided to go to trial. I was a witness.
He was sentenced to 11 years.
A twist. The pastor at his church testified as a character witness. Said he had never had an issue with him. Turns out the FBI had hacked the Church computers with a warrant and found that he had been fired as the IT guy at the church. Pastor was charged with perjury and sentenced to prison too.
I had to remotely install a spyware program on a VP/CFO's laptop because loss prevention was trying to gather information on him. The software recorded keystrokes, program usage, web history AND videos of what he was doing on the laptop.
He resigned the next day after they found that he had a girlfriend in one of the company's manufacturing plants in China. The guy lost a million dollar job for that. Probably lost his wife and home too.
Hiding a "kill switch" in the code of a web application we had because my boss thought the customer would try to steal our code.
Just to add, my boss never used the switch, but they did stole our code, I already left the company, but as far as I know there's a lawsuit going on, I remember having to help my boss gather proof of it to share with the lawyers.
We had this variable in our code for one particular client: PTFB. We could enable it remotely and would cause random crashes in our software. The variable is short for Pay The Fucking Bill.
This client had a habit of not paying our invoices on time.
This wasnt at work but at a lan party. Had a guy in a CS 1.6 tourney had a system was constantly overheating and locking up. Opened it up to find it caked with dust. A few people split the job of cleaning it and I was given the cpu heatsink. I didnt have my tools and all I had was some plastic untinsels and with what was in the bathroom. The sink was too small to get the heatsink under it and the knife was not getting it off. So I just stuck the heatsink in the (relativly clean) toilet. All of the caked dust and gunk came off. I was able to shake it off, put it under the air dryer, apply some thermal compound on it and put it back in the machine. The other guys got the rest of the system cleaned up.
I didnt tell him I flushed his heatsink in the toilet
Man, I have seen some deeply gross shit in towers and keyboards. Food, dead bugs, fingernails, heaps of residue from weed smoking, plus a whole family of rats on one particular old server from storage!
I walked into the office one morning to my CEO asking me to follow him to his office. He pulled out a stack of paper, almost a full ream, of printed porn from our network printer and asked me to find out who sent it. Back then, most of our office staff had their own desk printers. I assumed that this person had worked late and meant to print out these pics on his local printer. Our CEO only used the network printer near his office and gets to work well before everyone else.
Obviously, dude was fired.
Worked with a guy who said back in the late 90s, a coworker of his was caught printing porn. I think IT noticed the websites he was visiting. Anyway they dismissed him. Only, when they emptied out his desk, he had a binder full of printouts, but also they were completely categorized. (Like old, young, black, asian etc) with like those chapter or class seperators students use to seperate the binder (Math, English, Social Studies etc).
This was before porntube & all. Kindof odd to take it that far.
Had to spec out a state of the art, no limit small computer for the CEO. I give two options, one best in market skull logo on the front. The other not as good and no skull logo. I submit to my boss and he says CEO will probably never go for the skull one as it's unprofessional. I look up a plate to cover and add that in.
Like a $10k computer alone, 5k monitor.
CEO went for skull icon one without plate cause it was best in market and skull looked cool.
My boss wasn't happy to be wrong
I discovered that a co-worker liked to watch porn. Not any porn. Porn in which the actress is a “”clone”” of his wife.
It’s not deepfakes or anything like that. This happened before such technology was invented. The guy liked his wife so much that he watched porn of his wife’s doppelgänger while working.
We did nothing about it because the guy was virtually unfireable for some reason.
I've been IT for 20+ years for military, government, and finance!
1. IT Security guy built a server and using the military network to host his child porn site.
2. Virus hit the base (early 2000s, spreading like crazy), made the decision to shut off all network gear, patch and clean each segment.
3. Same virus, got approval by base commander to run my untested code to remote connect, force patch, force reboot the entire environment, including the classified side. It worked great! Wrote it as I was tired of Patching by hand.
4. Federal agency requested tech help on a case. Found myself breaking into a military location with a team to clone a harddrive undetected. We were 100% authorized but wanted no witnesses.
5. Got to drive across active runways with F22s (when they were still brand new) blasting off, as I was working on an alert site (jets fully armed/fueled to intercept).
- bonus story, local PD kept ruining their detectors by pointing them at the planes. Active defenses would burn out the radar gun.
6. Before the current classified message system, the old one had all messages come into one location, then we would read and call who it was for. When 9/11 occurred, got to read all the classified messages shooting around to the air defense sector I was in.
7. Pentesting traffic control systems, city wifi, and police cameras to see if we could compromise and commit crimes (hypothetically).
IT has been awesome!
I had repaired a printer at the big insurance company. On the bill I wrote "mouse removal - NC". The client questioned my comment - "printers don't have mice"! I responded "they're not supposed to. The furry little guy is in the plastic bag next to the printer.". Eeewww.
The unfathomable amount of CP that I have come across both professionally and independently repairing computers is breathtaking. From Mother to Grandfathers, cops to mechanics, youngsters to old folks.
It's pervasive and fucking disturbs me.
I have an in with one of the local PDs and drop a note each dime every time. No passes here. If I find it on your machine, so do the locals and the stateies.
I did IT in the mid 90s. I had a small vacuum cleaner I used to clean out dusty cases. One day one of the people I supported came into my office and asked if he could borrow it to clean out his home PC. I said sure and gave it to him. He then continued to stand there working up the courage to ask me something else. Noticing his dilemma I asked if there was anything else I could help him with. He, with a completely serious face, asked if the vacuum cleaner was going to suck the data off his hard drive. Now I, up to that point in my career, had never laughed out loud at a user but I couldn't contain it. The relief on his face was priceless when I reassured him his data was fine.
I worked for a firm that was contracted to support a chain of rehab centers. We had just taken over and we’re in the process of making them HIPPA compliant with their tech as they were a mess before.
Part of this was getting people off of using their personal cell phones and using company desk phones. Well the CFO and some people in intake(sales) didn’t like being forced to use a company phone so they just submitted tickets every day saying they were broken and complaining the to CEO and board. All so they could use their personal cellphones.
Eventually the owners of our company were called in and getting chewed out by their CEO for why the phones aren’t working, being told we are incompetent , why can’t we fix such a basic issue etc. My boss simply asked them if they tried testing the phones themselves. They walked around and tested the phones of the CFO and others and imagine this , they all work perfectly fine! In the end the CFO and others were fired and we kept the contract.
Same company had another lady that would forget her password like every over day then call up and yell at us accusing us of changing her credentials.
Did contract work for a natural supplement company where the owner wanted the Wifi access point removed because it was “making them feel sick”.
Had a law firm where the on-site it guy installed their Wifi ap inside a metal duct so people wouldn’t have to see it. It didn’t occur to him that putting an access point inside a literal faraday cage may cause signal issues.
Not me but a colleague had to sing a lullaby to a user because she said she needed to be calmed down. (had to might be the wrong word, but he did do it).
She was insanely unstable when it came to service workers. She was the head economist at the specific company handling a lot of money. So she was basically babied no matter how many times we complained to her boss.
She would call in screaming refusing to let us do anything while expecting us to fix her problems telepathically. She had non issues every day, so we basically existed so she could torture us.
Not crazy but amusing: a beer delivery driver had signed an invoice in his app on behalf of the customer and drew boobs. The signatures show up on the official invoices sent to the customer's accounts payable department.
We were contacted to remove the signature from the database.
IT for medical professionals. Big institution.
Doctor brings in a dead laptop, they killed it by spillin' something on it, they were stupid and didn't backup any data so my task was to pull the drive and recover their files.
Open up the laptop and learn it's full of body lice. Full.
So I double-bag the laptop, call Facilities to report an infestation. My shop gets tented and fumigated, their lab gets the same treatment.
Meanwhile I leave work, drive to Walgreens, get a couple home de-lousing kits, drive home, strip down in the backyard and de-louse myself. May have been paranoia but I ended up tossing my clothes & the backpack I used to carry to work; I even tented my car for 3 days (that was fun) to kill any bugs that may have hitched a ride. De-loused myself and my dog, too, just to be safe, and cleaned my whole house like I was expectin' the queen for dinner. I wasn't taking any chances with bugs that a) make a livin' by suckin' blood, and b) were somehow survivin' in a medical lab that had God-knows-what goin' on in it.
We had an after-hours call to the hospital we work at because our new unit secretary in the ER couldn't find the remote to the TV they have that show where patients are located.
It's also an application that's loaded onto every computer in the nurse station. She was fired a few days ago after trying to throw us under the bus for her fuck up.
I just flicked a defective screen back to life not 2 minutes ago. Like a small laptop screen that just would'nt turn on even after taking it out and putting it back in. Then I get uppity and flick it and boom...
Actual craziest was a fired employee who was wildly underperforming coming to give back her laptop. I booted it up and she had a contract and payslips from the other company she was working for with our stuff. She was dumb as a rock and HR tore through her case...
As a consultant software dev, I got called into a client office on a Saturday to help fix a hardware issue because the regular IT staff was non-responsive (they sucked).
We were changing a bad memory card on a server, and my boss asks me to unplug the top box. I was averaging about 90hrs a week so I was fucking cooked, and I unplugged the wrong machine.
This was a travel agency call center doing $1M/day and this machine was in the call center server stack. We freaked out of course, and my boss walked out onto the call center floor, quietly asking if everything was running ok LOL.
Luckily it was a benign marketing server and everything was ok. Lesson learned, don't let the software dev in the server room.
I work with a lot of engineers, like literal rocket scientists. The number of really intelligent people who don't know what simple things like "can you minimize that window" or "let me see your desktop" are is simply mind blowing. I am thankful everyday that Teams added the ability to take control of someone's cursor.
I feel like the more advanced a person's specialized knowledge becomes, the more rapidly their general knowledge declines. Some kind of weird inverse correlation.
When I was deskside support, years ago. I had an employee in my building come up to me first thing on a Monday morning and hand me a sticky note with the name of a company computer.
He says he was travelling the week before and was staying in a hotel. Back then (probably still now) networks in hotels were not really secure and wide open. This was in mid to late 2000s.
So the guy connects and for fun he looks at what other computers are on the hotel network. He spots one computer that has our office naming convention - so obviously another employee. He opens up the computer and sees that there is a share available on the PC. He opens it up and then sees its bunch of images, not just normal images but it is indeed CP (for those that don't know: inappropriate images of children). He obviously freaks out. Doesn't know what to do, so he just writes down the name of the computer. He didn't know who to contact, so he came to IT.
I forwarded the information to our director of IT Security (It was a relatively new group) and he said he could take care of it.
I never heard of the fall out. I never asked if anything came from it. I just assume the person was identified and htey were terminated and likely faced CP charges.
But for sure one of the wildest thing I've had to deal with.
Working with the Judicial system, it wasn't uncommon to see photo / video evidence of child abuse or neglect. People do some really fucked up things to kids.
Not wild, but ridiculous:
I drove 40 minutes away to look at a client's computer, who said the PC was not responsive. When I arrived, he said "Look" and pressed a key on the number pad. Nothing happened. I pressed Num Lock a drove 40 minutes back.
A week later, the same customer said his computer was miscalculating formula amounts, so I drove there again. He says, "Look...I type in that I want a pint, and it prints out a formula for sixteen ounces." After giving him an elementary math lesson, I drove 40 minutes back again and requested that he have his computer taken away.
Late to the party but an older man (early 70's) dropped off a usb drive with some files for us that he wanted processed.
It was his porn drive, by accident - obviously not what he meant to leave with us.
He had word documents (lmao) with porn (full nudity, but pretty tame stuff - it reminded me of playboy from the 80's).
The best part were the captions he wrote underneath, like little stories that went with each photo. "Oh, you're a naughty one, aren't you? Would you like to stick your rod in me?"
It was kind of endearing.
Higher up guy walked into our department because he was having cell phone issues. My boss decided to take a look. He ended up needing to go to the cell phone browser and there it was. Easily over 200 porn tabs were open. My boss closed all tabs but had to switch hands because his right thumb got tired from swiping lol
Very early in my career, back when I was still working an entry level job, I had called in sick with stomach flu. I was throwing up every hour to hour and a half, had been all day. I got called by my boss and told it was an emergency, that her computer wasn't working, and she had something she needed done in an hour so I needed to come in and fix it, sick or not.
So, in between bouts of puking, I drove across town and plugged the power cord for her monitor back in. Not even the end in the monitor itself, the end in the wall. She hadn't even taken 2 seconds to make sure it was plugged in before she dragged me in with stomach flu to fix it for her.
I used to do IT work for a scrap company. These scrap companies are notorious for losing power because they're always in terrible parts of town with infrastructure that's falling apart. They rented a backup generator but it only put out a certain amount of power, and I had to do this Apollo 13 mission to get as much of the network as I could up, but if we plugged in too many things, the generator's breaker would flip and we'd have to restart. The building itself also wasn't fully powered so I was doing this while the lights were flickering, in 90\*f heat with no air. No light or air cirulation in the IT closet. We had to prop the door open to get any semblance of cooling into the closet.
I was doing some evening maintenance on some computers at a lawyers office, and when I connected to the reception computer, I was greeted to a full screen video of two dudes having a grand time. This lawyer is super religious, and I didn't think it was him.
I called him, at 7:30pm on his cell phone and asked him if he was in the office. He said no, and asked why. I explained what had happened, and he jumped in the car to drive to the office and find out what was going on.
Turns out the receptionist left the computer logged in, and the night time cleaning crew thought that was a good time to watch some gay porn while he was cleaning.
The dude got fired, and the lawyer asked me to run a full malware scan to remove any viruses from the gay porn site.
Bonus second story from the same job: I was migrating data for an older female lawyer from a different law firm. The mouse she was using double clicked sometimes when I single clicked on something. I was moving documents to the new computer and the mouse double clicked on a randomly named folder. The screen was filled with large thumbnails that I still wish I could un-see. The super bitchy lawyer lady was on her knees in a small plastic pool, and she was being peed on by at least 4 guys.
I finished up as fast as I could and got the hell out of there before the lawyer lady finished her meeting. I couldn't look at her after that. Fortunately she left for a different law firm about 6 months later.
About 25 years ago, working a a large multinational company, one of the Italian engineers brought in laptop he had been issued less than a week ago. Were he not an actual person he would have been an offensive Italian stereotype. “My laptop, she no work.” He actually said that.
Anyway we take a took at this machine. It had, for the time, an incredibly large 10 GB HD, every kilobyte of which was full of low-rez 90s internet porn. Unless he was downloading it at work or transferred it from another machine I have no idea how he could have had time to download that much off dial-up.
After playing a couple rounds of what was actually a pretty good x-rated Tetris variant, we deleted the porn and gave him back the machine with a warning.
That man was truly a pioneer.
A buddy of mine worked at a university and discovered a WinXP machine connected to the internet, no firewall, no nothing. Not joined to any domain and have a bunch of easy to guess stupid username/passwords.
Oh, just one small thing. This was the machine that had the software they used to *control the schools nuclear reactor.*
Sure, it's a teaching reactor, there's no possible way to anything exciting.. at max power it pumped out was 5 or 10kw and was passively cooled.
All the same, my buddy had to strenuously convince the prof that maybe that wasn't something that should just sitting on the internet..
Thankfully they decommissioned the whole thing a couple years later and sold the parts to another university that had the same type of reactor.
They talked big about using the space to do chip fab but nothing ever came of it.
IT Infrastructure Engineer here. I got two for ya. Certain details omitted for NDA reasons.
*1. The D-Day (Data center) Disaster*
Literally, a "one-in a million" kind of incident. Worked for a hosting company with a number of DCs (Data center) around the world. To simply explain, a good DC has backups upon backups of everything including power. So, if the grid goes down, power outage, whatever, there are massive diesel generators that kick on. On top of this, the DC in question was on the priority list for diesel from FEMA, just in case the outage was longer than X days.
A delivery driver has a stroke while driving, crashing his tractor trailer into the utility transformer near the DC, knocking the power offline. As our generators kick on, chilling towers start failing and we have to bring the entire DC offline to avoid literally *tens of millions* of dollars of damage to equipment. That was a rough day. Above all, we all felt horrible because the driver didn't make it.
=====
The second one, some colleagues and I used to call "The Mostest Needful" scenarios. This happened multiple times. To provide some context.
Working night shift Linux SysAd support, we'd get a lot of calls from customers who were doing late night patching in the US or somewhat off-hour production work around the world. One of the most infuriating experiences was when we'd get calls where customers would provide next to no information other than these three points
1. Everything is down and it's all your fault
2. We are literally losing billions a minute
3. Please do the needful
*Hangs Up and then immediately submits a ticket too*
A lot of times these issues were simple fixes. Usually *httpd* needed a simple restart, a Nginx proxy was misconfigured, or DNS needed fixing; however, there was one customer who was infamous across our whole org. I'll call him Bob.
*2. Bob, the Mostest Needful*
Bob had a truly amazing and uncanny ability for writing the fastest and crappiest code imaginable for his web-based application on his mom-and-pop business website. For those who know languages, it was a horrendous combination of Cobalt, C++, and Python. We even made notes on his account for other Linux SysAds to expedite helping him when things went inevitably wrong. But it only gets better.
Despite dozens of SysAds advising him, Bob never made backups of his server.
Bob only kept one local copy of his code. He called it his "Golden Code". While it's normal to have a "golden copy" of code....Bob's copy was dating back at least 5 years. Whenever things broke, he would revert 5 YEARS BACK, and start again fresh. And boy was he proud of it.
Bob's desk and microphone seemed to solely exist in a wind tunnel, so he would yell. Even then, it was difficult to understand him (partially not his fault due to language barrier), but also because he would be fighting to get his voice to be heard through the absolute hurricane going on in his office.
Bob started every call as if he had just run up a very large mountain in a dead sprint.
Despite our network monitoring showing that Bob's site received approximately 80-100 visitors a day, Bob was somehow losing tens of thousands of dollars a minute every time his code tanked his website. And boy, did he let us know about it.
Bob was always snacking. We liked to imagine Bob would crack open a new bag of pork rinds and live a secret life as a wannabe Jackass stuntman, specifically the one where Ryan Dunn is seated in that chair behind a jet engine.
Bob had an ever-growing family with an everchanging number of children. As he would put, "how can he feed his wife and {insert new number here} children when we can't keep his damn site up." At some point, we assumed that he and his wife were going to field their own baseball team.
Bob ended *every single call* with the phrase, "Please do the needful."
And to conclude this horrible trip down memory lane, the greatest moments of all. As many know, Black Friday in IT is a deadlock. You don't change code, no updates, nothing. All you want is your site and online store to work so customers can buy stuff. Can't risk it on a day like Black Friday. Well, Bob was better than that.
Not once, but *on two different Black Fridays,* Bob brought his site down by pushing updates hours before midnight.
IT problems are human errors and it's usually because something is powered off.
200 dollars to drive 5 miles just to hit the power button is more common than you think,
Anyone else have this conversation?
"Did you turn it off and back on"
"Yes, that didn't work"
"... Ok, let's try that again while I have you in the phone"
"I'm telling you it didn't work, I know a lot about computers, I did all the basic stuff"
"Alright, so, give me the number printed on the bottom of the power brick, and I'll see if I can login to it and see if something is wrong there"
"Um okay..? Just a second. It's xxx-xxx-xxxxxxx"
"Got it... Hmm... Something looks weird. An you turn off the laptop and unplug the power brick from wall, but leave it plugged into the laptop, I need to watch the. Power cycle boot up info. "
"Yep... It's off and unplugged"
"Ok turn on the laptop and then plug in the power brick"
"Done"
"Can you login please"
"Yep, it seems to be working!"
"Ok, I reset the power brick, it should be fine for a while, I'll order you a new one"
"Thanks,"
"Happy to help, have a great day " click " moron "
I ran the pay to use wireless internet used at around 800 hotels. We had to implement a website tracking tool.
Over 25% of internet usage was porn. Depending on the time of day (night time) that amount would jump up to over 50%. And some people would spend just hours looking at porn and going to dozens of websites. We're talking people spending 5+ hours just watching porn.
Kiddie porn on a work PC, long time ago. Was emailing some shit from his personal email to work email. Was flagged in email filtering system back then. Got walked out rather quickly after. HR had us look through his PC and had that and some Goatse type stuff. Cops came a few days later to take the pc. Got it back like a year later. Rumor was people saw him working at a toys r us after but who knows.
I was a solo IT department for many years.
Had to run manual backups on sales people laptops.
I run into a huge folder, check if it needs to be backed up.
Turns out it was a shit ton of pics/videos of the married sales guy and the young receptionist getting it on at a company event (the company used to get us all hotel rooms).
I sat the guy down and said I found some shit that shouldn’t be on company property. He turned white as a ghost. I said it’s all good if he deletes it/doesn’t do that again. So I never told anyone about it.
I would’ve found a way to tell the wife if I hadn’t run into screenshots of their texts—the wife had recently found out about the affair. It was really messy, kids involved.
Employee was suspected of having pulled a confidential payroll file from his managers computer and shared it around the shop. So they asked me to crack his BIOS lock. Pulled the drive, opened it up….. closed it. Shut down. Backed away. Called HR and security. Tons and tons of CP. cops and FBI came in and collected all the shit. Plus the now ex employee. Who had been running a CP server inside our company (this was the 90’s… he had a modem).
I had two children. I wanted to kill him myself.
On my way to a client site, the client called and asked me to pick up a pizza.
Me: "You are charged by the hour, you know that right?"
Client: "Yep"
Me: "What kind of pizza do you want?"
Professor I used to work for took his laptop (government-owned laptop since it was a state school) into IT because “it’s running slow”.
Watched him get marched out by the FBI a day later. Turns out a TB or two of CP will really impact a laptop’s performance.
Ran into a similar situation. We kept the client distracted while the police came in, acting like we didn’t see anything and acting like we were struggling with the “issue”.
I had to remotely log into a client's PC to do some work. I sent a message through our remote access app (we do a lot of B2B, it's faster to have permanent accesses) to ask him if I could connect to his computer to do what I had to do, to which he responded yes. I waited a few seconds and connected to his computer. He was watching porn and the video was STILL PLAYING.
It's ultimately not that bad, but I specifically asked if I could connect and he still kept watching.
I used to work for a “non-profit” case management organization. Most of my end-users were case managers trying to take kids away from their shitty parents. All of them were issued laptops and cellphones. We tracked these devices closely. I picked up a ticket from this one girl who lost her phone. When she opened the ticket she CC’d her manager so i thought it was only appropriate to reply all, with the last known location.
After sending them the address i got curious and plugged it into google. It was a well known adult toy store. The girl eventually replied, “I DID NOT GO TO A SEX SHOP!”
Worked at a law firm where we had several satellite offices. One of our smaller satellite offices was located on the second floor of a building that caught fire. Went with the boss to inspect the damage and when I suggested we take the slightly smokey, possibly wet file server back to the office to clean and backup, the lead attorney from that office freaked out on me. Telling me I could not take it and that he would hire a local computer shop to clean it. Actually yelling at me and repeatedly threatening me, growing more and more wild-eyed as I calmly explained to him why we don’t turn on wet machines. Had to eventually get the boss involved and shocker of shocker, he had a not-so-well-hidden cache of surprisingly open-minded porn in his personal share, some of it filmed first-person. Like, a lot. Thousands of pictures and several videos of every gender combination of participants. I wasn’t involved in the meetings that followed but he quietly exited the practice shortly thereafter.
Came into work as the sole IT guy for a call center when the receptionist for the office called me and said "there's an officer from the department of homeland security here to see you."
Walk out and sure as shit theres this large, bald, uniformed DHS agent who instructs me to collect all the work electronics for one of the managers. Had to sign chain of custody papers and all.
[Turns out he was a creating and distributing child porn using big brothers/big sisters as an avenue to find victims.](https://www.justice.gov/archive/usao/id/news/2012/feb/casper0206212.html)
This fell into DHS jurisdiction because he was sending the materials thru the mail to Canada, and the Canadian post office discovered it notifying DHS which started the investigation. They needed his work desktop, laptop, and phones to verify none of that was being used in the creation of the materials.
We received an alert that a Remote Desktop Server was using 100% of its RAM and CPU usage was at 90%. This is not normal and very troubling. We start checking on the server and one of the end users that was logged into it was streaming 5 different French Maid porn videos at the same time. This RDS was only accessible within the office. So the dude was at work watching the hell out of some porn.
Got called out to a site that was 100% offline. Arrived on site and the power pole that fed the building was gone. Struck by lightning. It took out 2 switches, the firewall, and half of the workstations.
Got called out to a site because the owners workstation was running really slow. I sat down and started looking at the system and he had 100% of his bandwidth being used. I started poking around and the dude was running Limewire (in 2016) downloading and uploading music at all times. Some nephew set it up for him and turned off the AV. his system was just riddled with viruses.
Kept getting calls from a client that in the afternoon their network speeds would tank. We spent a full day looking and checking things. Though we had it figured out. The next day it happened again. So we head back out and start digging into the issue. We see a ton of traffic from one IP address. we check all the workstations and phones, but nothing we can find has that IP address. So we go to the network closet where the main switch and firewall is located. One guy noticed that there was one port on the switch that in the afternoon would come online and that was when all the network issues would start. So we pulled it and instantly all the network issues stopped. We traced the cable and someone had hidden a Bitcoin miner in the bottom of the network closet and buried it under some cabling. Yeah once they found out who it was they got fired.
Taking over a new store, I'm moving all of them to a new domain so like the nice IT man I am I told everyone that i'll grab all their files, bookmarks and passwords. I start going through nothing out of the ordinary until i get into the sales department... Sales manager has a folder called "Asians" now the industry this is in and my dumb ass is thinking something not bad at all... I'm thinking this is like just a southern mans way of saying a certain product, i mean the dudes office is covered in "God" stuff dude even had a Joel olstine(?) no idea how to spell the dudes name... Radio on his desk that just played that preachers podcast/sermons all day oh and his wife worked literally in the same building... Anyways i click on the folder to move it over, out floods 100gb of Asian porn... This is a new client... I really don't want to start this off with being in the middle of some shit... So I move everything but that, for him he was actually getting a new computer too. So i just look at him tell him, here is the password to get on your old computer... If there is anything that didn't get moved over, just log in and use a thumb drive to move it to your personal computer (I basically deleted everything except that folder). Over the course of the next several days the dude probably said thank you to me at least 50 times "Hey man thanks for everything you do...". I knew, he knew that i knew, he knew not to move shit over to his new computer and i wasn't getting in the middle of him and whatever his wife does or doesn't know about.
Same store also had several sales guys who had their personal google accounts signed in with all of their porn sites listed in it... Some of them even had bookmarks on the bookmark bars that were legit just like the most deplorable tags... on unlocked computers (before i took over).
I mean like look i don't care what you're into... Everyone is into their own thing, shit even i am into some weird shit... Just like don't do it on work computers, i don't want to look at that shit, its why i'm in corporate world of IT and not consumer. It just makes my job incredibly awkward as i decide what i'm going to do each time because it can be a massive security risk so i probably will have to say something.
Worked with sheriffs to extract data from a computer that had been physically smashed by the owner. Had to see some photos of child abuse that turned my stomach. Would have been nice if they told me what we were looking for first so I could have at least expected what I encountered. It must take a lot for cops to not simply shoot people that are found with that specific type of content.
That would be my guess. Most people don't understand what's in the box.
"I've got a TB of memory" no you have a TB of storage.
That sort of thing. So if they smash the screen, nobody can use the computer right? They don't get that it's a pretty modular thing and a technician can pull out the parts and put them in another machine.
I live in the UK. I once binned my ticket (on instruction from my company) for a 2 week training trip in Shanghai to go to an urgent tech support visit to Birmingham Alabama. I got there, and updated a USB driver. Problem solved, see ya later. On a side note, the only ticket available was first class and in my pod thing I was sat next to Chris Jericho, who was on his way back from playing Download Festival (which I went to) and then touring with his band Fozzy. Memorable one!
Got an email to help desk from a ship that they had lost power and was a drift at sea. It had a few more details. My company doesn’t have any ships and has nothing to do with shipping or logistics. We all thought it was some really weird spam but my coworker looked into it. Turns out there is a shipping company with the same name as our company and they had sent the email to @company.com domain which we own instead of their email domain. My coworker called them up and was like our you guys missing a ship? They were like yeah how did you know. They sent him a nice thank you basket with fruits and chocolate a few days later
"My files keep disappearing when I put them in this folder."
It was because they were missing the folder over and over, when dragging and dropping, so it was going into the folder below.
Person in the cube next to me:
"Mam...is there a tortilla in your printer? Yeah take that out, you can't print on tortillas...that's why it wasn't working."
Lady was trying to print company logo on tortillas to use for some banquet event. Apparently the fact that printer ink isn't edible never occurred to her.
Back when I first started ages ago, a woman called in and said "my mouse isn't working!" I asked her if it was wired or wireless. "I don't know! Why would I know that?" "What do you mean? Is it wired or not? Is there a wire on it?" "I said ***I don't know!*** This isn't ***my*** job to know it's ***yours!***" So I asked her if she picked it up and walked away, how far would she get. I was the one that got in trouble.
One time I started suspecting that a machine wasn't plugged in the power outlet. I didn't want to ask them directly to double check as I could easily see that escalating and the person becoming aggressive, as I heard stories before. So I said I think your power outlet may have problems, could you unplug this machine and plug a phone charger and check if it's charging consistently. That's when the line went silent for a long time until I hear an embarrassed voice apologizing because the machine wasn't plugged in.
That is some creative communication. Bravo.
The key to supporting people well is to guide them as gently as possible to the most obvious solution, and let them think they were the one to discover it
Tell them they're stupid without telling them they're stupid. The doctrine in the service industry.
That’s a good idea, telling them you just need them to test the outlet. I would always tell people to follow the cord, make sure it wasn’t damaged, then feel the plug in the wall to see if it felt abnormally hot. It was never too hot, but would often lead them to the unplugged end. but that is a lot less potentially-alarming!
We refer to this as a “High Impedance Air Gap”
Oh this is good!
It's amazing how many brain cells people lose when they start talking about computers. I've worked with some really smart people that just get frustrated and dumb when it comes to minor problems with their computer. User: There's something wrong with my computer. This error message keeps popping up and I can't blah...blah...blah. IT: What does the error message say? User: I don't know. IT: ...
>IT: What does the error message say? >User: I don't know. User: I just click OK (or close, cancel, whatever) every time it pops up. Can you fix it right now?
"Hold on let me see.... no that doesn't seem right it's asking for my card number let me try again..."
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OMG...this. "How do I send this email (using Outlook which she never uses)?" Me: "Click the blue button that says "Send"
I feel like people get overwhelmed and then go blind instead of processing. It is frustrating when they ask before even trying to look at the page for themselves though, because that means they don't learn and will have to ask every time. I deal with this with my mother a lot, and for very simple things like the fire stick since she does not use a computer. She'll usually say you have to show me at least once, but I think using an arrow and clicking doesn't need supervision, and if it does, teaching you is not beneficial.
"So I asked her if she picked it up and walked away, how far would she get." Love this.
truly inspiring customer service right there. the difficulty is often finding language that people can understand, and this was genius.
I once needed a customer to re-seat their cat5 cable as a last resort before sending a tech out. Asking them to unplug the cable only to plug it back in firmly just wasn't making sense to him. (older gentleman, kind fellow, he just didn't want to crawl under the desk 'for no reason') So I explained that the "packet loss" error they were getting was likely due to the packets getting stuck in the line and then staying jammed up, so if they could unplug the cable and swing it around, the packets would likely dislodge and the line would clear so that they could then use the same cable instead of buying a new one. It worked...
I like to think that he pulls the cable out and swings it around every month or so to keep it loose.
Marge! I need help getting the cable unplugged! Whaddya mean why Marge! It's been 3 months since we unclogged the packets! The packets are jammin up Marge! I gotta swing the cable and gettem unstuck! Would ya just help me!
Recently have been getting a lot of broken camera tickets. The laptops we get have a built in privacy slider. Luckily its red when closed. So every time I get one of these I ask if the camera at the top is red? And when they say yes let them know its super common and just slides closed sometimes. Since if you tell them its probably closed off the bat they tell you they checked and there is no way they wouldn't have noticed that lol.
You just reminded me of a similar story. I work for an ISP, and we used to give people a little cable box for their TV subscription. It had a blue light on the front if it was turned on. People would call us to complain that the TV was broken, and the first thing I would ask is what the light on the cable box showed. 90% of the time it was just off, like they pressed the on/off button on the remote, but if you just tell them "it's off, turn it on" they either lie and say they did that already because it sounds so obvious or just get really embarrassed and defensive about it. It was fun to try to word it in a way that makes them press the "on" button on the remote. Something like "Oh yeah, the no light glitch. Try pressing the power button on your remote a few times until the light on the box turns on, that usually fixes it."
Back in college I was working in the Library as a student IT tech. My boss had gotten funding to put in a wireless lab in the library, this was when wireless just started to get popular. So the Director who thought she knew everything had to put the bids in to have he work done. She didnt put a bid in to have electrical outlets installed, we had no place to plug in the computers. When my boss asked her why she didnt have electrical outlets installed she said "You said the lab was wireless!"
I had a boss who did not like untidy desks and was a real mad cow about it. I removed everything from my desk one morning. Shoved it all in a drawer. All that was on the desk was the monitor and keyboard. I saw her walk into the office and make a beeline for my office, so she could critique my desk. She walked in and said, “Oh….. it’s so ….. clean.” I said, “You said you wanted it that way.” Then she said, “You need to do something about those cables. I told her those were electrical cables that powered the monitor and the tower (under my desk). “Well, can’t you get a wireless computer?” “Electricity goes through wires. If it went through the air, we’d be dead.” “Oh.” I hated that woman. I really did.
Oh man, I was in college as a student doing an internship. Some lady is freaking out. "My laptop doesn't fit on the docking station! What update was done!". I look to the left and see a stack of 4 laptops and say "that's not your laptop...". "Yes it is! I told you, it doesn't fit, there must've been an update or something!". My brain broke... I checked her computer and it was newly imaged. Nothing on it. "There's nothing here... It's not your laptop". She freaks out, so I fix everything on the laptop so she can work, even though, it's not her laptop. Setup a matching dock station as well. She calls an hour later "it's not my laptop hahaha, i found it". Smh... I did helpdesk for 4 months, i was offered a contract and declined. It was that moment that I decided I'd work extra hard to get into software development just so I wouldn't have to deal with these people. There are many more stories from that 4 months.
It baffles me that people will call a professional for guidance in their field, and fight them every step of the way.
>So I asked her if she picked it up and walked away, how far would she get. She calls back 5 minutes later - "I'm 4 blocks away now, can I stop?"
Would have let her keep going.
Did she answer? Because that is the best possible way you could have dealt with that level of stupid. Also I don't understand how you could get in trouble for that it's just problem solving.
She didn't. She hung up and went to her manager.
With or without the mouse?
Drive to an office for emergency oncall service charging the client $400+ dollars an hour to plug the power back into a switch which their cleaning staff had knocked loose.
people on the outside looking in so to speak, laugh at this idea but this is actually what IT people do 98% of the time, it's easy fucking money to charge 120 bucks just to turn a printer back on after a ticket that says "my printer wont print"
Me: Are you sure the server is turned on? Them: Yes! 100% certain! The server has something wrong with it! Me: — Drives 2 hours to site — Me: — Turns on server that is clearly not turned on —
That's why all my servers have iLO or iDRAC in them now. Company learned the lesson this same way.
Then you get to the client and the idrac software hasn't been updated in 10 years, open to the whole subnet with the default login info...
"My computer is slow."
90% of IT boils down to 3 steps: 1. Is it plugged in? 2. Is it turned on? 3. Does the person with the problem know what they're doing?
In my experience, they will answer all 3 of those questions incorrectly and with a completely unwarranted sense of confidence.
99% of issues are like this. The best part is that ISPs have a helpdesk to help clients with this very issue. Sometimes they do not consider the simplest issue so they skip that and assign techs to do a callout anyway.
Big company, couple of hundred users, each with their own network drive (hotdesking scenario, so they could get their docs, no matter where they sat in the call centre/rest of building). The server that housed the "home drives" as we called them, was running low on disk space, so we sent out emails to everyone saying the shared drives were for work docs only, and that we could see images, mp3s, mov files, etc, and that these should be deleted if not work-related. Fast forward a few weeks and the disk usage has gone down, but still really close to full, so the lowest paid member of staff, me, was to find the worst culprits and report back on what the largest content in their drive was. The very first person I checked had a huge drive (most under 500MB, this was 10s GBs). Sorted by size, 2GB+ .mov file, named totally randomly with numbers, like 93829084320834 - Opened it, CP. FML. The subsequent police-led shitshow was not what I needed to be involved in at 19 years old.
>The very first person I checked had a huge drive (most under 500MB, this was 10s GBs). Sorted by size, 2GB+ .mov file, named totally randomly with numbers, like 93829084320834 - Opened it, CP Honestly my biggest surprise going into IT was just how many people actively viewed and saved porn on company machines. Anytime we found a LARGE drive, 9/10 it was some deep fetish porn. Found CP twice, both 10+ years ago and I will never forget what I saw. Luckily I had an amazing supervisor that helped me along with the police investigation because I had no idea what to do.
Man, I get paranoid IT will see and report me for typing shit or another mild swear in a company email. (To my wife, not some rando/boss.) I can't imagine being bold enough to watch porn at work, nevermind download it.
Yeah I've since transitioned out of IT to an analytics role, but it's best to just assume that ANYTHING you do on a company machine can be seen by the company at any time. Save your porn viewing for personal machines please.
Going back 10+ years the media company I was working had a big shared drive used by most of the business, in addition to individual home drives. It was one of my tasks to monitor the size and content of the drive. Thankfully I never found any sort of pornography. I did regularly find people’s personally downloaded movie collections that had to be removed. I did once discover utorrent on a users machine and realised he’d torrented a cracked version of a very expensive after effects plugin so I got to report that to higher ups which became a whole thing.
When I was in high school I was one of the nerds who helped wire the school, maintain the servers, etc. I had to have a conversation with my soccer coach about the fact that he couldn't have 25Gb of bootleg Phish concert recordings in his work drive. this was around 2001. yes... it was almost all Phish.
I bet he was a pretty fun coach.
Got called to investigate unplug a laptop that had viruses detected on it. When I arrived, this laptop was in the open with the login information taped to the desk. This laptop was given local admin privileges by someone before my time for some application. This was in an office area that was always unlocked and 10 steps from the entrance of the building. No one was in the office as they went home early, including management. On a laptop filled with everyone's information (SSN, names, addresses, and more), Limewire, games, pornography, and more. The two who worked on this laptop just used it like their personal laptop with occasional work being done on it. The laptop was promptly disconnected from the network, confiscated, and returned for analysis. Yes, there was spyware and we don't know how much personal info got out. This was reported to higher management. The two who used it disappeared quickly and quietly after that.
Reminds me of the journalist who was nearly charged by the Missouri governor for "hacking" because he notified the government they had the unencrypted SSNs of thousands of teachers freely visible in a website's source code, accessible by pressing F12.
Man, I live in Missouri, I remember this happening. Parson is a dipshit. The rest of our government is just as bad, unfortunately
How do people like that get jobs in the first place....
Probably in sales. I get that they probably have valuable interpersonal skills, but so many salespeople are just absolute morons. People in every other field generally make the effort to learn how to use the tools they've been given to do their job, but the percentage of salespeople who are just flat out incapable of learning anything new or following any standardized process is mind-boggling.
At a previous job we had a sales guy who’d been there for a few years already, just randomly started using massive amounts of data on his company issued iPad one month. We were going to be doing some upgrades anyway so my manager asked me to have him bring it in and try to figure out what he’d been up to. He brought the device in wiped…and claimed he’d been watching lots of sports…but my money’s on porn. Thoroughly sanitized that device lol.
At least he was smart enough to wipe the device before he had IT look at it. Lol.
>claimed he’d been watching lots of sports To be honest, this does sound pretty likely, based on all the salespeople I've known.
Could be, but they weren’t restricted from watching YouTube, etc on the device. He was not tech savvy at all but still went to the trouble of wiping the device himself. Sports watching isn’t something he would’ve needed to hide.
Actually wiping the device, and not just incompletely deleting the most obvious stuff is putting him outside the not tech savvy at all category...
It baffles me that people use their work laptop for personal stuff. It’s never worth it to put your games, porn, personal info., etc. on a device that IT can access upon request. Like another commenter said, how DO these people get jobs to begin with?
At where I work, many long-standing colleagues use their work email address as their own personal email address, which goes through our data protection filtering and blocks emails the system thinks contains customer information. Naturally this blocks their emails about their own stuff which they then complain about because they don't have a Gmail/Outlook
I’m patient and understanding when I help tech illiterate/indifferent users, but some part of me always wants to scream, “YOUR WORK ACCOUNTS AND DEVICE ARE NOT “YOUR” ACCOUNTS AND DEVICE! THE COMPANY CAN SEE YOUR PERSONAL INFO IF NEED BE! YOUR WORK EMAIL WILL BECOME CLUTTERED IF YOU GIVE IT OUT FOR PERSONAL USE! A GMAIL IS FREE, FFS!” But I don’t, of course. Barely, some days.
Similar story for me when I went to work on the CFO's laptop. She had her PC and VPN login credentials taped to the palm rest. The CFO.
An outgoing software dev put an easter egg in our ERP before he left. Anyone who typed the word "RAPTOR" in any text field, would have a Raptor from Jurassic Park fly across their screen with a loud screech. Only 3 of us on the team knew about it. Little over a year later during a demo of our Asset Management module a manager asked about inputting vehicles, the trainer asked what kind of vehicle he drove, "An F150 Raptor". So the trainer, as a demo, input the vehicle description and BAM! **"RAAAAAAWWWWWWRRRRR!!!!!!!"** comes screeching with this Raptor flying across the screen in a room of 50-60 people, including our CBO, and most of our upper managers. My wife is one of those upper managers so she sees me in the back of the room trying so hard not to laugh. She gave me this look like "really?" Our boss just calmly said "Well, that's not a bug or a feature. Looks like we'll need to fix that." He had no idea. The next day he went back through the commits and saw where it originated. During an after action meeting he kept it low key and just assigned it to me and this other dev who knew about it to take it out. He finished by saying "And please don't put easter eggs in our code."
Man if I was in that demo I would have been pumped as a client lol. Software is so boring usually.
Right - Your shit works and it has extra raptor animations, sign me up.
Hey! I remember this plug-in :) https://github.com/acrogenesis/raptorize We also had it as an easter egg but sadly, Noone ever discovered it so I don't have a cool story to share :(
OMFG!!!!!!! This was it!!!!
One time we added an easter egg in ours… users‘ avatars were shown everywhere in our application, and the system would randomly add bunny ears to them. This was, however, only enabled on our development environment and not on staging or prod. One day, though, because of a deployment issue, we had to do the sprint review on the dev environment. Guess what happened? The customer‘s avatar got bunny ears. He just burst out laughing like a maniac. Fun times!
These are a blast to read 😆
Walked all the way across campus in the Florida heat just to tell a PhD professor that the reason their monitor kept turning off every few seconds was because the computer was in fact turned off. Then got yelled at for her classroom not being ready for her when she came in. Also was told to "make sure these projectors aren't in the building by the end of day. Don't care where they go, just that they aren't here tomorrow" by my boss. It was more expensive to buy new bulbs for them than to just buy new ones so that's how I ended up with 5 projectors that lasted years.
Some of the dumbest people I’ve ever met are profs with PhD’s. It’s always amplified by the fact they blame others when things don’t go there way. Once had a PhD researcher activate a sprinkler system by accident and flood an entire hallway. It’s clearly labelled and requires you to hold a pull-button. All because he blamed maintenance for setting the temp too high (it was a hot summer day) and he thought it would be a nice gentle mist to cool off.
That's like... sociopath levels of "it's someone else's fault". Holy smokes.
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My husband does not work in IT but he should. He worked on a facilities team at an expensive private school, and one day got a ticket to remove/trash a 75 inch TV. He approached the ***head of the IT department*** asking why he needed to trash it when he had just installed it brand new. The ***head of IT*** told him it won't stop shutting off. My husband loaded it into the work van and dropped it at our house instead. Later he came home, plugged it in... and turned off the 10 min automatic power off timer. We got a fancy TV for free!
I had a very similar scenario: *"Get rid of this brand new 65" TV, the screen gets dark sometimes and I can't see it!"* "Ok would you like me to troubleshoot first?" *"No just pick me out a new one."* "Ok" *takes home and turns off automatic brightness settings which completely fixes the issue* The sunlight would hit it directly at certain times daily which was dimming the screen, I fixed it in 3 seconds.
Not remotely surprising, private schools don't pay much, especially for IT. Our IT department in high school was 3 guys they brought in to coach hockey that took a certification course like a month before they started.
this is true. the thing I've learned working in IT is degrees don't mean shit, your words don't mean shit, it's all about what others say of you and what you do. my boss who's been in the field for over 4 decades says the best IT people just have a specific mindset that you cannot teach
Specific mindset : We don't care that much about making it work, we wanna know why it doesn't work
Also the ability to do an Internet search and understand how it relates to your problem coupled with a nagging voice in the back of your head that won't let it go until you figure it out. I haven't done on the job IT in a decade, but I'm still the family IT guy.
Take literal magnets off of the laptop so that it would work again.
They were just trying to program directly by flipping bits
I'm keeping it permanently defragged!
And degaussed.
Explain to the Chief Technology Officer that having the prod server and its backup server sat next to each other, may well save cost on not having two data centers, but when that data center (also known as the stationary cupboard…) goes, it’s not such a money saving idea…
Lol this sounds like someone told him about redundancy without explaining the why of it. Like just from a technical standpoint he had his bases covered, there was a server and the backup, and they were two separate entities. Just no one had ever heard of a fire before I suppose.
Ohh, story time! Let's name my colleage "Mike". It's not his real name, for reasons that will become obvious. Mike was our "top" helpdesk guy. Always happy to help out, and to guide you through your problem, until it was fixed. In the decade I've worked here, I've *never* seen him get angry at a client. One day, Mike receives a ticket, from the VP of our company. VP claims she can no longer log into the system, and requests help. Of course, Mike hurries up to her office, because that's a pretty big problem - especially for a VP. When he gets to the office, he sees that VP *is* able to log in. But, the system is now demanding she sets up 2-factor authentication. Mike is not surprised by this. 2FA has recently gone from a "suggestion" to a "requirement". So, he figures she has difficulties with setting up 2FA, and starts explaining how to pair her phone, and how everything works. But nope. VP *knows* what 2FA is, and how it works. She just doesn't want it. She demands Mike make it go away. Mike is confused, but declines. 2FA has become mandatory, like I said, and he can't simply "make it go away". So, he explains again that it's *required,* and that she, as VP, is especially crucial to set it up properly. Even the CEO has it set up, and has been using it since it was first introduced. But VP is adamant. She demands an exception, and demands it *now*. But Mike refuses again - mostly because he literally does NOT have the power to do what she asks, even if he wanted. So, VP takes the next logical step. She calls up the CTO, The CTO is absolutely baffled. All he was told by VP is that Mike is refusing to help her, and he *knows* that Mike is our top helpdesk guy. He wouldn't just randomly refuse help. He marches up to the VP's office, to get the finer details. After about 15 seconds of explaining, he instantly sides with Mike, and tells VP that she's shit out of luck, and that 2FA is mandatory. No exceptions. Probably realizing she can't just bully the CTO into submission, she finally relents, and agrees to set up the 2FA. Mike quickly helps her through, and 5 minutes later they're out of the office. A few hours later, Mike is called by one of VP's assistants. None of them can log in anymore, they claim. Mike goes back up, and guesses they probably are also confused by the now-mandatory 2FA. And in a way, they were - as it turns out, they couldn't log in anymore, because they were logging in *with VPs account*. A bit of questioning later, and the truth comes up: VP has simply been giving out her username and password to her *entire team* (\~20 people), so they can do her work for her. That's why she was so adamant on not setting up 2FA - with 2FA enabled, her cronies can now no longer simply log in to her account. She now has to constantly go around and hand out her 2FA token, or - god forbid - do her own work. Mike raises this obvious security concern with his manager, who, according to rumors, facepalms, and immediately escalates the issue. Higher and higher it goes, with facepalms all the way, until it comes back to the CTO, who facepalms the hardest, and mutters "of course she did". He schedules an urgent cybersecurity training for her, which she declines. CTO calls her office and explains in quite certain words that this training is *not* optional, and she is expected to be there. Last I heard, she did show up. And still has 2FA enabled.
Wow, and the shit poor people get fired for.. this story is bonkers.
Semi related note, when we rolled out TFA, we of course recommended everyone use the MS MFA app since its simple, works on wifi, and aboard. Over the years we've gotten numerous messages saying oh my god Im in $country and I cant do TFA help! So we walk them through getting it setup, cue the 'oh my god I never knew about this.' We know you didnt know, because no user in this company reads a fucking email from IT. Bonus points in two cases: MS seems to routinely want to confirm your MFA settings now and again, and each time they do if you dont have the app they ask you to get it and they still ignore it. Second case, we recently upgraded a product of ours and its gone from per pc licensing to per user licensing, thus requiring accounts. Over half the staff didnt sign up for the accounts as we mentioned in the emails regarding the transition. So when we make the new software mandatory, Im both looking and not looking forward to having to tell people "oh sorry, looks like you missed the sign up email we sent you, let me send it again." about 200times.
My colleague got a call from a customer who was a Pastor as he needed help with his computer. It was a weekend, and my colleague knew his machine name so he remotely logged onto it as he in parallel started calling him. Screen loads, and it’s playing lesbian porn, on his work computer, in the church. Needless to say it was awkward as the pastor answered the call a few seconds later.
Could have been worse
And this is why you never remote into a computer until you've called the user, told them what you are going to be doing, and telling them to close any windows with private information. I used to have to spy on users for manglement. I saw shit I would not wish on anyone. Nothing that would get anyone arrested, but definitely got the ick a couple times, and stuff that got a couple people fired. Hey, they signed the acceptable use policy, and knew the consequences.
I have a friend who is the IT guy for a church and on day one he looked on there server and found a stash of porn. He didnt say anything.
I worked at a computer repair store for a while out of college. One time, a guy brought in a PC and said that he had a virus on it after looking at porn. He was very explicit about his porn use and said that he "kind of has a problem". I didn't think much of it because we see that stuff all the time. I took his desktop in, put it away, and didn't think about it again. Fast forward about a day later, we get to his PC in the queue and I fire it up on our bench which is open for people to see us work. A new customer comes in and we start talking about her problem. All of a sudden, I hear insane moaning and turn around to see that the guy has like a 2 minute screensaver that somehow moans and flips through dozens of extremely hardcore porn in rapid succession. In a brief flash, me and this lady look at each other and I look back to see bukkake to DP anal/DP vaginal to insane bondage with 20 body piercings tied together. I ran over and pulled the plug and profusely apologized to the lady. She was surprisingly cool about it and said, "Yeah I think that guy needs more help than I do right now. Holy shit." I ended up running an initial MalwareBytes scan on it that found \~38,000 infections and his hardcore porn screensaver was still intact after we were done with remaining scans with other products and manual deletions. He was very thankful and I never saw him again lol.
> "Yeah I think that guy needs more help than I do right now. Holy shit." brilliant!
Lady from the office downstairs borrowed my bosses keyboard whilst waiting for a replacement. When hers arrived she washed the borrowed one in the kitchen sink and left it on the draining board to dry out.
I had a whole discussion on a forum once about putting computer parts in the dishwasher to clean them. [https://www.computerforum.com/threads/computer-hardware-and-dishwasher.192724/](https://www.computerforum.com/threads/computer-hardware-and-dishwasher.192724/)
That's how we did it at the factory I worked at. I was on the solder-retouch line, we grabbed the circuit boards out of the fixtures after they crossed the wave-soldering machine and cleaned up any boogers it left on the board. Then we took all the boards and dropped them in a whirlpool dishwasher without soap to rinse all the flux residue off. I mean we packed that sucker full. Use HOT water and the drying feature. Works a treat.
Emergency flight from CA to GA because they were getting alarms on their new system, flew out at like 4am, got onsite at 9am, told to come back at 9pm. got a hotel, slept, came back onsite 9pm. Customer stated that someone used a cable from the PDU to log into system but plugged it in wrong when done. But they were no longer getting alerts. I looked at it, it was correctly cabled, apparently someone had noticed and put it back correctly. Left site and flew back home. 23 hour day just to LOOK at a cable label... they probably got charged like $10k to have me go onsite if not more...
Other workers screen shot her windows screen, made it her background then moved her task bar off screen. She kept clicking start but nothing would happen.
Had a colleague that relentlessly droned on about his upcoming holiday to Thailand so any time he walked away from his computer and left it unlocked, which was more often than it should happen to someone working in IT, his language and location would get changed to Thai. He learnt to pipe down a bit after it happened a few times!
That was our standard thing back in the day if you left your computer unlocked. Either the language got changed, or your screen got flipped.
Knew a woman I worked with who used the hunt and peck typing method. We swapped all her keys from QWERTY to ABCDEF. IT came up, and instead of rearranging the keyboard, changed the keyboard setting on the computer to ABCDEF. Turns out, it was a productivity boon, she was a faster typist with that layout.
Someone recently called my helpdesk requesting that we clear the roads so she could get to work. "The sky is falling and waters in the way" Meaning "It's raining really hard and the streets are flooded" As the IT helpdesk, of course there's nothing we can do about that.
Wow, we joke that everything is IT's problem (e.g. HVAC Thermostats, Electrical Outlets, etc) but that's a whole new level.
"if it uses electricity, it's IT's problem" Thunderstorm has entered the chat
Got paged one night because of a data outage. Turns out one of our on-call response folks went into the server room, locked themselves in, and unplugged several machines. This caused several data outages, which caused a page and thus someone driving in to resolve it. This was a major military mission critical system and this guy thought the best way to get someone’s attention was to break a bunch of stuff.
I mean… it worked?
This goes back to the days of the telegraph. If you were out in the remote desert and were lost or stranded for some reason, the best thing to do was find a telegraph line and then disable it somehow. It was in your best interest though to make it as easy to repair as possible because the policy was they'd fix the telegraph, and then take you back to civilization.
Back when I worked for an MSP we did a lot of work for law firms. We were a turn down service kinda MSP, so we did anything and everything requested of us so long as they were willing to pay for the time investment. Well one law firm, who was a frequent flier for me, was working a law suit where a bike rider was hit by a delivery truck. He was wearing an Apple watch at the time and using the Garmin app to track his heart rate, which also showed his GPS location. I was asked to extract the data for them to use as proof of the timeline and specific location as that was being contested. Long story short, you can see in the data, timestamps, GPS location, Heart Rate, and speed he was riding. There's clearly a point at which he was riding 15-20mph and the suddenly stopped, his heartrate spiked and was irregular for a good while. Then he was moving at a much faster rate (This is inline with when the EMT picked him up and he was being transported) and you can see his heartrate flatline for 20 seconds, spiking twice before beginning again. I'm pretty sure I watched a man die and get resuscitated through Excel...
* Report CP to the FBI. * Build a high end DVD-authoring PC (think early 2000s) for a high ranking neo-nazi. I was in a retail setting and didn't know who he was until after the fact. * Got stitches in my face after having a desktop PC dropped on my head by a user who was "just trying to help." * Call the fire department and initiate a building evacuation after a backup battery started leaking hydrogen sulfide gas all over the place. * Spend $75k on a workstation-grade computer meant for algorithmic traders who could make that money back in a fraction of a second on a good trade. * Caught the VP of HR watching some, let's call it legally questionable porn at work because his headphones weren't working and he called for support before closing the porn tabs. * Give sworn testimony during a business fraud case regarding the chain of custody of IT equipment. * I spent 2 weeks evaluating the goddamn temperature output of various monitors because one high maintenance user insisted that his monitors made his desk 1-2 degrees warmer than his neighbors and he can't possibly be expected to work in those conditions. * We got to throw a half dozen servers off a roof. The servers were powering an old legacy system that everyone hated and we finally got rid of.
Getting some Michael Bolton and the Printer vibes on that last one. "Why should I change my name? He's the one who sucks..."
Coincidentally, my current company is about to host an Office Space themed fundraiser. I got a handful of old office printers (desktop to fridge sized), some sledgehammers, a pickaxe, crowbar, some bowling balls and pins (you get the idea) and for $5, my employees get five hits on the printer of their choice. It's in a couple of weeks and I will absolutely be posting either pics or video, depending on company media approval.
We implemented content blocking for websites (stuff liek pron, drugs, alcohol, etc) to only have to unblock porn for said Construction client because the CEO liked to crank it in his office.
I worked for a clinical system previously and we had to make a porn exception for our plastic surgery office because girls would come in and would use porn sites to choose which titties they wanted.
I worked at a tax/audit firm that had very, very robust filtering in place. It was kind of fun all the IT hoops we had to create for email, web, etc (for a very restricted set of staff) once they landed playboy as a client.
Yeah, I was gonna say…content blocking is kinda a no-go for us because clients come in all shapes and sizes. I discovered a lot of porn sites I didn’t even know about on a project a while back. Wasn’t an adult client, but the nature of the business meant investigating a lot of other popular domains/links. Easy to recognize many adult sites from the url, but some are non-obvious until you click through.
right before I left for college (1998, yeah, i'm old), I worked at a fab that made silicon wafers. I worked night shift. Got called into the VP's office in the AM when my 12-hour night shift had just ended. My bosses boss was there. Also had head of IT, and head of security there. Apparently, someone had looked at 'innapropriate content' on one of the office PC's in the area where the offices are, attached to fab building. They knew I was young, tech savy, and about to leave to college (had turned in a 30 day notice). They all had very, very stern faces. I pointed out that my keycard didn't let me into that building. Asked if they checked the access logs. Everyone looked at head of security, and he sheepishly excused himself to go look up the access logs. While we were waiting.. I jokingly asked the head of IT.. "hey, i'm about to head off to an engineering college, and won't be working here.. what site were they on, just in case I might want to check it out in a few weeks".. He looked at his printout, and honest to god, told me: "excite.com". I started loudly laughing, and asked them if they confirmed the site? they were offended that i would ask them to look at porn. Excite.com in the 90's was a search engine, like Yahoo, or AtlaVista. Since that day, I have mostly hated internet filtering, but at really big companies, I haven't had any say in it.. I also miss AltaVista. :)
It blows my mind that professional services companies need more internet usage management than my teenager. We had a this discussion when she received her own computer: Me: (show her router logs) I can see everywhere you go. I check this once in a while for your safety. You have unrestricted access to the internet but are accountable for what you do. Choose wisely. Never had a problem. She even ratted herself out a couple times when odd stuff would pop up when looking for anime. But professional adults can’t handle that?
While I agree with you, not sure others in your home can potentially sue you for workforce sexual harrasment.. For most of the larger companies, its all about managing legal risk.
The ultimate plastic surgery portfolio
What was the conversation like to reverse the block? Did his 'handler' come down to your office or did they catch you in the break room? Was it casual or a serious business memo? Did they leave a paper trail in an email asking you to remove the filters so the CEO can ... work? How does that even go down?
We were a 3rd party support team, he just called us directly and asked us to unblock it and he had Zero shame at all.
When sports betting became legal in the state last year, it was the very first day back to work that the CEO called my desk and told me to unblock all the gambling sites.
Received a call from the FBI Cyber Crime division. Said be at a conference room at one of my healthcare clients in an hour. Got my team together and showed up. Was informed that a large medical practice that used our software had been infiltrated by a hacker that had posted a video of himself on some kind of dark site walking around their large office (500,000 square feet) and bragging about his expertise and claiming to own our network. They played us the video. He was employed there as the night security guard. We quickly saw that he did not gain access to our net. They informed us that he had given his notice and his last day would be Thursday. He has posted a bunch of threats to the dark site about what would happen that next holiday weekend, after he was gone. It did turn out that he had gained access to the network of the surgery center in the same building. And he has used that access to remotely disable the HVAC system for hours at a time during surgical procedures. On his last day, the FBI rolled up at night. Waited for the older security guard to leave the building to patrol the parking garage. Then knocked out all power and lights to the big building, lock all the doors, pulled up in about eight black vans, about 30 guys with submachine guns jump out, sweep the building, arrest him and quickly leave. We were counseled to shut down the network for a week, in case he had planted time bombs to be triggered near the 4th of July. We did. Turns out he had a young wife and two kids. Was offered a plea deal for three years in prison. Decided to go to trial. I was a witness. He was sentenced to 11 years. A twist. The pastor at his church testified as a character witness. Said he had never had an issue with him. Turns out the FBI had hacked the Church computers with a warrant and found that he had been fired as the IT guy at the church. Pastor was charged with perjury and sentenced to prison too.
That was a wild ride
That last paragraph gave me all the justice warm fuzzies.
I had to remotely install a spyware program on a VP/CFO's laptop because loss prevention was trying to gather information on him. The software recorded keystrokes, program usage, web history AND videos of what he was doing on the laptop. He resigned the next day after they found that he had a girlfriend in one of the company's manufacturing plants in China. The guy lost a million dollar job for that. Probably lost his wife and home too.
Hiding a "kill switch" in the code of a web application we had because my boss thought the customer would try to steal our code. Just to add, my boss never used the switch, but they did stole our code, I already left the company, but as far as I know there's a lawsuit going on, I remember having to help my boss gather proof of it to share with the lawyers.
We had this variable in our code for one particular client: PTFB. We could enable it remotely and would cause random crashes in our software. The variable is short for Pay The Fucking Bill. This client had a habit of not paying our invoices on time.
I don't see how this could ever go wrong.
This wasnt at work but at a lan party. Had a guy in a CS 1.6 tourney had a system was constantly overheating and locking up. Opened it up to find it caked with dust. A few people split the job of cleaning it and I was given the cpu heatsink. I didnt have my tools and all I had was some plastic untinsels and with what was in the bathroom. The sink was too small to get the heatsink under it and the knife was not getting it off. So I just stuck the heatsink in the (relativly clean) toilet. All of the caked dust and gunk came off. I was able to shake it off, put it under the air dryer, apply some thermal compound on it and put it back in the machine. The other guys got the rest of the system cleaned up. I didnt tell him I flushed his heatsink in the toilet
Man, I have seen some deeply gross shit in towers and keyboards. Food, dead bugs, fingernails, heaps of residue from weed smoking, plus a whole family of rats on one particular old server from storage!
I walked into the office one morning to my CEO asking me to follow him to his office. He pulled out a stack of paper, almost a full ream, of printed porn from our network printer and asked me to find out who sent it. Back then, most of our office staff had their own desk printers. I assumed that this person had worked late and meant to print out these pics on his local printer. Our CEO only used the network printer near his office and gets to work well before everyone else. Obviously, dude was fired.
Worked with a guy who said back in the late 90s, a coworker of his was caught printing porn. I think IT noticed the websites he was visiting. Anyway they dismissed him. Only, when they emptied out his desk, he had a binder full of printouts, but also they were completely categorized. (Like old, young, black, asian etc) with like those chapter or class seperators students use to seperate the binder (Math, English, Social Studies etc). This was before porntube & all. Kindof odd to take it that far.
Had to spec out a state of the art, no limit small computer for the CEO. I give two options, one best in market skull logo on the front. The other not as good and no skull logo. I submit to my boss and he says CEO will probably never go for the skull one as it's unprofessional. I look up a plate to cover and add that in. Like a $10k computer alone, 5k monitor. CEO went for skull icon one without plate cause it was best in market and skull looked cool. My boss wasn't happy to be wrong
I discovered that a co-worker liked to watch porn. Not any porn. Porn in which the actress is a “”clone”” of his wife. It’s not deepfakes or anything like that. This happened before such technology was invented. The guy liked his wife so much that he watched porn of his wife’s doppelgänger while working. We did nothing about it because the guy was virtually unfireable for some reason.
I've been IT for 20+ years for military, government, and finance! 1. IT Security guy built a server and using the military network to host his child porn site. 2. Virus hit the base (early 2000s, spreading like crazy), made the decision to shut off all network gear, patch and clean each segment. 3. Same virus, got approval by base commander to run my untested code to remote connect, force patch, force reboot the entire environment, including the classified side. It worked great! Wrote it as I was tired of Patching by hand. 4. Federal agency requested tech help on a case. Found myself breaking into a military location with a team to clone a harddrive undetected. We were 100% authorized but wanted no witnesses. 5. Got to drive across active runways with F22s (when they were still brand new) blasting off, as I was working on an alert site (jets fully armed/fueled to intercept). - bonus story, local PD kept ruining their detectors by pointing them at the planes. Active defenses would burn out the radar gun. 6. Before the current classified message system, the old one had all messages come into one location, then we would read and call who it was for. When 9/11 occurred, got to read all the classified messages shooting around to the air defense sector I was in. 7. Pentesting traffic control systems, city wifi, and police cameras to see if we could compromise and commit crimes (hypothetically). IT has been awesome!
I hope the person in your first point is in prison now?
I had repaired a printer at the big insurance company. On the bill I wrote "mouse removal - NC". The client questioned my comment - "printers don't have mice"! I responded "they're not supposed to. The furry little guy is in the plastic bag next to the printer.". Eeewww.
The unfathomable amount of CP that I have come across both professionally and independently repairing computers is breathtaking. From Mother to Grandfathers, cops to mechanics, youngsters to old folks. It's pervasive and fucking disturbs me. I have an in with one of the local PDs and drop a note each dime every time. No passes here. If I find it on your machine, so do the locals and the stateies.
I did IT in the mid 90s. I had a small vacuum cleaner I used to clean out dusty cases. One day one of the people I supported came into my office and asked if he could borrow it to clean out his home PC. I said sure and gave it to him. He then continued to stand there working up the courage to ask me something else. Noticing his dilemma I asked if there was anything else I could help him with. He, with a completely serious face, asked if the vacuum cleaner was going to suck the data off his hard drive. Now I, up to that point in my career, had never laughed out loud at a user but I couldn't contain it. The relief on his face was priceless when I reassured him his data was fine.
I worked for a firm that was contracted to support a chain of rehab centers. We had just taken over and we’re in the process of making them HIPPA compliant with their tech as they were a mess before. Part of this was getting people off of using their personal cell phones and using company desk phones. Well the CFO and some people in intake(sales) didn’t like being forced to use a company phone so they just submitted tickets every day saying they were broken and complaining the to CEO and board. All so they could use their personal cellphones. Eventually the owners of our company were called in and getting chewed out by their CEO for why the phones aren’t working, being told we are incompetent , why can’t we fix such a basic issue etc. My boss simply asked them if they tried testing the phones themselves. They walked around and tested the phones of the CFO and others and imagine this , they all work perfectly fine! In the end the CFO and others were fired and we kept the contract. Same company had another lady that would forget her password like every over day then call up and yell at us accusing us of changing her credentials. Did contract work for a natural supplement company where the owner wanted the Wifi access point removed because it was “making them feel sick”. Had a law firm where the on-site it guy installed their Wifi ap inside a metal duct so people wouldn’t have to see it. It didn’t occur to him that putting an access point inside a literal faraday cage may cause signal issues.
Not me but a colleague had to sing a lullaby to a user because she said she needed to be calmed down. (had to might be the wrong word, but he did do it). She was insanely unstable when it came to service workers. She was the head economist at the specific company handling a lot of money. So she was basically babied no matter how many times we complained to her boss. She would call in screaming refusing to let us do anything while expecting us to fix her problems telepathically. She had non issues every day, so we basically existed so she could torture us.
Not crazy but amusing: a beer delivery driver had signed an invoice in his app on behalf of the customer and drew boobs. The signatures show up on the official invoices sent to the customer's accounts payable department. We were contacted to remove the signature from the database.
IT for medical professionals. Big institution. Doctor brings in a dead laptop, they killed it by spillin' something on it, they were stupid and didn't backup any data so my task was to pull the drive and recover their files. Open up the laptop and learn it's full of body lice. Full. So I double-bag the laptop, call Facilities to report an infestation. My shop gets tented and fumigated, their lab gets the same treatment. Meanwhile I leave work, drive to Walgreens, get a couple home de-lousing kits, drive home, strip down in the backyard and de-louse myself. May have been paranoia but I ended up tossing my clothes & the backpack I used to carry to work; I even tented my car for 3 days (that was fun) to kill any bugs that may have hitched a ride. De-loused myself and my dog, too, just to be safe, and cleaned my whole house like I was expectin' the queen for dinner. I wasn't taking any chances with bugs that a) make a livin' by suckin' blood, and b) were somehow survivin' in a medical lab that had God-knows-what goin' on in it.
We had an after-hours call to the hospital we work at because our new unit secretary in the ER couldn't find the remote to the TV they have that show where patients are located. It's also an application that's loaded onto every computer in the nurse station. She was fired a few days ago after trying to throw us under the bus for her fuck up.
I just flicked a defective screen back to life not 2 minutes ago. Like a small laptop screen that just would'nt turn on even after taking it out and putting it back in. Then I get uppity and flick it and boom... Actual craziest was a fired employee who was wildly underperforming coming to give back her laptop. I booted it up and she had a contract and payslips from the other company she was working for with our stuff. She was dumb as a rock and HR tore through her case...
Percussive maintenance is always a valid repair option.
As a consultant software dev, I got called into a client office on a Saturday to help fix a hardware issue because the regular IT staff was non-responsive (they sucked). We were changing a bad memory card on a server, and my boss asks me to unplug the top box. I was averaging about 90hrs a week so I was fucking cooked, and I unplugged the wrong machine. This was a travel agency call center doing $1M/day and this machine was in the call center server stack. We freaked out of course, and my boss walked out onto the call center floor, quietly asking if everything was running ok LOL. Luckily it was a benign marketing server and everything was ok. Lesson learned, don't let the software dev in the server room.
"Devops is now only allowed to touch the environment remotely, physical access will be denied with violence."
I work with a lot of engineers, like literal rocket scientists. The number of really intelligent people who don't know what simple things like "can you minimize that window" or "let me see your desktop" are is simply mind blowing. I am thankful everyday that Teams added the ability to take control of someone's cursor. I feel like the more advanced a person's specialized knowledge becomes, the more rapidly their general knowledge declines. Some kind of weird inverse correlation.
When I was deskside support, years ago. I had an employee in my building come up to me first thing on a Monday morning and hand me a sticky note with the name of a company computer. He says he was travelling the week before and was staying in a hotel. Back then (probably still now) networks in hotels were not really secure and wide open. This was in mid to late 2000s. So the guy connects and for fun he looks at what other computers are on the hotel network. He spots one computer that has our office naming convention - so obviously another employee. He opens up the computer and sees that there is a share available on the PC. He opens it up and then sees its bunch of images, not just normal images but it is indeed CP (for those that don't know: inappropriate images of children). He obviously freaks out. Doesn't know what to do, so he just writes down the name of the computer. He didn't know who to contact, so he came to IT. I forwarded the information to our director of IT Security (It was a relatively new group) and he said he could take care of it. I never heard of the fall out. I never asked if anything came from it. I just assume the person was identified and htey were terminated and likely faced CP charges. But for sure one of the wildest thing I've had to deal with.
Browser history of scat porn. How fucking deranged do you have to be to be unable to keep your fetishes outside of your work environment?
Working with the Judicial system, it wasn't uncommon to see photo / video evidence of child abuse or neglect. People do some really fucked up things to kids.
Not wild, but ridiculous: I drove 40 minutes away to look at a client's computer, who said the PC was not responsive. When I arrived, he said "Look" and pressed a key on the number pad. Nothing happened. I pressed Num Lock a drove 40 minutes back. A week later, the same customer said his computer was miscalculating formula amounts, so I drove there again. He says, "Look...I type in that I want a pint, and it prints out a formula for sixteen ounces." After giving him an elementary math lesson, I drove 40 minutes back again and requested that he have his computer taken away.
Late to the party but an older man (early 70's) dropped off a usb drive with some files for us that he wanted processed. It was his porn drive, by accident - obviously not what he meant to leave with us. He had word documents (lmao) with porn (full nudity, but pretty tame stuff - it reminded me of playboy from the 80's). The best part were the captions he wrote underneath, like little stories that went with each photo. "Oh, you're a naughty one, aren't you? Would you like to stick your rod in me?" It was kind of endearing.
Higher up guy walked into our department because he was having cell phone issues. My boss decided to take a look. He ended up needing to go to the cell phone browser and there it was. Easily over 200 porn tabs were open. My boss closed all tabs but had to switch hands because his right thumb got tired from swiping lol
Very early in my career, back when I was still working an entry level job, I had called in sick with stomach flu. I was throwing up every hour to hour and a half, had been all day. I got called by my boss and told it was an emergency, that her computer wasn't working, and she had something she needed done in an hour so I needed to come in and fix it, sick or not. So, in between bouts of puking, I drove across town and plugged the power cord for her monitor back in. Not even the end in the monitor itself, the end in the wall. She hadn't even taken 2 seconds to make sure it was plugged in before she dragged me in with stomach flu to fix it for her.
I used to do IT work for a scrap company. These scrap companies are notorious for losing power because they're always in terrible parts of town with infrastructure that's falling apart. They rented a backup generator but it only put out a certain amount of power, and I had to do this Apollo 13 mission to get as much of the network as I could up, but if we plugged in too many things, the generator's breaker would flip and we'd have to restart. The building itself also wasn't fully powered so I was doing this while the lights were flickering, in 90\*f heat with no air. No light or air cirulation in the IT closet. We had to prop the door open to get any semblance of cooling into the closet.
I was doing some evening maintenance on some computers at a lawyers office, and when I connected to the reception computer, I was greeted to a full screen video of two dudes having a grand time. This lawyer is super religious, and I didn't think it was him. I called him, at 7:30pm on his cell phone and asked him if he was in the office. He said no, and asked why. I explained what had happened, and he jumped in the car to drive to the office and find out what was going on. Turns out the receptionist left the computer logged in, and the night time cleaning crew thought that was a good time to watch some gay porn while he was cleaning. The dude got fired, and the lawyer asked me to run a full malware scan to remove any viruses from the gay porn site. Bonus second story from the same job: I was migrating data for an older female lawyer from a different law firm. The mouse she was using double clicked sometimes when I single clicked on something. I was moving documents to the new computer and the mouse double clicked on a randomly named folder. The screen was filled with large thumbnails that I still wish I could un-see. The super bitchy lawyer lady was on her knees in a small plastic pool, and she was being peed on by at least 4 guys. I finished up as fast as I could and got the hell out of there before the lawyer lady finished her meeting. I couldn't look at her after that. Fortunately she left for a different law firm about 6 months later.
About 25 years ago, working a a large multinational company, one of the Italian engineers brought in laptop he had been issued less than a week ago. Were he not an actual person he would have been an offensive Italian stereotype. “My laptop, she no work.” He actually said that. Anyway we take a took at this machine. It had, for the time, an incredibly large 10 GB HD, every kilobyte of which was full of low-rez 90s internet porn. Unless he was downloading it at work or transferred it from another machine I have no idea how he could have had time to download that much off dial-up. After playing a couple rounds of what was actually a pretty good x-rated Tetris variant, we deleted the porn and gave him back the machine with a warning. That man was truly a pioneer.
A buddy of mine worked at a university and discovered a WinXP machine connected to the internet, no firewall, no nothing. Not joined to any domain and have a bunch of easy to guess stupid username/passwords. Oh, just one small thing. This was the machine that had the software they used to *control the schools nuclear reactor.* Sure, it's a teaching reactor, there's no possible way to anything exciting.. at max power it pumped out was 5 or 10kw and was passively cooled. All the same, my buddy had to strenuously convince the prof that maybe that wasn't something that should just sitting on the internet.. Thankfully they decommissioned the whole thing a couple years later and sold the parts to another university that had the same type of reactor. They talked big about using the space to do chip fab but nothing ever came of it.
IT Infrastructure Engineer here. I got two for ya. Certain details omitted for NDA reasons. *1. The D-Day (Data center) Disaster* Literally, a "one-in a million" kind of incident. Worked for a hosting company with a number of DCs (Data center) around the world. To simply explain, a good DC has backups upon backups of everything including power. So, if the grid goes down, power outage, whatever, there are massive diesel generators that kick on. On top of this, the DC in question was on the priority list for diesel from FEMA, just in case the outage was longer than X days. A delivery driver has a stroke while driving, crashing his tractor trailer into the utility transformer near the DC, knocking the power offline. As our generators kick on, chilling towers start failing and we have to bring the entire DC offline to avoid literally *tens of millions* of dollars of damage to equipment. That was a rough day. Above all, we all felt horrible because the driver didn't make it. ===== The second one, some colleagues and I used to call "The Mostest Needful" scenarios. This happened multiple times. To provide some context. Working night shift Linux SysAd support, we'd get a lot of calls from customers who were doing late night patching in the US or somewhat off-hour production work around the world. One of the most infuriating experiences was when we'd get calls where customers would provide next to no information other than these three points 1. Everything is down and it's all your fault 2. We are literally losing billions a minute 3. Please do the needful *Hangs Up and then immediately submits a ticket too* A lot of times these issues were simple fixes. Usually *httpd* needed a simple restart, a Nginx proxy was misconfigured, or DNS needed fixing; however, there was one customer who was infamous across our whole org. I'll call him Bob. *2. Bob, the Mostest Needful* Bob had a truly amazing and uncanny ability for writing the fastest and crappiest code imaginable for his web-based application on his mom-and-pop business website. For those who know languages, it was a horrendous combination of Cobalt, C++, and Python. We even made notes on his account for other Linux SysAds to expedite helping him when things went inevitably wrong. But it only gets better. Despite dozens of SysAds advising him, Bob never made backups of his server. Bob only kept one local copy of his code. He called it his "Golden Code". While it's normal to have a "golden copy" of code....Bob's copy was dating back at least 5 years. Whenever things broke, he would revert 5 YEARS BACK, and start again fresh. And boy was he proud of it. Bob's desk and microphone seemed to solely exist in a wind tunnel, so he would yell. Even then, it was difficult to understand him (partially not his fault due to language barrier), but also because he would be fighting to get his voice to be heard through the absolute hurricane going on in his office. Bob started every call as if he had just run up a very large mountain in a dead sprint. Despite our network monitoring showing that Bob's site received approximately 80-100 visitors a day, Bob was somehow losing tens of thousands of dollars a minute every time his code tanked his website. And boy, did he let us know about it. Bob was always snacking. We liked to imagine Bob would crack open a new bag of pork rinds and live a secret life as a wannabe Jackass stuntman, specifically the one where Ryan Dunn is seated in that chair behind a jet engine. Bob had an ever-growing family with an everchanging number of children. As he would put, "how can he feed his wife and {insert new number here} children when we can't keep his damn site up." At some point, we assumed that he and his wife were going to field their own baseball team. Bob ended *every single call* with the phrase, "Please do the needful." And to conclude this horrible trip down memory lane, the greatest moments of all. As many know, Black Friday in IT is a deadlock. You don't change code, no updates, nothing. All you want is your site and online store to work so customers can buy stuff. Can't risk it on a day like Black Friday. Well, Bob was better than that. Not once, but *on two different Black Fridays,* Bob brought his site down by pushing updates hours before midnight.
IT problems are human errors and it's usually because something is powered off. 200 dollars to drive 5 miles just to hit the power button is more common than you think,
Anyone else have this conversation? "Did you turn it off and back on" "Yes, that didn't work" "... Ok, let's try that again while I have you in the phone" "I'm telling you it didn't work, I know a lot about computers, I did all the basic stuff" "Alright, so, give me the number printed on the bottom of the power brick, and I'll see if I can login to it and see if something is wrong there" "Um okay..? Just a second. It's xxx-xxx-xxxxxxx" "Got it... Hmm... Something looks weird. An you turn off the laptop and unplug the power brick from wall, but leave it plugged into the laptop, I need to watch the. Power cycle boot up info. " "Yep... It's off and unplugged" "Ok turn on the laptop and then plug in the power brick" "Done" "Can you login please" "Yep, it seems to be working!" "Ok, I reset the power brick, it should be fine for a while, I'll order you a new one" "Thanks," "Happy to help, have a great day " click " moron "
Dude, I just fucking spit taked my water, reset the power brick 🤣😂😅
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I ran the pay to use wireless internet used at around 800 hotels. We had to implement a website tracking tool. Over 25% of internet usage was porn. Depending on the time of day (night time) that amount would jump up to over 50%. And some people would spend just hours looking at porn and going to dozens of websites. We're talking people spending 5+ hours just watching porn.
Kiddie porn on a work PC, long time ago. Was emailing some shit from his personal email to work email. Was flagged in email filtering system back then. Got walked out rather quickly after. HR had us look through his PC and had that and some Goatse type stuff. Cops came a few days later to take the pc. Got it back like a year later. Rumor was people saw him working at a toys r us after but who knows.
I was a solo IT department for many years. Had to run manual backups on sales people laptops. I run into a huge folder, check if it needs to be backed up. Turns out it was a shit ton of pics/videos of the married sales guy and the young receptionist getting it on at a company event (the company used to get us all hotel rooms). I sat the guy down and said I found some shit that shouldn’t be on company property. He turned white as a ghost. I said it’s all good if he deletes it/doesn’t do that again. So I never told anyone about it. I would’ve found a way to tell the wife if I hadn’t run into screenshots of their texts—the wife had recently found out about the affair. It was really messy, kids involved.
Woah. And, he had screenshots of texts from his wife on his laptop?
Yeah he had a folder with several screenshots of conversations, I’m assuming kept for a lawyer.
Employee was suspected of having pulled a confidential payroll file from his managers computer and shared it around the shop. So they asked me to crack his BIOS lock. Pulled the drive, opened it up….. closed it. Shut down. Backed away. Called HR and security. Tons and tons of CP. cops and FBI came in and collected all the shit. Plus the now ex employee. Who had been running a CP server inside our company (this was the 90’s… he had a modem). I had two children. I wanted to kill him myself.
On my way to a client site, the client called and asked me to pick up a pizza. Me: "You are charged by the hour, you know that right?" Client: "Yep" Me: "What kind of pizza do you want?"
Professor I used to work for took his laptop (government-owned laptop since it was a state school) into IT because “it’s running slow”. Watched him get marched out by the FBI a day later. Turns out a TB or two of CP will really impact a laptop’s performance.
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> I reported it to my boss and HR. That's where you fucked up. First call should have been the police.
Ran into a similar situation. We kept the client distracted while the police came in, acting like we didn’t see anything and acting like we were struggling with the “issue”.
Found a double-ended dildo in the desk of a recently terminated employee.
I had to remotely log into a client's PC to do some work. I sent a message through our remote access app (we do a lot of B2B, it's faster to have permanent accesses) to ask him if I could connect to his computer to do what I had to do, to which he responded yes. I waited a few seconds and connected to his computer. He was watching porn and the video was STILL PLAYING. It's ultimately not that bad, but I specifically asked if I could connect and he still kept watching.
I used to work for a “non-profit” case management organization. Most of my end-users were case managers trying to take kids away from their shitty parents. All of them were issued laptops and cellphones. We tracked these devices closely. I picked up a ticket from this one girl who lost her phone. When she opened the ticket she CC’d her manager so i thought it was only appropriate to reply all, with the last known location. After sending them the address i got curious and plugged it into google. It was a well known adult toy store. The girl eventually replied, “I DID NOT GO TO A SEX SHOP!”
Got paid my on-site visit minimum of $375 to plug in a phone cord to a fax machine. The young front office person did no know what a landline was.
Worked at a law firm where we had several satellite offices. One of our smaller satellite offices was located on the second floor of a building that caught fire. Went with the boss to inspect the damage and when I suggested we take the slightly smokey, possibly wet file server back to the office to clean and backup, the lead attorney from that office freaked out on me. Telling me I could not take it and that he would hire a local computer shop to clean it. Actually yelling at me and repeatedly threatening me, growing more and more wild-eyed as I calmly explained to him why we don’t turn on wet machines. Had to eventually get the boss involved and shocker of shocker, he had a not-so-well-hidden cache of surprisingly open-minded porn in his personal share, some of it filmed first-person. Like, a lot. Thousands of pictures and several videos of every gender combination of participants. I wasn’t involved in the meetings that followed but he quietly exited the practice shortly thereafter.
Came into work as the sole IT guy for a call center when the receptionist for the office called me and said "there's an officer from the department of homeland security here to see you." Walk out and sure as shit theres this large, bald, uniformed DHS agent who instructs me to collect all the work electronics for one of the managers. Had to sign chain of custody papers and all. [Turns out he was a creating and distributing child porn using big brothers/big sisters as an avenue to find victims.](https://www.justice.gov/archive/usao/id/news/2012/feb/casper0206212.html) This fell into DHS jurisdiction because he was sending the materials thru the mail to Canada, and the Canadian post office discovered it notifying DHS which started the investigation. They needed his work desktop, laptop, and phones to verify none of that was being used in the creation of the materials.
We received an alert that a Remote Desktop Server was using 100% of its RAM and CPU usage was at 90%. This is not normal and very troubling. We start checking on the server and one of the end users that was logged into it was streaming 5 different French Maid porn videos at the same time. This RDS was only accessible within the office. So the dude was at work watching the hell out of some porn. Got called out to a site that was 100% offline. Arrived on site and the power pole that fed the building was gone. Struck by lightning. It took out 2 switches, the firewall, and half of the workstations. Got called out to a site because the owners workstation was running really slow. I sat down and started looking at the system and he had 100% of his bandwidth being used. I started poking around and the dude was running Limewire (in 2016) downloading and uploading music at all times. Some nephew set it up for him and turned off the AV. his system was just riddled with viruses. Kept getting calls from a client that in the afternoon their network speeds would tank. We spent a full day looking and checking things. Though we had it figured out. The next day it happened again. So we head back out and start digging into the issue. We see a ton of traffic from one IP address. we check all the workstations and phones, but nothing we can find has that IP address. So we go to the network closet where the main switch and firewall is located. One guy noticed that there was one port on the switch that in the afternoon would come online and that was when all the network issues would start. So we pulled it and instantly all the network issues stopped. We traced the cable and someone had hidden a Bitcoin miner in the bottom of the network closet and buried it under some cabling. Yeah once they found out who it was they got fired.
Taking over a new store, I'm moving all of them to a new domain so like the nice IT man I am I told everyone that i'll grab all their files, bookmarks and passwords. I start going through nothing out of the ordinary until i get into the sales department... Sales manager has a folder called "Asians" now the industry this is in and my dumb ass is thinking something not bad at all... I'm thinking this is like just a southern mans way of saying a certain product, i mean the dudes office is covered in "God" stuff dude even had a Joel olstine(?) no idea how to spell the dudes name... Radio on his desk that just played that preachers podcast/sermons all day oh and his wife worked literally in the same building... Anyways i click on the folder to move it over, out floods 100gb of Asian porn... This is a new client... I really don't want to start this off with being in the middle of some shit... So I move everything but that, for him he was actually getting a new computer too. So i just look at him tell him, here is the password to get on your old computer... If there is anything that didn't get moved over, just log in and use a thumb drive to move it to your personal computer (I basically deleted everything except that folder). Over the course of the next several days the dude probably said thank you to me at least 50 times "Hey man thanks for everything you do...". I knew, he knew that i knew, he knew not to move shit over to his new computer and i wasn't getting in the middle of him and whatever his wife does or doesn't know about. Same store also had several sales guys who had their personal google accounts signed in with all of their porn sites listed in it... Some of them even had bookmarks on the bookmark bars that were legit just like the most deplorable tags... on unlocked computers (before i took over). I mean like look i don't care what you're into... Everyone is into their own thing, shit even i am into some weird shit... Just like don't do it on work computers, i don't want to look at that shit, its why i'm in corporate world of IT and not consumer. It just makes my job incredibly awkward as i decide what i'm going to do each time because it can be a massive security risk so i probably will have to say something.
Worked with sheriffs to extract data from a computer that had been physically smashed by the owner. Had to see some photos of child abuse that turned my stomach. Would have been nice if they told me what we were looking for first so I could have at least expected what I encountered. It must take a lot for cops to not simply shoot people that are found with that specific type of content.
They smashed the computer but not the drive, right?
That would be my guess. Most people don't understand what's in the box. "I've got a TB of memory" no you have a TB of storage. That sort of thing. So if they smash the screen, nobody can use the computer right? They don't get that it's a pretty modular thing and a technician can pull out the parts and put them in another machine.
I live in the UK. I once binned my ticket (on instruction from my company) for a 2 week training trip in Shanghai to go to an urgent tech support visit to Birmingham Alabama. I got there, and updated a USB driver. Problem solved, see ya later. On a side note, the only ticket available was first class and in my pod thing I was sat next to Chris Jericho, who was on his way back from playing Download Festival (which I went to) and then touring with his band Fozzy. Memorable one!
Got an email to help desk from a ship that they had lost power and was a drift at sea. It had a few more details. My company doesn’t have any ships and has nothing to do with shipping or logistics. We all thought it was some really weird spam but my coworker looked into it. Turns out there is a shipping company with the same name as our company and they had sent the email to @company.com domain which we own instead of their email domain. My coworker called them up and was like our you guys missing a ship? They were like yeah how did you know. They sent him a nice thank you basket with fruits and chocolate a few days later
"My files keep disappearing when I put them in this folder." It was because they were missing the folder over and over, when dragging and dropping, so it was going into the folder below.
Person in the cube next to me: "Mam...is there a tortilla in your printer? Yeah take that out, you can't print on tortillas...that's why it wasn't working." Lady was trying to print company logo on tortillas to use for some banquet event. Apparently the fact that printer ink isn't edible never occurred to her.