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IT Horror Stories

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CrisisVT

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Jan 13, 2006
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So given that I just ordered a little over 900.00 in parts, I got to thinking about past bad experiences with not only shipping, but parts, manufactures, etc… I figured I’d post a section in the forums to see who’s got some good IT battle scars.

Here’s my favorite:
At my very first IT job, I’m working late one night with my supervisor (who sounds like Mickey Mouse). We’re doing some maintenance in our server room re-arranging the servers, putting in a new rack, etc.. The last task we have is to move the current rack out from the wall (it’s on wheels) to make room for a wall installation AC unit. Now, here’s the room layout: Server rack on one wall, about 4-5 feet for an isle with a power junction in the middle of the adjacent wall, and then all the networking hardware (the routers, firewall, patch panel, ADSL equipment etc..) on the opposite wall; it’s pretty tight.

As we pull the large rack out from the wall, dark liquid suddenly starts shooting out from behind the rack. My boss lunges to get behind the rack to spot an uncapped pipe spewing the liquid and instinctively goes to cover it with his hand…this action immediately sends him reeling back screaming (like Mickey Mouse) “IT’S BOILING HOT!”.
So now we have hot nasty liquid shooting out through our rack, over the power junction, and at our networking equipment. I jump ahead of my boss and see farther back a valve handle, and close it. As it turns out, the line was an old hot water line that was never properly capped before they turned the room into the new server room.

This was my first introduction to serious IT work.
(Oh and my boss was fine, he didn’t hurt his hand)


Mod Edit - Funny, I suppose, but off topic for General [H]ardware. If you have a hardware question, this is the right place. If you want to yak and tell stories, General [M]ayhem is where it's supposed to go. Thanks - BlindedByScience
 
Massive paper jam in a high speed, dot matrix printer. Think 50 pages a minute stuffed into an area 36 inches wide, by 1 inch by 1 inch.
 
This isnt exactly an IT disaster... but... in highschool I kinda knew the guy that would make sure the network and computers were working correctly. One day he grabbed me and my friends and was like, "You guys have to see this".

An ENTIRE lab (about 25-30 computers) were !!!!!!.exe'd. If you dont know what this is... basicly, you just click it and it turns ALL of the graphics in Windows to !!!!!!. Background, startbar, icons, mouse pointer... :D
 
I worked for a company that did online services; a CompuServe competitor, back before the Internet. It was a nuthouse. The owning company was a stock brokerage who was all but shut down by the SEC. Cocaine, sex, and a profound lack of vision permiated the work environment. Just the same, I liked most of the people there, except for the upper managers.

For years, I worked at a consulting company that also had great people: except for three or four folks in our sales/marketing arm, who were inept. They weren't computer people, and didn't understand how to sell our services. They underestimated everything in sight, to the considerable stress of the guys actually doing the work.

While consulting, I met people of incredible ineptitude. I worked with some of the laziest people in the world, and a few of the most unfathomable organizations. The arbitrary roadblocks that get between people and their success is Kafkaesque.
 
The most recent I have is at my part-time job. I work as a Network Technician for a demilitarization company. While I was away on Christmas break, one of the company’s servers went down. My boss (who’s pretty tech savvy) started trouble shooting the problem with Dell, the last step they had him try, was disabling the current drive array, making a partition on a storage drive, and installing Server 2003 on that and trying to boot the machine. Well the machine booted but was still really unstable, so they sent a tech out.

Here’s the horror part: The tech, is checking over the machine, and notices that our array is disabled. Without asking anyone or getting permission, he chose to re-enable the array and mirror over it with the NEW Server 2003 installation, thus he wiped out our entire Citrix installation.

-Oh and I have a pretty good one about DHL shipping, and why I will never use them again-
 
A customer once asked me to my face, no joke, "does the printer have to be plugged in to work?"
 
In college I had a job helping dormies with their comps, mostly getting them online and virus cleaning. This one ROTC genius's comp was all screwed up, so I go to look at, he's got like 600,000 pornographic images in the browser cache and loads of viruses. He claims his roommates did it, so I set a password in bios, so his roomates couldn't even get to windows. A week later he calls back, has another 200,000 images, and still claims it wasn't him....
 
So here's my DHL deal; I ordered a Yeong Yang cube case, and the option was only DHL. So , my case is signature required, and expected to arrive on a Friday. I have no plans so I wait around the house to accept my package. 11:00am I go past my front door and there's my package, just waiting on the porch, no slip, no nothing.

When I bring it inside I find that the side of the box not facing the front door has a five inch, by five inch hole slammed through the box. So before I even open it I call the company and take pictures. When I get it open I find that something hit the side of the case so hard it deformed the side panel completely and left two deep gouges in the metal.

DHL took no responsibility. Luckily the company I ordered from shipped me free of charge a replacement door panel.
 
One last bump to give the thread a chance.

*grabs shock paddles* CLEAR!!
 
Back in '98, setting up an Appletalk network of 20something odd Mac LCIIs....

The thing just wouldn't work, I reinstalled the OS (from floppies) on almost all of the machines, and finally, I could get it to work... sort of. The point of all of this was to get any computer to be able to print to an old stylewriter printer... Well, once it got up, print it did, and printed picture after picture of a badly pixelated gif of jenna jameson playing with herself... figures my mom's lab would have one of the few mac viruses out there at the time....
 
ok...this is a relatively new one and its when I first started working at a bank...(this is completely my fault by the way)

I needed to move a new 32 inch tv from the operations building... to the third floor of the bank. the board meeting room...which is right next to the presidents office.

the tv was black ... that does not matter

doing this required bringing it outside, to the front(which is on the square) then in through the front entrance, then into the elevater.

the tv was on a rolling tv stand with straps...that does matter.

so I made it from back to front with no problems...

the large sidwalk around the square was brick...

made it over a gutter with diamond steel over it...whew

went 3 yards

hit a rock... a very small rock

I was holding onto the tv but it still tipped over... got around to the front and tried to stop it... Slowed it down a great deal but the bottom corner hit the ground and it rolled onto the screen. managed to get it back up onto the stand. the screen had a white line across it and I didn't notice till i got up to the meeting room that the bottom corner was crushed in( and that was where a speaker was ).

prayed

plugged it up and it worked fine...i just never knew if the sound worked on it...

Im glad I still have a job... :)
 
in 1993 getting our first pentium 60mhz chip into our shop and watching the boss drop it on the floor by mistake =priceless bunch of ceramic poop on the floor. it shattered.
 
So were installing some new monitors in our server room.

My boss is talking to me, and lifts the monitor from a prominent manufacturer out of the box, but he's holding it through the plastic bag that protects the screen. As soon as he gets the monitor all the way out of the box and kicks the box away, the monitor slips through the plastic and smashes on the floor.

Now I'm biting my tongue not to laugh, he very calmly, picks up the phone in the room, hits a speed dial, and gives some account information. Then says this "Hi, one of the monitors you sent us came pretty damaged, can you send us a replacement...great...yes please overnight it...thanks." He then looks at me and says "What?!...this never happened...and you can take the day off paid."
 
Steel Chicken said:
A customer once asked me to my face, no joke, "does the printer have to be plugged in to work?"
Click to expand...
I get a lot of those where I work, which is a computer shop, but we're an ISP as well. The number of people who try to tell us that their modem problems are our fault is incredible. Not to mention those who think that their e-mails come in by themselves is staggering. They are taken aback when I tell them, on the phone, after fixing their dial-up settings, that "you now log on to the internet, and check your email for me". The reply goes something like "but I thought it came in automatically?".

Other favourite moments in computer retail include explaining to customers that USB is said U-S-B, not U-B-S, or S-U-B (seriously),and that ADSL is not pronounced A-S-D-L.

I could think of more, but I've just got up (shuddders to think what else has happened)
 
Here is my horror story:

I work as a ResNet Computer Consultant, its Fall 2003, A week before studnets are supposed to move back in. Keep that in mind, 4000 unpatched computers comming back on campus. Well, we hear about this small little virus called MSBlaster. Luckly, i get the job of making a CD to patch, disinfect and install a virus scanner on peoples computers. I have 6 hours to do this before we are supposed to get a master copy to a cd duplication place to get them back in time for move in.

I do a smashing job, i make it completly automatic, and it worked pefectly. Infact, a quote in the paper from a freshman was "It just works, its great!"

So sounds pretty good right? Well, anyone remember what came out mear days after MSBlaster? Nachi! Now here is where it gets ugly. It came out only days after we got the CDs back from the duplicator, so there was no way to change them. We probably got ~10% infection rate of nachi due to people who dident get the disks, or got the disk after they got nachi and the most current dats to the campus's site licence virus scanner. We had to work on over 400 computers in a weeks time. We worked 70 hour weeks the next two weeks, infact i even remember staying up to midnight or later calling people letting them know that they were infected.

atleast the pay was great that week :D
 
I work at a school

Tech horror or just life horror

I have had more than 10 emails from college educated people who currently teach english which read something like.

My computer are is not working you fix computers.....
This problem are not acceptable fix are internets now!

Is it possible that I work for people who rode on the short bus?
 
I walked on to a net admin job where the previous admin had set up 50-200 ft lenghts of unshielded cat5 from the server room to each and every computer (340ish) computers...I wanted to hunt him down and kill him.

I had pictures of the "patch job" he had done....I nearly cried at the sight. No wonder this guy got "let go".

At least I got double overtime during the period that I worked to unfook everthing that he did. THAT was a Looooong month. lucrative....but long.
 
"We've decided it would less expensive to have our IT work done remotely from India. Here's your severance check."
 
I actually had a lady ask me, "You mean once I delete it, it's gone?"


:confused:
 
i worked for a freelance extremely small onsite computer repair team.

my favorite calls were "Is 'NTLDR' not detected a bad thing?"
"I have WindowsME.....(insert problem here)"


and of course while working as an intern, i loved hearing a Desktop Support guy say "We don't have enough hot bitches working here" right as the female head of HR was walking by. i got to put my application in the next day for his job.
 
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