Weird and Cringe things you've seen while working in IT - Since everyone is too lazy to make such a thread where IT bros can vent

[The Last Stand]

Then you get an Indian manager, and it's all upside-down. YOUR job is to make MY metrics look good so I get a promotion next year taking credit for your successes. I need you to write your own tickets and put them through the process so my senior managers see the beans being counted.

I have this one Indian or Middle Eastern call about their custom email domain not working for their Gmail account. I'm thinking, okay, we have to check the SMTP address, port number and outgoing/incoming mail servers. The email works but Google won't take it. I say contact Google, they say no. I tell him we have to escalate the domain, but he won't allow me to record or take screenshots of the error. He demands EVERYTHING from me, but won't allow me to notate or have proof of his issue so I COULD better help him.

I swear, every call from an Indian or Arab is passive aggressive with their refusal to do anything, expecting an instant solution or remedy. Sometimes, they try to tell you how to do your job. Always bossy, but suddenly ignorant when you ask ANY effort from them.

 

[SouthernBitchBob]

I have this one Indian or Middle Eastern call about their custom email domain not working for their Gmail account. I'm thinking, okay, we have to check the SMTP address, port number and outgoing/incoming mail servers. The email works but Google won't take it. I say contact Google, they say no. I tell him we have to escalate the domain, but he won't allow me to record or take screenshots of the error. He demands EVERYTHING from me, but won't allow me to notate or have proof of his issue so I COULD better help him.

I swear, every call from an Indian or Arab is passive aggressive with their refusal to do anything, expecting an instant solution or remedy. Sometimes, they try to tell you how to do your job. Always bossy, but suddenly ignorant when you ask ANY effort from them.

And "please check and confirm" for totally inconsequential things just to make sure the process involves MORE Slack tag. Put the ball back in your court as fast as possible with as little effort as possible. Mostly so that, when management asks what's taking so long, they can shrug and point at you.

 

[The Last Stand]

And "please check and confirm" for totally inconsequential things just to make sure the process involves MORE Slack tag.

Do you work with me? That's what they said word for word. "Please have them check and confirm," as if I'm not going to do my job for YOUR issue.

 

[SouthernBitchBob]

Do you work with me? That's what they said word for word. "Please have them check and confirm," as if I'm not going to do my job for YOUR issue.

"Please check and confirm" is an Indianism I've learned over the years, just like "kindly revert" or "do the needful". And constantly asking you to teach them how to do things you can find as a first StackOverflow result. Coworkers not knowing how to do something is fine, but ffs when they ask questions that tell me they didn't bother to type it into Google, it makes me welcome our AI overlords. ChatGPT couldn't possibly be less competent than an Indian contractor. Just last week I had one tell me "please advise how to connect MySQL Workbench to <server> through a proxy".
Me: *Googles that question*
Oh look. It's the first result.

Even better is when they do the reverse. You ask them something and they just blindly paste the first Google result they find without even reading to see if it's relevant at all.

 

[Betonhaus]

"Please check and confirm" is an Indianism I've learned over the years, just like "kindly revert" or "do the needful". And constantly asking you to teach them how to do things you can find as a first StackOverflow result. Coworkers not knowing how to do something is fine, but ffs when they ask questions that tell me they didn't bother to type it into Google, it makes me welcome our AI overlords. ChatGPT couldn't possibly be less competent than an Indian contractor. Just last week I had one tell me "please advise how to connect MySQL Workbench to <server> through a proxy".
Me: *Googles that question*
Oh look. It's the first result.

Even better is when they do the reverse. You ask them something and they just blindly paste the first Google result they find without even reading to see if it's relevant at all.

can you just go "no problem, you can find in depth instructions here https://letmegooglethat.com/?q=plea...ect+MySQL+Workbench+to+server+through+a+proxy"?

granted it's probably also a language and cultural barrier, where they can't tell the difference between a stack overflow in depth answer and a 4chan post that tells them to enter "sudo rm -rf /* --no-preserve-root". that barrier would not exist if they actually had the education they claim to have.

 

[iScream into the void]

Reading through this makes me glad I have the people in my office well trained. Holy shit.

Biggest issue I've had to deal with is one of the laptop's not playing nice with some monitors, but since they're not from the office (a lot of the employees work from home for better or worse) so there's only so much I can do for shit that isn't ours.

 

[SouthernBitchBob]

I don't think anything will ever top the time a manager plopped an Indian in the desk next to mine. I was pissed that manager didn't ask me if I'd mind. He spent the next month creepily staring at me, waiting for me to notice so he could ask me insightful questions such as:

• *points at IDE* "do you think this will compile?" (I answered "Hit run and find out.")
• "You teach me Python?" (The thing he was hired for)
• And my favorite. *plops laptop down on my desk. Points at it.* "Feex."

 

[vanta pilled]

I don't think anything will ever top the time a manager plopped an Indian in the desk next to mine. I was pissed that manager didn't ask me if I'd mind. He spent the next month creepily staring at me, waiting for me to notice so he could ask me insightful questions such as:

• *points at IDE* "do you think this will compile?" (I answered "Hit run and find out.")
• "You teach me Python?" (The thing he was hired for)
• And my favorite. *plops laptop down on my desk. Points at it.* "Feex."

Mein Gott, did you kill this manager's family and continuously taunt him? That's the only reason I can think of on why your manager would do such a dreadful thing to you.

 

[The King-In-Chains]

Not in IT but:

• Get sent a Jupyter notebook to look at and give comments/criticism for a person green in the profession
• Literally has all the placeholder code intact (I.E., ###YOURCODEHERE###)
• Send back message immediately: "Do you actually want to work in this profession?"
• Direct superior to them grills them

Life is good sometimes.

 

[BABANGUIDE64]

Not in IT but:

• Get sent a Jupyter notebook to look at and give comments/criticism for a person green in the profession
• Literally has all the placeholder code intact (I.E., ###YOURCODEHERE###)
• Send back message immediately: "Do you actually want to work in this profession?"
• Direct superior to them grills them

Life is good sometimes.

I hope this guy is fucked very rough

 

[Samuel Fuller]

Old and new always meet not always halfway, but maybe 1/5th of the way. Back in 2003-2004 it was rumored that Microsoft's Xbox-successor would have a (I think) 12GB SSD. Not a big deal these days but at the time those cost upwards of 20,000 dollars because the aeronautics industry were the main buyers. Turns out SSDs are excellent black boxes and otherwise stabile data recording devices.

Not to say floppy's are better, they're generally awful. Hot take: Zip drives got a bad rep but I feel that was partially because they were way more expensive and the expectations were hight compared to the generic and cheap 3½ diskette. If the latter failed it was like cheap paper tearing.

The bad rep of Zip drives came from the drop in build quality as the prices for them came down resulting in a fault that spread like herpes once a bad drive damaged a disc.

The Click of Death would kill any format in the market.

Having an issue that made every use of the drive a die roll as to whether the drive and possibly all your data stored on the discs for it surviving, and hitting just as CD-ROM burners were becoming affordable was just natural selection in action.

 

[Samuel Fuller]

A client my company supports has had its finance department get phished and hacked so many times that they set up an air-gapped network for their ACCPAC system.

The hamster-brains of their finance department couldn't handle using a VPN to access ACCPAC, so they got second PCs that are only on the air-gapped ACCPAC network, in addition to their standard PCs which they still use for email and everything else aside form ACCPAC.

They were initially given KVM switches and one set of monitors, one keyboard and one mouse each.

THAT was too complicated for their department head, so now everyone in the finance dept. has two PCs, two keyboards, two mice and two or three monitors on their desks.

And they STILL average one user's MS365 account getting compromised every other month.

 

[Shlomo XL]

UPD: hate retarded niggers ≈ 20% of passengers

Wee update: it's now summer and shit breaks way less often. Since winter, a few funny things happened.

• Took an emergency glass breaker from a flock of juvenile train surfers - almost no vandalism on our stretch since then. Wonder why.
• Fucking Indians. Didn't even -attempt- to speak the language and pulled out a phone with voice translation open first thing, expecting my help. Gradually, I began to hate them.
• One of the most important pieces of equipment we maintain - a chunky server that coordinates work of turnstiles on a given station - is, on one of said stations, behind lock and key in a labyrinthian series of tunnels and back rooms underground that one has to phone someone over from a few stations away to even access. This procedure takes at least an hour because you have to exit the facility to get signal reception. Fucking genius.
• Been hiding spare parts in the ceiling at the cashier's lately because a round trip from the 'shop to the furthermost serviced station can easily take 3 hours. Bribery (in the form of occasional pastry and Rafaello candy) can work wonders between departments.
• Retarded cocksuckers from other service companies continue frying our equipment. Oops.
• Some of the card terminals' bases are so thoroughly rusted that you can just take them home.

 

[The Last Stand]

Another day, another frantic woman that shouldn't have a smartphone. She believes, no, KNOWS, her phone is "hacked" because she accidentally enabled an accessibility setting. I try to ask her what issues she was having, she refused to answer. Even worse, she's going through her settings trying to disable random shit and has the gall to ask how to get rid of an UI element. I tell her some stuff is built into the operating system; she doesn't take no for an answer and just hangs up.

 

[BABANGUIDE64]

Idiotproof smart tech was a mistake. It neither works properly only being smart-ass nor is it safe from improper usage, moreover it increases the probability of errors and provides less freedom to users to fix the problem themselves.
People facing engineer's dilemma and pajeets are the reason why things are dumb and gay and why tech sucks swallowing huge chunks of stale AIDS infested cum

 

[mister meaner]

A client my company supports has had its finance department get phished and hacked so many times that they set up an air-gapped network for their ACCPAC system.

...

And they STILL average one user's MS365 account getting compromised every other month.

I can't imagine this contract being worth it. These people need mandatory training, and they should be fired if they can't show demonstrate basic competency.

 

[Samuel Fuller]

I can't imagine this contract being worth it. These people need mandatory training, and they should be fired if they can't show demonstrate basic competency.

My first day on the job, the teammate I was shadowing said "Now, I am going to show you some stuff for Company X, and since you're experienced, your first instinct is going to be to run away screaming. I felt that way too."

They are hilariously backward and cheap, and are a nightmare to support at times. They have an Entra ID domain, but refuse to pay for an InTune license, so we have to hope their people set up new laptops correctly and call us to remote in to set up the local admin rescue account, but they usually don't. Their branch managers disregard policy and then freak out when shit breaks because of it, but there are never any consequences for them.

When we received an email asking how to answer a partner company's IT Security questionnaire, me and another colleague said we should just instruct them to tell the partner company to run away and not look back.

Somehow, this shitshow of a tard farm company has been on Business in Canada's top ten list of Best-Managed Canadian Companies for over a decade.

 

[Betonhaus]

Somehow, this shitshow of a tard farm company has been on Business in Canada's top ten list of Best-Managed Canadian Companies for over a decade

Sounds about right.

We finally got a service tech in to look at my lathe, the turret was out of alignment by 0.040" and causing severe problems when tapping so it's a relief to get that fixed.

 

[Samuel Fuller]

Idiotproof smart tech was a mistake. It neither works properly only being smart-ass nor is it safe from improper usage, moreover it increases the probability of errors and provides less freedom to users to fix the problem themselves.
People facing engineer's dilemma and pajeets are the reason why things are dumb and gay and why tech sucks swallowing huge chunks of stale AIDS infested cum

Giving users the "Freedom to fix it themselves", and boy is that a faggoty, Stallman-level bullshit way to put it, just means more idiots who know just enough to be a danger to themselves will just fuck things up worse before they come to you to fix it.

NOT WORTH THE HASSLE.

 

[SouthernBitchBob]

I've discovered that phrases such as, "I want you to drive this", "I want you to lead this", and "I want you to show leadership" mean "I have a project that I want you to architect, secure, test, automate, report on, document, network, and do everything from start to finish solo. And if you tell me it's impossible, I'll reply with 'show leadership'".