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

[306h4Ge5eJUJ]

When they get breached they are so absolutely fucked it's unreal, that's a massive risk of insider threat as well. All it'll take is one pissed off employee and a badly configured backup schedule, impact for days

You think a shop with this setup has automatic backups?

 

[HahaYes]

You think a shop with this setup has automatic backups?

I can hope ok

 

[The_Red_Man]

Not directly IT, but (a friend) used to work at an ISP and old people calling in to fix their TVs was the fucking worst.

"MY TV ISN'T WORKING YOU NEED TO FIX IT I PAY GOOD MONEY FOR THIS!"

"Sir, what do you see on the TV right now if you turn it on?"

"NOTHING. IT JUST SAYS 'HOMIE ONE!"

"I'm sorry,  what?"

"ARE YOU DEAF?! HOMIE ONE! H. O. M. I. AND THE NUMBER ONE."

 

[Steve Martin Short]

Once upon a time, I worked for a company with multiple love actions. One of the supervisors there was, to be frank, a bit dim. One day, he came up to me and asked if it was true what he heard, that I knew computers. I said yes, he went on his merry way, and that was the end of it.

Except, of course, for the part where I'm telling this story.

Time went on, and he transferred to another nearby location. His reign of errors was over. Until one day, I get a phone call.

It's him.

He needs to know how to copy and paste.

Explaining highlight and right-click, only to have to switch over to ctrl-c, ctrl-v, multiple time using increasingly shorter words, it would have been faster for him to just retype it.

The supervisors who had worked with him all has a good chuckle at his expense when I told them why he had called.

 

[Steve Martin Short]

Once upon a time, I worked for a company with multiple love actions.

That would, of course, be "locations". Rate me dumb and late all you want, for 'tis mine own fault that I did not double-check what mine phone didst choose to post upon mine behalf, and failed to notice again until the time for self-correction had long passed.

 

[mister meaner]

Repost from the India menace thread but when I was a barely-out-of-highschool trainee at an MSP, we had a new guy come from India who had a masters degree. I had to show him how to run windows updates on his first week of employment.

Also i had to reverse park for him sometimes cause the first time he did he nearly backed into another car

 

[Smaug's Smokey Hole 2]

Repost from the India menace thread but when I was a barely-out-of-highschool trainee at an MSP, we had a new guy come from India who had a masters degree. I had to show him how to run windows updates on his first week of employment.

Also i had to reverse park for him sometimes cause the first time he did he nearly backed into another car

Maybe he was good at other things?

 

[Dante Alighieri]

Maybe he was good at other things?

Like street shitting or sexual harassment?

 

[mister meaner]

Maybe he was good at other things?

No, he ended up having to learn off me for a while. I suspect he was a nepo hire as our manager is also Indian

 

[Unicorn Fairie]

Customer had me clean out their computer they said cost $4,000 dollars when new. And what was this computer running? The Sims 4...

 

[666NASTYFUCKINGFREAK666]

A couple weeks ago a user came in for a password reset and he told me that he doesn't know his bank password, he just uses facial/fingerprint recognition to log in.

 

[Shlomo XL]

So far we got...

UPD (really, this belongs more in the work stories thread but hey):

• Freezing my goddamn extremities off in the early frosts mate!
• Shoving expiring assignment tickets over to other equipment maintainers (several entities maintain different parts of devices) to buy time;
• Straight-up disabling non-contactless bank card readers in some machines because they get used less than once per year;
• Rats in the gate machines (they keep fairly warm throughout the year just from the computers running inside);
• Jumper-wiring bits of a given machine's mobo (again, no replacement parts; big ups Louis Rossmann!) in the field;
• Bringing a mini-tent to work so the wind doesn't blow off the umbrella during maintenance on the open-air machines;
• Random electrical outages and "scheduled" (nobody tells us the schedule) power cuts to the stations that sometimes fry motherboards, cook SSDs and overall are a blight on everyone's existence (but a source of income for us);
• Unlicensed Windows on half the ticket machines.

We laugh at all of the above, but it's a serious pain in the arse to deal with sometimes.

 

[Rubatán]

On thursday, I showed up to work and the keys to the data center and a few closets I have with a bunch of miscellaneous junk and spare keyboards and such are missing. Everything was left open, and nothing was gone, at least nothing important or anything particularly noticeable.

Because the company I work for has no issues with me having full and complete access and control of anything that runs with electricity, I checked the cameras and found out one of the security guards in our building just rolled into my office, grabbed the keys from where I hide them (not allowed to take them home with me) and opened each and every thing that those keys opened, checked them out for like a minute and just... did nothing. Took nothing. He just left with the keys in hand and that was it.

Fast forward to this friday and I find an envelope on my desk. It's the missing keys. I'd already arranged to have the locks swiftly replaced, so I don't really need them anymore. But still, just... bizarre.

I'm not sure what to think. Did he give in to an intrusive thought? Is he just autistic? He's brown-skinned, did he almost give in to his natural urge to steal? I don't know!

 

[Betonhaus]

On thursday, I showed up to work and the keys to the data center and a few closets I have with a bunch of miscellaneous junk and spare keyboards and such are missing. Everything was left open, and nothing was gone, at least nothing important or anything particularly noticeable.

Because the company I work for has no issues with me having full and complete access and control of anything that runs with electricity, I checked the cameras and found out one of the security guards in our building just rolled into my office, grabbed the keys from where I hide them (not allowed to take them home with me) and opened each and every thing that those keys opened, checked them out for like a minute and just... did nothing. Took nothing. He just left with the keys in hand and that was it.

Fast forward to this friday and I find an envelope on my desk. It's the missing keys. I'd already arranged to have the locks swiftly replaced, so I don't really need them anymore. But still, just... bizarre.

I'm not sure what to think. Did he give in to an intrusive thought? Is he just autistic? He's brown-skinned, did he almost give in to his natural urge to steal? I don't know!

Maybe he made copies of the keys and checked what things are valuable and how big of a cube van he needs to rent?

 

[HahaYes]

I don't know what's sadder, the fact that I've lost count of how many incidents I've gotten invovled with which are caused by some faggot leaving RDP wide open, or the fact that nearly every time it happens the moron who did it decides to try have a go at my team for securing the business they're in (aka doing our job) by locking down said retards very quickly hijacked shit and obliterating it from the face of the earth

It is very funny watching them seethe at the latter though, especially when they deny it given we can just point at the logs and go "lolno"

 

[Ghost Noob]

First week at a new position, client comes in wailing "System restore deleted all of the files on my personal computer!" turns out they confused System Restore and System Recovery. When the process was completed they were left with just a welcome message, a bare desktop, and all of the OEM bloatware.

I fired up PhotoRec and let it run into the wee hours of the morning to recover what it could. Wrote a short script to remove obsolete file extensions and to organize the remaining files. I did not clean up everything efficiently, as to use this as a learning opportunity for the client; there were still tens of thousands of files they needed to review .

Client ended up getting what they needed, and provided the IT team with some snacks for the week.

 

[The Last Stand]

I had a few calls from older men calling for IT support. I go in to screen share on their devices, I see photos of porn on there. Per policy, I'm required to pause it as calls/mirroring sessions are always recorded. One man in particular had full frontal male nudity as his BACKGROUND.

 

[HahaYes]

I had a few calls from older men calling for IT support. I go in to screen share on their devices, I see photos of porn on there. Per policy, I'm required to pause it as calls/mirroring sessions are always recorded. One man in particular had full frontal male nudity as his BACKGROUND.

Thanks for reminding me of the time I was working on some checks following a client compromise to make sure we weren't fucked over by proxy, ran a broad search for the name of one of the files said threat actor group regularly use + used in the attack on said client, and ended up finding around 200GB of hardcore fucking porn on some retards workstation. All from just ONE keyword

Some people are fucking beyond saving

 

[SouthernBitchBob]

Indians want to use AI to "generate test cases". Not the code for them (though that's also what they want), but like...the cases. That is, "I have a function that adds two numbers together, what are some possible ways to test that?". Naturally, I'm staring at this marveling at the incompetence on display, wondering how the fuck someone can tie their shoes in the morning if they can't immediately think of at least four or five ways to poke holes in a method, but management is gleeful because it'll "improve efficiency", a slide said so!

Never let poos into your company. Never.

 

[ita]

Oh shit, I just found this thread and I have a story I’ve been dying to get off my chest for years now. Warning: gross.

I used to do IT work for a private religious university. One day I get a school-issued laptop back from one of the professors, who was turning it in to have its data transferred over to a newer model. He seemed a bit skittish at the time, but maybe I was just imagining things.

I take the laptop to the back room that us IT folk are caged in and start setting up the file transfer to the new machine. One thing we would do is also manually check the media folders for files to transfer, as the users of these school-issued machines didn’t always store anything there. This machine had two clips in its video folder.

The first one was hardcore gay porn. It was a download from some porn site, so no one of relevance to the school was involved or anything. I told the other IT guys about it and we crowded around the machine and had a laugh…but that turned to horror when we all checked the other file.

The second video was a home movie, about 20 minutes long. Front and center was the very same professor that handed me the laptop for file transfer — but he was kneeling on a bathroom floor, wearing pink lacy bodysuit lingerie and grinning demonically at the camera. Immediately we paused the video, and our bemused chuckling from just seeing downloaded gay porn suddenly turned to a small chaos. Some of the guys laughed a louder, nervous laughter, the rest of us lowered our voices going “What the fuck? What the fuck?” We pretty much immediately knew we were going to have to take this secret to our graves (well, we already did because of IT confidentiality anyways) and decided to skip through this video to see where it went.

In the video, the professor sheepishly talked to the camera for a minute or two, then proceeded to crawl over to the toilet behind him and lifted the seat cover. Unfortunately for us we could see the contents of the toilet clearly in the video, which was full of piss and logs of shit. The professor smiled greedily at the toilet and then proceeded to dunk his head in like one might when bobbing for apples, but his goal was, well, shit.

We stopped the video again and scrubbed through it to see that the entire remainder of the video was more of the same. Personally I was feeling a deep dread and wanted nothing more to do with this; luckily for me, it was soon time to clock out, so I fortunately didn’t get to be the one to hand the new machine back to that professor. I think one of the other IT guys may have even (unethically) copied over the video onto a personal flash drive for some reason. I do know, though, that we did transfer all files over to the new machine, as promised.