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

[Shlomo XL]

I used to do IT work for a private religious university.

yeah the rest of the story checks out. Thanks.

 

[GenociderSyo]

Worked IT for a mIRC, Website & Gaming hosting company back in the 90s and it always amazed me that CEOs would so easily give root access out to some random person on the internet with no training working for free just to get out of having to learn unix to update their own server.

Right before shut down during Covid grants went out that required clients were given iphones and laptops. I suddenly had to be an IT for every random client who had serious mental illness or serious cognitive delays and the stuff they could do in 5 minutes to a laptop or iphone was sheer insanity. It became even worse when earlier this year they pulled the plug on the program and removed their free internet and cell access without telling anyone.

 

[Shlomo XL]

Rats in the gate machines

UPD: the cunts ate through most of the wire insulation on a couple of said machines, then pissed and shat all over the insides and one of my colleagues who is responsible for that stretch of the railway had an allergic reaction to it.

Okay. Maybe I fucking hate rats after all.

Had to replace the ac/dc back in black converters, motor controls, Ethernet cables, the motherboard... honestly, the amount of crap that a modern gate machine now has makes me yearn for analogue times. computers suck

also, had to rip out the brain of a standalone card reader (tall box you tap your card with) and reassemble it at the cashier's 'cause it was raining sideways again

 

[Celebrate Nite]

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.

Wake up, honey! New copy-pasta just dropped!

 

[Jang Joo]

This machine had two clips in its video folder

I'll never understand people just leaving their depraved shit easily findable. I don't expect them to use encrypted containers, but how about a passworded archive? A random folder deep in the bowels of the OS?
No, just the fucking media folders under the user. Fucking hell mane

 

[Leaded Gasoline]

I'll never understand people just leaving their depraved shit easily findable.

They probably get off on the thought of being found out

 

[ita]

I'll never understand people just leaving their depraved shit easily findable.

I thought the same thing initially until it dawned on me that it was probably intentional, because of the whole humiliation fetish porn thing. Ugh.

 

[306h4Ge5eJUJ]

I'll never understand people just leaving their depraved shit easily findable. I don't expect them to use encrypted containers, but how about a passworded archive? A random folder deep in the bowels of the OS?
No, just the fucking media folders under the user. Fucking hell mane

If you're the only user, why bother? I doubt most people think about the possibility that some IT guy would have to move files over and might take a look while he's at it, at least not until it's too late. And it's not like searching for folders with large videos or lots of images is hard either, so whether you put it under C:\Windows\System32\Taxes or C:\Users\Me\Porn makes little difference.

 

[ZMOT]

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

that even happened to me in the borderline pre-internet days, humanity has always been full of coomers. and it wasn't even the good stuff, "amateur" in the sense why would anyone see those people naked...

If you're the only user, why bother? I doubt most people think about the possibility that some IT guy would have to move files over and might take a look while he's at it, at least not until it's too late. And it's not like searching for folders with large videos or lots of images is hard either, so whether you put it under CWindows\System32\Taxes or CUsers\Me\Porn makes little difference.

this and that they often don't even think about it, only when something happens they _maybe_ remember "oh wait there's stuff they shouldn't see", if they do at all.

 

[Smaug's Smokey Hole 2]

If you're the only user, why bother? I doubt most people think about the possibility that some IT guy would have to move files over and might take a look while he's at it, at least not until it's too late. And it's not like searching for folders with large videos or lots of images is hard either, so whether you put it under C:\Windows\System32\Taxes or C:\Users\Me\Porn makes little difference.

Sometime in the late 90s/early 2000s I had a buddy that worked for a hardware/software repair shop for a year or so. He jokingly told me that part of their problem-solving routine was searching for *.jpg and such. They had to call the police a couple of times and you can probably figure out why.

 

[Ghost Noob]

Sometime in the late 90s/early 2000s I had a buddy that worked for a hardware/software repair shop for a year or so. He jokingly told me that part of their problem-solving routine was searching for *.jpg and such. They had to call the police a couple of times and you can probably figure out why.

WinDirStat should be run during all diagnosis to find any hidden(large) directories or files with erroneous extensions.

"Just cleaning up your storage bro"

QDirStat for *NIX /Apple

 

[The Last Stand]

I get customers asking me if I'm in the United States. That I can understand since speaking with foreign call centers can be difficult to comprehend with their accent.

I had one call from a frantic old lady about wanting to change her phone number because she's being harassed by some 70s TV show actor on FACEBOOK. Okay, I'm not a carrier so I cannot change numbers and I don't work for Facebook so I'm practically useless in this situation.

 

[Celebrate Nite]

I had one call from a frantic old lady about wanting to change her phone number because she's being harassed by some 70s TV show actor on FACEBOOK.

I have so many questions.

• What is the name of the 70's TV show actor?
• How did this old lady get your number?
  • Follow up - What made her think it was a good idea to call your place to begin with?
• Do you have the same name as her carrier?
  • Follow-up - is she even using any of the major carriers, or is it one of those no-namebrand pre-paid boomer phones?

 

[Betonhaus]

I have so many questions.

• What is the name of the 70's TV show actor?
• How did this old lady get your number?
  • Follow up - What made her think it was a good idea to call your place to begin with?
• Do you have the same name as her carrier?
  • Follow-up - is she even using any of the major carriers, or is it one of those no-namebrand pre-paid boomer phones?

Or better yet is she actually being harrased by the actual actor, or some bot or jeet pretending to be him? What form is the harrassment taking? Is he trying to screw her, fully confident that his legacy as an actor would get him laid?

 

[The Last Stand]

I have so many questions.

• What is the name of the 70's TV show actor?
• How did this old lady get your number?
  • Follow up - What made her think it was a good idea to call your place to begin with?
• Do you have the same name as her carrier?
  • Follow-up - is she even using any of the major carriers, or is it one of those no-namebrand pre-paid boomer phones?

It was from some old cop show. Magnum PI or Miami Vice. I think AT&T. She doesn't call me; I get calls as I work for tech company. The harassment was from arguing in a private fan club group. What sticks out to me is that these type of people are so stubborn, they expect anybody knowledgeable in computers to assist them with whatever. Why don't you just leave the group?

 

[The Last Stand]

This is cliche, but of all the things that annoy me with background noise (children crying/playing, muffling, loud televisions, people talking in the background), the chirping smoke detector drives me up the wall. When I hear it, I cannot unhear it, even when I'm not around it.

 

[Shlomo XL]

Got a job in an IT-adjacent service firm that maintains commercial railway access control/ticketing infrastructure...

UPD: I fucking hate retarded niggers that comprise a good 20% of passengers on any given route.

• drunks smashing the glass doors of the gate machines (part and parcel of living in a big city);
• idiots of all ages, sexes and races trying to force said gate doors open because ??? well, who gives a shit about the equipment, right;
• immigrantoids interrupting me while I'M CLEARLY BUSY or on the phone;
• fucking niggermonkey my-name-is-Jafars I-come-from-afars loudly and rudely trying to ask me how to operate a ticket machine - again, while I work - and attempting to start shit with a guy 1.5x their size and several pointy metal bits in the hand (really mate?);
• gate warden YELLING at me to fix shit without needed spare parts (bitch, how?);
• ticket machine keymasters fucking off from their posts whenever they damn well please.

...and this fucking CUNT last friday. Imagine: It's well past 11PM, I'm tired out of my godddamn mind, on the phone, ON THE TRAIN, and what does he do? ASK ME FOR A LIGHT. INSIDE the train. How fucking dick-brained do you have to be to not only interrupt someone talking, but do it to try and trip the fucking fire alarm?

I hope these people get their legs chopped off by a freight locomotive like that one drunk warden from one of the more cursed train stops.
No, I'm not in the UK, if you were wondering.

Spoiler

P.S. My apologies for making these posts a lot more focused on plain old idiocy of people who aren't clients of an IT company or whatnot... but they're still idiots - the source of weird and cringe things everywhere.

Oh yeah, an actual IT tale for dessert: one of the hospitals I once tried applying for a job in uses a specialized, state-mandated Linux distro to run their crap. Said distro isn't the most... usable, so the hospital IT guys' solution was to emulate Windows on all of the workers' computers. 10/10.

 

[BABANGUIDE64]

ticket machine keymasters fucking off from their posts whenever they damn well please.

You should do it too

 

[McKennai]

Couple years ago an IT VP got caught mining crypto on corporate servers.
The running joke of "At least you're not that guy" hasn't left the office ever since.

 

[Betonhaus]

Couple years ago an IT VP got caught mining crypto on corporate servers.
The running joke of "At least you're not that guy" hasn't left the office ever since.

Did he make a profit?