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

[Right To Bear Blarms]

Security zealots are the enemy of actually getting anything done.

Spent weeks with a customer building an environment (which was air gapped) from scratch only for them to get a new cybersecurity manager a few months later who thought that the environment had too much networking so they had their sysadmins go in and remove the network bonds for replication and management. Only to end up screaming at me because their system wasn't replicating anymore and they couldn't log into it.

 

[Disco Inferno]

$120 an hour

my brother, if I knew that was the problem, I would have spent 2 hours fucking around instead fixing the actual problem

 

[Celebrate Nite]

Listening to multiple departments try to explain why they all think they can't use the new ticketing system we have as it's set up and need it customized. They don't. I realize why people shoot up their workplace when one of them asks "can't we just set up an new ticketing system instead of this one?"

Two of my past jobs didn't even use ticketing systems, they just had a separate outlook inbox specifically for IT and everyone in the IT department had to watch it and mark what they were working on. Half the time they can't even be bothered to do that and just physically look for you. I got yelled at a few time for helping people that way because in one of the jobs they had a very strict "no walk-ins allowed" policy.

 

[Kiwi Lime Pie]

At my first IT job, I eventually took over a position when the person that previously held it decided to abruptly resign. When I relocated to her desk (since her computer had the specific setup needed to write/test that particular software), I ended up grossed out by the amount of dust, fuzz, and crap in her keyboard -- so much so I'm surprised the keystrokes were still able to register.
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At my final IT position, I worked as a consultant on a project for a large corporation who had plenty of those "safety first" related posters all over the building I worked in. One particular day, one of my fellow consultants and I are discussing the next phase of our project wit the client contact person. We're inside the testing chamber with the door open and our contact observed that the equipment was warm and running when it shouldn't be because there's a safety switch that puts/keeps the equipment in a standby state whenever the door is opened. Not knowing how unsafe the situation was, I made a quick exit from the chamber.

It turned out that a technician was testing the equipment and disconnected the door interlock safety switch to replace it with a dummy load. The next day, our contact person informed us that the technician had been counseled about company safety protocols and that he needed to tell people if and when he'd be running equipment with the door safety switch bypassed.
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I didn't see it firsthand, but this happened at the first assignment I worked for the previously-mentioned consulting shop. At this place (a now defunct company), a consultant from a different firm that handled the client's network security instead disabled the firewall so he could download porn. The team leader from the department I worked for there found this out by chance and ended up getting a promotion over the matter. Once the tech in question was fired, multiple CDs worth of porn ended up removed from the system.

 

[JoshPlz]

For anyone that has to do physical work, I think we can all agree that some (if not most) people live in their cubicles, which means going underneath them to re-wire/unhook stuff can sometimes be a disaster. Garbage and junk on the floor, dust all over the place, sometimes it stinks down there. I've seen pillows, shoes, papers all over the place that are at risk of a fire hazard near the wires/computer/powercords. Wires that have gotten sticky due to them spilling shit on them.

I've always been of the opinion that computer towers should be ontop of the desks and never below. Half the time the side where the vents are on the tower are always facing the wall, which could cause the tower to overheat, not to mention everyone is always kicking them and doing other stupid physical damage to them.

I can confirm the more often than not disgusting conditions under desks. The fire hazards too. It used to be common for women to bring those small space heaters and run them all year long, because they are always cold. Either the AC is set too low, or the heating not high enough. Those things were of course a recipe for disaster in the dusty, cramped conditions under desks and would cause frequent hardware failure from overheating systems and power supplies. They were eventually banned after one caught fire.

And any towers or other equipment standing under desks absolutely WILL be annihilated over time. People simply don't give a shit and kick, push and rip the hell out of stuff with their feet.

 

[totallyrandomusername]

Typing just the letter "c" into someone's browser to test something and the first thing that pops up is the suggested search term "Chink Blow Job". I suggested to the 50+ year old gentleman that he would probably get better search results using "Asian" rather than "Chink".

 

[Celebrate Nite]

In one of my past jobs, the office they were in didn't have a proper server room, so they stuck their main servers in a literal walk-in closet outside the hallways next to the front door of the office. It was my job every morning to check the temperature in there. Majority of the time the temp was between the high 50's to mid 60's. One day, in WINTER, and a few hours before 5PM where everyone's shift was over, the temperature alarm went off because it had gotten to the high 90's, DANGEROUSLY close to the 100's to where the servers would just shut down completely (this was in 2016 and at the time they had Windows server 2012 r2 installed on it). The server were 3 pizza box lookin things on a metal shelf with 2 batteries at the bottom of the shelf.

The It Director took a couple big portable fans and placed them inside the room, one to suck out the hot air, and another to blow in cool air. It didn't do much because we were still skating on thin ice in the mid 90's range. They had me be on guard duty for the room, since it wasn't inside the office, the IT director was paranoid that someone would go in and steal something, so I took an office chair and sat in front of the door while dicking around with one of the spare laptops they had. The owner of the building had one of his guys go up in the roof of the 4 story building to see what the issue was. Turns out that outside was SO COLD, the machine literally froze to death and couldn't give the room the cool air it was supposed to.

I spent hours in that hallway on guard duty till midnight, because after they fixed the machine on the roof, they had to get a separate guy to refill it with freon (or whatever it needed to blow cool air). That guy had to make TWO trips to the office because he got the wrong tank. The tank for the AC is light blue, but he was using was like a orange/mango color lookin tank, and he didn't realize it till last minute. We were a thin hairline close to migrating the servers to the company that takes care of them for us (updates, screenshots, etc...), but the director decided to wait it out to see if the new tank would work, which thankfully it did.

A few days later, it broke down again multiple times during the week but thankfully they weren't long endeavors like the first time.

 

[Coolio55]

In one of my past jobs, the office they were in didn't have a proper server room, so they stuck their main servers in a literal walk-in closet outside the hallways next to the front door of the office. It was my job every morning to check the temperature in there. Majority of the time the temp was between the high 50's to mid 60's. One day, in WINTER, and a few hours before 5PM where everyone's shift was over, the temperature alarm went off because it had gotten to the high 90's, DANGEROUSLY close to the 100's to where the servers would just shut down completely (this was in 2016 and at the time they had Windows server 2012 r2 installed on it). The server were 3 pizza box lookin things on a metal shelf with 2 batteries at the bottom of the shelf.

The It Director took a couple big portable fans and placed them inside the room, one to suck out the hot air, and another to blow in cool air. It didn't do much because we were still skating on thin ice in the mid 90's range. They had me be on guard duty for the room, since it wasn't inside the office, the IT director was paranoid that someone would go in and steal something, so I took an office chair and sat in front of the door while dicking around with one of the spare laptops they had. The owner of the building had one of his guys go up in the roof of the 4 story building to see what the issue was. Turns out that outside was SO COLD, the machine literally froze to death and couldn't give the room the cool air it was supposed to.

I spent hours in that hallway on guard duty till midnight, because after they fixed the machine on the roof, they had to get a separate guy to refill it with freon (or whatever it needed to blow cool air). That guy had to make TWO trips to the office because he got the wrong tank. The tank for the AC is light blue, but he was using was like a orange/mango color lookin tank, and he didn't realize it till last minute. We were a thin hairline close to migrating the servers to the company that takes care of them for us (updates, screenshots, etc...), but the director decided to wait it out to see if the new tank would work, which thankfully it did.

A few days later, it broke down again multiple times during the week but thankfully they weren't long endeavors like the first time.

For a moment there I didn't realize you were talking in Fahrenheit and I thought "Cool! Jew room!"

 

[Smaug's Smokey Hole]

my brother, if I knew that was the problem, I would have spent 2 hours fucking around instead fixing the actual problem

It wasn't my job but I didn't see anyone else around. I'm also an econut and eco stands for economy. They were wasting money.

A couple of places used laptops, no docks, as a replacement for stationary computers because it looked better. They were plugged in to monitors and mouse/keyboard 24/7 and never moved. No laptop was fully closed either because it would shut everything down. Everywhere you looked this was what you saw:

They didn't know and I thought they just liked the look until I asked them one day.

It should also be noted that $120 had a value of $60 because everything was twice as expensive and when freelancing like that you never know how much work you will get. I once spent two weeks playing vidya and hoping there would be enough work soon to pay for my crummy $850 apartment.

 

[Haltmann]

Remoted into someone's machine and he had googled "What does ☹ mean?"

Another guy had Piratebay on his bookmarks bar on his work computer. I didn't say anything because I'm not a narc though.

One time when remoting into someone's machine, a group in the Teams chat had someone say something like "You guys remember working with Artie? Turns out his real name is Arteporn" and not very long after this, the chat exploded with people saying LOL and ART OF PORN HAHA

 

[Kiwi Lime Pie]

Remoted into someone's machine and he had googled "What does ☹ mean?"

When I received the previously-mentioned promotion at my first IT job, the bulk of our customer base was in another state, so most of our technical support was done via pcAnywhere. One client, however, was so concerned with privacy that they refused to allow remote access for their troubleshooting or software updates/patches. I'm not sure how our company or our reseller for that area handled supporting and updating their software.

Ironically enough, I think this was the same client who somehow got my contact information after my employer went belly up (more about that in this post). I came home one night to find a phone message from them asking if I could support the program for them. I called them back to inform them that I lacked the time (because I had already found another job), the development environment, and --most importantly -- the source code to do that and they needed to contact the officer(s) for the former company because they were the ones that might still have those items.

Typing just the letter "c" into someone's browser to test something and the first thing that pops up is the suggested search term "Chink Blow Job". I suggested to the 50+ year old gentleman that he would probably get better search results using "Asian" rather than "Chink".

If working on a friend's computer for them out of kindness counts as IT work, I have a similar story.

Someone I know from my high school years called me up to ask if I could come by to help them with a computer problem, so I said I'd take a look to see what was wrong. It turned out that her scanner wasn't working and I also believe she complained that her internet browser -- most likely IE at that time -- seemed slow.

Getting the scanner to work was easy. Uninstalling and reinstalling the drivers solved the problem and I was able to scan a couple of pictures for her afterwards.

When I decided to clear her browser's cache and history, I gave her some brief, good-natured teasing when the screen that showed the recent history listed an entry for a site that was clearly a porn site. She quickly dismissed it as something her brother browsed when he recently house sat for her. I honestly didn't care how it got there because I believe what adults do in private should be none of my business and adults viewing porn (that isn't CP) in private is equally none of my concern.

However, she must have been embarrassed or pissed that I saw that entry because she stopped contacting me for anything else after that night. Years later, she still won't initiate conversation/contact with me unless we happen to be at the same event at the same time.

 

[DeadwastePrime]

100mbps is ratshit to you?

How would you feel about a 2.5mbps connection?

i feel attacked

 

[一个日志]

I was off site working on upgrading windows servers via satellite internet on an oil tanker. I had about 5000ms. so I would click, and wait and repeat. Then I saw it. Selena Gomez XXX.exe and I felt a sinking in my stomach. this was a virus we had spent months battling and we thought we had won. because these horny fucking sailors would download all kinds of porn when they were on shore, and trade it like baseball cards. So I checked the access logs to find the infected computers and there was only 5, one of them was the captain. Then I had to sit the captain down, again. and explain to him. you don't click on files called .exe especially when its called Selena Gomez who was a minor at the time.

 

[Pissmaster]

Total capacity was 8TBs
The amount of folders with anime totalled over 600 or so, some had 400+ episodes in them.
I shudder to image how much it took to download it all on a ratshit 100mbps connection back then.

when you die I hope you end up in a dimension exactly like this one except you're forced to only use dialup forever

 

[一个日志]

I think this could sum up any interaction with non tech people.

 

[Kheapathic]

Worked at a small casino in Nevada; while there's plenty of retard customers I had to deal with, there were a couple of workers that were special.

We were upgrading one of our systems; the vendor doesn't tell us that when password security is enabled, certain special characters don't work, but the error code doesn't tell us what's wrong. So we go live, and when it comes time to get people their new passwords; a lot of what people were used to using was not working. We ask the vendor and they didn't even know that the Exclamation Point, Pound Sign, Ampersand, and Parenthesis are either excluded or not counted as special characters. We had to go through and figure out all their rules by hand.

Had one pit boss who had the memory of a gold fish. While I could write a novella about him and passwords; spent 45 minutes on the phone with him trying to get him to remember his password. Why can't I just force a reset, because the rest would make his swipe card stop working, and I'd then need to make him a new swipe card, and corporate is getting pissed with the amount of swipe cards we're going through.

The head of Hotel services had lots of paperwork and shit as his job entails. Dude would have a Chrome browser with at least 30 tabs open; one of which was always whatever soccer game was going on the another was always spotify. He'd have every Excel document for the past few years open, all at one time. On top of other shit he'd be looking at/working on, the dude literally never closed anything, he'd just open another tab/file/whatever. Got tired of his weekly calls of "My computer is running slow." Try to explain how RAM and page files work and how he's needing his computer to handle far more than it can. He complains enough and pulls his weight to get us to make a Super Dell Optiplex for him, weekly calls then became monthly calls. Just made a habit of going down to his office on Friday/Weekend evening and if he wasn't in, would reset his computer for him. Someone snitched and I got talked to about overstepping my bounds; still did it, kept his computer running smooth and he was pro at saving everything before leaving for the night anyway.

One pro though; our servers had their own backup power separate from the building's backup generators. The building's air conditioning wasn't connected to the backup generators, where the server room's HVAC was connected to its own backup power. Had a couple of power outages and all those bodies make things heat up quickly. I'd do my rounds, make sure everything that needs to be done is being done, and while everyone is sweating their ass off; I'm chilling in the server room, if someone needs me they had my work cell number.

6TB of anime on our academy NAS.

I don't remember how much, but had anime on a shared drive in Iraq. The S-6 guys were pretty cool.

 

[Disco Inferno]

For anyone that has to do physical work, I think we can all agree that some (if not most) people live in their cubicles, which means going underneath them to re-wire/unhook stuff can sometimes be a disaster. Garbage and junk on the floor, dust all over the place, sometimes it stinks down there. I've seen pillows, shoes, papers all over the place that are at risk of a fire hazard near the wires/computer/powercords. Wires that have gotten sticky due to them spilling shit on them.

I've always been of the opinion that computer towers should be ontop of the desks and never below. Half the time the side where the vents are on the tower are always facing the wall, which could cause the tower to overheat, not to mention everyone is always kicking them and doing other stupid physical damage to them.

Cubicles are some if the most unsanitary places I've ever seen. If I had to choose between eating food of the bathroom floor or under a cubicle I would probably choose the bathroom.

Speaking of cubicles- I had a guy and serious complaint that his computer wouldn't turn on, there was a foul smell and smoke. Figured the PSU kicked the bucket due to dust. When I went down, the first thing I saw was a rat chewing the PSU cable and subsequently dying from electrocution. It was almost exactly like the botched execution scene in The Green Mile.

Also, i jumped up and hit my head on the desk. This resulted in a mild concussion

 

[⠠⠠⠅⠑⠋⠋⠁⠇⠎ ⠠⠠⠊⠎ ⠠⠠⠁ ⠠⠠⠋⠁⠛]

Typing just the letter "c" into someone's browser to test something and the first thing that pops up is the suggested search term "Chink Blow Job". I suggested to the 50+ year old gentleman that he would probably get better search results using "Asian" rather than "Chink".

Um, my understanding from the porn thread is that facialabuse.com doesn't use your fantsy-pants terms like 'Asian'.

I came home one night to find a phone message from them asking if I could support the program for them. I called them back to inform them that I lacked the time (because I had already found another job), the development environment, and --most importantly -- the source code to do that

Unofficial offsite backups are for CLOSERS.

 

[Wood]

If working on a friend's computer for them out of kindness counts as IT work, I have a similar story.

Someone I know from my high school years called me up to ask if I could come by to help them with a computer problem, so I said I'd take a look to see what was wrong. It turned out that her scanner wasn't working and I also believe she complained that her internet browser -- most likely IE at that time -- seemed slow.

Getting the scanner to work was easy. Uninstalling and reinstalling the drivers solved the problem and I was able to scan a couple of pictures for her afterwards.

When I decided to clear her browser's cache and history, I gave her some brief, good-natured teasing when the screen that showed the recent history listed an entry for a site that was clearly a porn site. She quickly dismissed it as something her brother browsed when he recently house sat for her. I honestly didn't care how it got there because I believe what adults do in private should be none of my business and adults viewing porn (that isn't CP) in private is equally none of my concern.

However, she must have been embarrassed or pissed that I saw that entry because she stopped contacting me for anything else after that night. Years later, she still won't initiate conversation/contact with me unless we happen to be at the same event at the same time.

The IT crowd - Truest moment about tech support

Moss and Roy show what Tech support sometimes acts like. Or more precisely: what end-users seem like to qualified personnel.

youtu.be

 

[Return of the Freaker]

Cubicles are some if the most unsanitary places I've ever seen. If I had to choose between eating food of the bathroom floor or under a cubicle I would probably choose the bathroom.

This past Friday was my second day doing IT for a municipal government branch. They wanted me to set up a new computer as a kiosk (no login) in a disused office and swap out the old one, but keep the peripherals. Got permission to swap the keyboard when I noticed whoever last had that space had gotten ungodly amounts of food in the damn thing. There had to be half a cm of gunk and a couple previously unknown fungal species.