- Joined
- Dec 16, 2019
I had to teach someone how to resize a photo in Paint. Over the phone. Legend has it the photo is still not resized.
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
- Thread starter Disco Inferno
- Start date
- Joined
- Jan 2, 2020
At my last job, they went through IT staff like it was going out of style. Almost every month there would be a new person hired and one or two people let go. Before I was hired, they let go of one of the IT Supervisors because he was doing some criminal shit like giving away info or something (didn't get the EXACT details, just picked up on what other people were saying). So the IT director was doing double duty for a month or two until they found a new supervisor. He only lasted exactly one month because he wasn't exactly doing his job, and put more effort into playing Marvel games and watching porn. When they eventually found out and let him go, everyone was afraid (i.e. disgusted and grossed out) of touching his computer to wipe it clean and find the evidence of his "work". The few female IT staff that were working were acting like prudes and kept saying "omg that's so gross, ew, im skeeved out!". Meanwhile the other supervisor and director was like "this is such a disgrace, he's a supervisor, he was in the military, he should have known better!!!".
- Joined
- Nov 14, 2019
Bet they got some oldies in there.
- Joined
- Dec 7, 2020
i did know better
- Joined
- Dec 8, 2020
Talking about old systems a travel company I had briefly worked at had an ancient system for booking aircraft tickets. This thing had an interface with inspiration from BIOS, only accepted keystrokes with a solid eye burning blue background with the classic all caps block lettering.
Thing about this system is that there must have been some brutal character limits so every menu option was a short version of a phrase making everything a nice alphabet soup
Eg. Customer aircraft ticketing system
Cusaftickstem
Why they shortened shit this way I have no fucking idea
Thing about this system is that there must have been some brutal character limits so every menu option was a short version of a phrase making everything a nice alphabet soup
Eg. Customer aircraft ticketing system
Cusaftickstem
Why they shortened shit this way I have no fucking idea
- Joined
- Jun 30, 2021
My only IT work has been the unpaid variety, but I used to have a friend who had a real IT job that involved teaching the aging employees of some company how to use their computers. He said he once told some lady to click on the email icon with her mouse and she picked it up and pressed it against the screen. *facepalm* Makes you wonder exactly what those people were being paid for if they don't even know how to click an icon when being able to use Kikerosoft Office is generally a requirement for jobs involving computers...
- Joined
- Mar 17, 2019
Plenty of airlines still have internal systems that look to be based off TN3270 type terminal access (full screen rather than line by line terminals). There are systems for building a GUI on top of such systems too.
- Joined
- Aug 7, 2021
One of my first jobs back in the late 90s was 1st line support for a PSTN based provider. Nothing exciting to report; typical end user rage over being unable to enter their login credentials properly. However, I do remember a support ticket where a user was not able to access their ISP issued server space (can't remember how much allowance it was, but it was the 90s, so probably 10mb or some shit). Anyway. For the most part, end users created their own shitty variants of Geocities pages, typically about their pets or their gardening or whatever. This one guy though. His entire home page was a static HTML page with some chart that displayed various penile shapes and lengths.
I never asked why. It was never discussed.
Some things are best left unknown.
I never asked why. It was never discussed.
Some things are best left unknown.
- Joined
- Sep 18, 2017
>overhauling a website
>discussing the changes over a call-in meeting
>retarded junior dev not meeting deadlines says "yeah, the Register button is pointing to the wrong page, but in the meantime customers can click Sign In and we have a different Register button there"
>uh, customers aren't going to go to the Sign In page if they don't have an account, they're going to click the broken Register button, it'll be fucked, they'll not become paying customers
>"yeah, but we have the Sign In page as a front end on the old site, so customers are trained in using that Register button there. We'll fix it post-launch"
>*thoughtful pause*
>We're talking about NEW customers trying to create an account for the first time... they aren't trained to behave in ANY specific way on the site right now
>"oh, um, uh, *bullshitting intensifies*"
It's amazing how much website updates every few years mirrors stores rearranging their sections and shelving every few years. I thought escaping retail meant escaping that particular nuisance but the busywork never ends.
>discussing the changes over a call-in meeting
>retarded junior dev not meeting deadlines says "yeah, the Register button is pointing to the wrong page, but in the meantime customers can click Sign In and we have a different Register button there"
>uh, customers aren't going to go to the Sign In page if they don't have an account, they're going to click the broken Register button, it'll be fucked, they'll not become paying customers
>"yeah, but we have the Sign In page as a front end on the old site, so customers are trained in using that Register button there. We'll fix it post-launch"
>*thoughtful pause*
>We're talking about NEW customers trying to create an account for the first time... they aren't trained to behave in ANY specific way on the site right now
>"oh, um, uh, *bullshitting intensifies*"
It's amazing how much website updates every few years mirrors stores rearranging their sections and shelving every few years. I thought escaping retail meant escaping that particular nuisance but the busywork never ends.
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- Joined
- Dec 2, 2018
Years ago, I had to help a person insert a USB drive - multiple times. I don't mean "take a USB out and try different ports over the course of a minute". The person legitimately had no idea how to insert a USB, and no amount of telling her to flip it the other way if she can't put it in the port helped. She called multiple times about this.
It beat trying to un-spaghetti wires, though.
Edit: spelling
It beat trying to un-spaghetti wires, though.
Edit: spelling
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- Joined
- Jun 12, 2020
I once showed a coworker how to resize and minimize windows on the desktop. They apparently didn't like computers and only used their iPhone outside of work.
- Joined
- Mar 14, 2021
All the street shitters got dressed up like some Bollywood musical for one of their shitty pagan festivals. Then went back and sat at their computers dressed like retards.
- Joined
- Dec 17, 2019
That was a regular occurrence for me before covid and working from home hit, so thank you Shanghai Sniffles
- Joined
- Dec 7, 2020
Once upon a time, a user forgot their wifi password. You know, the one written in big friendly letters on their fridge where I left it. So this user reset their router, but wouldn't admit to it and just said it magically stopped working. If this user didn't reset the router then who did, some hacker? "No I didn't get hacked", said the user. You hacked yourself so well, user, that you didn't even know how to get into your wifi network anymore.
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- Joined
- Feb 3, 2013
You had me excited for a minute till I noticed the word "aircraft". Thought we had an authentic Terry Davis end-user on our hands.
- Joined
- Oct 3, 2018
When I was an F-16 mechanic we routinely had to sign out floppy disk readers to go along with out XP era toughbooks to do engine data downloads. A lot of the support tech the military has is geriatric by any metric.
Reports of a week's given sortie data was collected and presented on a CD to MOC after it was all said and done.
- Joined
- Sep 7, 2016
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.
- Joined
- Sep 18, 2017
based, this keeps China from mind-controlling our best birds
- Joined
- Mar 17, 2019
Joke's on you, the F-35 uses USB sticks that the MSS left around in the parking lot of the nearest strip club to the base.
- Joined
- Oct 3, 2018
A little inside baseball, but no one is allowed to use flash media on US government information systems. Too many intel and comm airmen have knocked down mission critical systems with pirated flash games and hentai viruses in the 2000's for any commander to sign off on removable flash media.
CD and DVD ROM discs are preferred for physical data transfer (i.e. across air gaps) though are slowly being phased out. Outlook and SharePoint are, for all of their issues, more easily encrypted and theoretically easier to use for anything on network.
Two more cursed scenarios:
My unit has iPads for technical orders (job manuals). It is entirely possible to brute force access because QA knows that maintenance airmen will forget the passwords while on the job and it's easier to let Airman Snuffy try every combo instead of having him huff it back to the tool crib to get the password.
Again from my unit, there are several computers at my work center that will refuse me email access, refuse internet access, refuse to acknowledge the credential on my CAC, or any combination of the three. No real reason, just junk old hardware. I have tracked down one computer that lets me do anything remotely efficient and plan my day around access to it when I'm on duty.
My issue with the GI e-waste is not unique and often gnarls anything computer related to a halt on larger training days.
Comm knows about this, my superintendent knows about this, the flight commander knows about this, as do squadron commander, wing king, and higher command. Nothing is going to be done.