In the spirit of IT stupidity, years ago, I was a director at a Florida Community College that will remain nameless (Think Nascar though and you won't be far off...)
When we started passing out small UPSs (about 450 VA) to techs that had our Novel Servers, we started to get reports of servers crashing. Since this had never happened before, I looked into it myself.
Turns out that rather than just protecting the server, certain techs had decided to also plug in their laser printers into the small UPS. My favourite was the one that had plugged in her toaster oven. (Yes, your laser printer and/or your toaster oven will trip the protection circuit of a 450 VA UPS and that will crash the server that is on the same UPS.)
Later, in pre-Internet days, we implemented campus mail with Lotus CCMail. Rather than walk a CD over to another building, this same tech attached the CD image to an e-mail, that she then sent to all of her friends. Since, CCMail duplicates the attachments for each email, she filled up all the storage and crashed our e-mail server...
On a related note, our President became concerned about the number of Fax Machines that were being put into the Taj Mahal err the Administration Building. The administrative assistants didn't know why. But each of them had a student worker to deliver documents to different offices.
Seems that the student workers had decided that it was easier to fax documents to an office down the hall than it was to walk down the hall and drop the documents off... Thats right, most of the faxes were to other fax machines in the same building...
I could keep going like this all day...
Great topic!
Uno
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