What are some good IT stories? And by good I mean horrific

SSUSeaWolf

Senior member
Mar 12, 2009
224
0
0
Computers are great, but the users are less than perfect.

I have heard great stories like a printer that could print every color but yellow, and after an hour of diagnosing the problem over the phone, the user asked if printing on yellow paper would have any effect.

Or just this last Thanksgiving a friend helped their relative for 2 hours reinstalling Windows because they thought their laptop was completely messed up and couldn't get the screen to turn on. Turns out it was perfectly fine, but was hooked up to an external monitor that just wasn't turned on.


Reading through everyone else's pain usually makes for good fun :)
 

lokiju

Lifer
May 29, 2003
18,526
5
0
When I did phone support for Compaq laptops back in the late 90's I had plenty of odd and interesting calls.

Three that I recall were...

1: Man calls asking to fix his POS compaq laptop, these were only consumer level laptops, not business level. He was very irate as soon as the call started and after taking call after call for 1.5 years straight I basically went out of my way to be a dick or help as little as possible when people were dicks. If they were nice I'd go out of my way to help.

Anyway his drive died, he had no back ups and said his whole entire business was on there. I apologized for this and told him there are data recover services/companies out there and gave him the number to one we gave out but told him they're very expensive and there's not guarantee they'll recover anything.

He demanded my name, he demanded my supervisors name, he demanded my managers name, which I gave him. He said he'd "sue us all!!" (with lots of anger in is voice mind you).

Then he actually started crying, full on sobbing on the phone. I asked him if there was anything I could help him with while he was sobbing and he "no" he just sound so broken, I *almost* felt bad for him.

2: I was helping a young lady out with some various issue and there was a bit of time waiting on it to boot into safe mode and she got to talking about how many different technologies were out there now days (mind you this was in 1997) and got onto the topic of "cybering". I was thinking I knew what she meant but wanted to be sure :p so asked her to tell me more, and she said "you know, cyber sex!, it's like phone sex but on the internet" Needless to say she was very flirtatious but I couldn't help but picture some heffer on the other end of the line.

3: An older guy called in asking for help with his battery and within the fist 20 seconds of him talking I knew exactly what the issue was and how to fix it so I just said "I'm familiar with this issue, please click on start...,settings..., control panel then double click on system" I was actually making a point to go slower with this guys cause I could tell he'd have a hard time keeping up just from everything before. So he yells at me "stop treating me like I'm a god damn idiot!!!" and I responded "I'm sorry if you feel like an idiot sir, I was merely going through the standard steps to resolve your issue" :D

He didn't like me essentially calling him an idiot and said he didn't want to talk to me anymore, I told him he was free to hang up and call back if that's how he felt. He took the suggestion and hung up.

Ah it was fun screwing with people sometimes.

My buddy that worked there with me for some damn reason went into a Indian accent mode (he was white) when on a call, the whole call he did the full on accent and when he hung up I said "WTF was that all about?" he said he didn't mean to but when the guy on the other end spoke he had a thick Indian accent and when he spoke it just came out like that with the first few words so he didn't want the guy thinking he was mocking him so he just ran with it.

I worked for a sheriff department for a large county back in '99 doing Y2k udpates to some 2,000 computers and had to update or replace computers any and everywhere they had them, including high security jails, undercover operations, forensics labs, etc.

That was just awesome more than anything, I really like that job.

One part of it that stands out though is I was updating a computer of some jail guard in his office and as part of my procedures for computers that were just being upgraded and not replaced, I'd clear their internet cache, back then by just going into the dir and deleting the files. Well I went into this guys folder and went and highlighted all the files and before I deleted them a few file names caught my eye. I don't recall now specifically what it said but it was kiddie porn pics and sites in his history. I reported it to my boss asking what to do he said "just delete it and doing say anything" so I did. I was 19 then and in hindsight, I feel like I probably should have mad this guy burn, that's just fucked up shit.

Another experience is the forensics lab, it was very high security and I had to be escorted down there since I didn't have clearance to get into some of the areas I needed to. But one time they get me in there and then go "well time for lunch" and head off. I'm in a room that has guns, all sorts of drugs and a freaking pallet of weed in the same room with me! Of course I didn't touch shit but that was kind of crazy.

In the main jail for the county they had the maximum security prisoners on the top floor of the building and they didn't have bars for them, they had thick bullet proof looking glass instead so they couldn't reach through the bars and grab anyone when they walked by. Well every time I'd walk through there some of them would start pounding on the glass as hard as they can making a thunderous sound and yell things at me like "you sure look pretty white boy!!!" and things of that nature trying to get me to look. The guards always just said don't look, don't even acknowledge you hear them.
 
Last edited:

spidey07

No Lifer
Aug 4, 2000
65,469
5
76
Haven't told this one in a while. In a remote office the user complained of the network not allowing her to connect to an oracle database at headquarters. Now the help desk spent countless hours troubleshooting, same with level 3 support for apps, database, network, etc. So it got bubbled up and the answer was to fly me out there to perform a thorough network analysis, take packet captures, the full deal. Because this was obviously some very serious network problem.

Get there, hook up a sniffer and ask her if she's having a problem because I'm seeing good SQL transactions in the traces. No problem.

Then an hour later she comes telling me - "Look, it's doing it again! What is wrong with the network!" I go back and look at the packet traces and see in the application layer "Username/password error"

I go to her machine and turn off the caps lock. Problem solved for probably 2500 bucks in travel expenses and maybe 40 man hours of previous troubleshooting by other departments. I am not making this up. You can't make this up.
 

nick1985

Lifer
Dec 29, 2002
27,153
6
81
Haven't told this one in a while. In a remote office the user complained of the network not allowing her to connect to an oracle database at headquarters. Now the help desk spent countless hours troubleshooting, same with level 3 support for apps, database, network, etc. So it got bubbled up and the answer was to fly me out there to perform a thorough network analysis, take packet captures, the full deal. Because this was obviously some very serious network problem.

Get there, hook up a sniffer and ask her if she's having a problem because I'm seeing good SQL transactions in the traces. No problem.

Then an hour later she comes telling me - "Look, it's doing it again! What is wrong with the network!" I go back and look at the packet traces and see in the application layer "Username/password error"

I go to her machine and turn off the caps lock. Problem solved for probably 2500 bucks in travel expenses and maybe 40 man hours of previous troubleshooting by other departments. I am not making this up. You can't make this up.


holy shit. ROFL!!!
 
Sep 7, 2009
12,960
3
0
My best "IT" stories are actually from way back when I worked at a best buy tech bench.

Everything from cockroaches infested pc's to transvestites throwing laptops. Corporate IT is boring by comparison.
 

Patt

Diamond Member
Jan 30, 2000
5,288
2
81
I recently did an hour long, highly technical demo of some of my company's software, which in essence comprises a suite of web-design programming tools.

I spent about 10 minutes of the demo writing a sample application in front of the clients (this was a web meeting), and adding some customizations to make it pretty whiz-bang. Their most senior technical guy asked if I could highlight certain parts of the web-app conditionally to alert users to issues.

I said of course, and went ahead and told him I'd flag those particular items in red. I went through, and implemented this much to the satisfaction of everyone but that one guy. He started complaining about it looking exactly the same. At first I tried to highlight what I'd done simply by talking, and he kept rudely cutting me off. The rest of his team tried to explain they could see the change, and that he must be mistaken.

At this point he delved into a bit of profanity, enough so that I considered terminating the demo. I launched into another explanation of what I'd done, and there was a long, pregnant pause at the other end. A quiet, contrite voice asked what color I'd flagged the items with? I answered "Red". Another long, quiet pause.

"I'm sorry, I'm colorblind so I couldn't see the change."

Resolved his physical issues by adding a BLINK tag :p
 
Sep 7, 2009
12,960
3
0
I used to work for a place that wrote extremely proprietary software/hardware (building controls stuff). One of our tech support guys was from India.. We had two or three dealers threaten to discontinue their relationship with us because they assumed we moved our TS over there after one support call with him, lol..

Woman at best buy came in to buy battery for cordless phone. I give her the battery, she puts it in the handset and hits talk. Gets all annoyed that it's the wrong battery since she can't hear a dial tone (base is at her house.. doh)

Guy at best buy tries to return a rear projection tv box with an old 70's wood encased tv inside. It took three people to bring it in (which made me immediately suspicious and told a CSR to have a tech inspect before returning). They had duct taped the top to try and keep us from checking it. Get this... the guy blames his wife. "She must have put the wrong tv in the box". And then... he just bails, leaving an old 70's tv in the store that we have no clue what to do with.. It ended up working so the car audio guys got it.

Numerous crazy fraud stories from best buy.. Everything from people putting bricks in boxes and trying to return to just... man. I need to sit down and type up all of the crazy crap that's happened
 

Barfo

Lifer
Jan 4, 2005
27,539
212
106
Customer ordered a webpage for his business. After 3 weeks or so it was done and we asked if he wanted us to host it in our servers, he asks "what for?". Turns out he wanted an initial 1000 copies of the webpage printed on paper to distribute to his clients, no plans to host the page or anything.

/facepalm

Mind you, this was around 1999.
 

spidey07

No Lifer
Aug 4, 2000
65,469
5
76
Customer ordered a webpage for his business. After 3 weeks or so it was done and we asked if he wanted us to host it in our servers, he asks "what for?". Turns out he wanted an initial 1000 copies of the webpage printed on paper to distribute to his clients, no plans to host the page or anything.

/facepalm

Mind you, this was around 1999.

Well he did ask for a webpage not a website.:awe:
 
Oct 27, 2007
17,009
1
0
I recently did an hour long, highly technical demo of some of my company's software, which in essence comprises a suite of web-design programming tools.

I spent about 10 minutes of the demo writing a sample application in front of the clients (this was a web meeting), and adding some customizations to make it pretty whiz-bang. Their most senior technical guy asked if I could highlight certain parts of the web-app conditionally to alert users to issues.

I said of course, and went ahead and told him I'd flag those particular items in red. I went through, and implemented this much to the satisfaction of everyone but that one guy. He started complaining about it looking exactly the same. At first I tried to highlight what I'd done simply by talking, and he kept rudely cutting me off. The rest of his team tried to explain they could see the change, and that he must be mistaken.

At this point he delved into a bit of profanity, enough so that I considered terminating the demo. I launched into another explanation of what I'd done, and there was a long, pregnant pause at the other end. A quiet, contrite voice asked what color I'd flagged the items with? I answered "Red". Another long, quiet pause.

"I'm sorry, I'm colorblind so I couldn't see the change."

Resolved his physical issues by adding a BLINK tag :p
panda-lol.gif
That one is awesome.
 

Fritzo

Lifer
Jan 3, 2001
41,916
2,156
126
holy shit. ROFL!!!

I had an executive secretary threaten to get me fired if I didn't order her a new hard drive---she wouldn't let me ask her any support questions, why she needed it...she just wanted a replacement hard drive for her machine on her desk in the morning or else.

Well, I did what she said, looked up a replacement hard drive for her computer (it was a $600 SCSI drive pair), had it overnighted for $92, had it imaged by the deployment department (which charged our department $150), and dropped it off on her desk by 9am the next day.

We got an angry call the next morning with the secretary screaming "WHAT THE HELL IS THIS????" I explained I ordered what she told me, and went ahead and started threatening my job again. It turns out she was talking about her computer---not her hard drive. She needed her computer replaced.

She went to the president of the company and complained about me, and then my boss played him the recording of her call. She was suspended for two weeks for not following procedures, unauthorized spending, and abuse of her position.

This is my favorite IT story :)
 
Sep 7, 2009
12,960
3
0
Here's a good corp one..

I had been at a new place (net admin) for about 3 months and was in the process of fixing all of the horrible deployments from the previous IT staff. I had a small secondary file server with 4 drives in raid 5. 1 drive failed, I closed network connections and started the rebuild. Jr. Network Admin thinks the server has crashed during the raid 5 rebuild and without asking HARD REBOOTS THE SERVER which destroyed the array. It was all backed up, just one of those wtf were you thinking moments.

I've seen some absolutely crazy setup servers... I'm sure you guys know the type.. Still running server 2000, hosting 15 different applications on that same server with 1gb ram, etc.

Oh another one.. I was doing consulting at the time and someone referred this sleazy company, basically a call center, to me. They had some sort of lotus notes database that relied on excel (don't remember the exact details) but they had to use excel 97... 2000/2003 wouldn't work with whatever they were doing in notes (this was in 05-06).

Long story short, they tried to skate out on paying me ~$4000 or so.... Until I "remembered" that they had the same excel 97 key used on easily 1000 computers. I told the owner that 888 ru legit is an incredibly easy number to dial and had a check within a week.
 

Elbryn

Golden Member
Sep 30, 2000
1,213
0
0
I recently did an hour long, highly technical demo of some of my company's software, which in essence comprises a suite of web-design programming tools.

I spent about 10 minutes of the demo writing a sample application in front of the clients (this was a web meeting), and adding some customizations to make it pretty whiz-bang. Their most senior technical guy asked if I could highlight certain parts of the web-app conditionally to alert users to issues.

I said of course, and went ahead and told him I'd flag those particular items in red. I went through, and implemented this much to the satisfaction of everyone but that one guy. He started complaining about it looking exactly the same. At first I tried to highlight what I'd done simply by talking, and he kept rudely cutting me off. The rest of his team tried to explain they could see the change, and that he must be mistaken.

At this point he delved into a bit of profanity, enough so that I considered terminating the demo. I launched into another explanation of what I'd done, and there was a long, pregnant pause at the other end. A quiet, contrite voice asked what color I'd flagged the items with? I answered "Red". Another long, quiet pause.

"I'm sorry, I'm colorblind so I couldn't see the change."

Resolved his physical issues by adding a BLINK tag :p

that's good. dont think i can really blame the guy though, other than missing your first explanation with the red color. think about it, your staring at a screen that you see no difference and there's a vendor who's standing there telling you he made a difference and insisting that you are wrong. haha awesome.
 

vshah

Lifer
Sep 20, 2003
19,003
24
81
I had an executive secretary threaten to get me fired if I didn't order her a new hard drive---she wouldn't let me ask her any support questions, why she needed it...she just wanted a replacement hard drive for her machine on her desk in the morning or else.

Well, I did what she said, looked up a replacement hard drive for her computer (it was a $600 SCSI drive pair), had it overnighted for $92, had it imaged by the deployment department (which charged our department $150), and dropped it off on her desk by 9am the next day.

We got an angry call the next morning with the secretary screaming "WHAT THE HELL IS THIS????" I explained I ordered what she told me, and went ahead and started threatening my job again. It turns out she was talking about her computer---not her hard drive. She needed her computer replaced.

She went to the president of the company and complained about me, and then my boss played him the recording of her call. She was suspended for two weeks for not following procedures, unauthorized spending, and abuse of her position.

This is my favorite IT story :)

ahh..gotta love it when the stupid users get their due
 
Sep 7, 2009
12,960
3
0
High up secretaries (Director/Exec) are always a pita. I've found it's important to make it clear that they cannot boss IT around like that..

Here's the thing, yeah she's suspended for two weeks.. But the damage will be her nasty whispers about IT to the VP's.

I had an executive secretary threaten to get me fired if I didn't order her a new hard drive---she wouldn't let me ask her any support questions, why she needed it...she just wanted a replacement hard drive for her machine on her desk in the morning or else.

Well, I did what she said, looked up a replacement hard drive for her computer (it was a $600 SCSI drive pair), had it overnighted for $92, had it imaged by the deployment department (which charged our department $150), and dropped it off on her desk by 9am the next day.

We got an angry call the next morning with the secretary screaming "WHAT THE HELL IS THIS????" I explained I ordered what she told me, and went ahead and started threatening my job again. It turns out she was talking about her computer---not her hard drive. She needed her computer replaced.

She went to the president of the company and complained about me, and then my boss played him the recording of her call. She was suspended for two weeks for not following procedures, unauthorized spending, and abuse of her position.

This is my favorite IT story :)
 

Patt

Diamond Member
Jan 30, 2000
5,288
2
81
that's good. dont think i can really blame the guy though, other than missing your first explanation with the red color. think about it, your staring at a screen that you see no difference and there's a vendor who's standing there telling you he made a difference and insisting that you are wrong. haha awesome.

The funny thing is though, that his team was also trying to tell him he was wrong, and he wouldn't take it to the point of almost exploding. I'm sure his face was purple from rage, and then bright red (not that he'd know) from embarrassment.
 

child of wonder

Diamond Member
Aug 31, 2006
8,307
176
106
Here's a good one. I'm a VMware Certified Professional with over 3 years experience managing VMware. At my current job I get to support bank applications all day long while people with 1 year experience work on VMware. It's awesome.
 

Saga

Banned
Feb 18, 2005
2,718
1
0
Long story short, they tried to skate out on paying me ~$4000 or so.... Until I "remembered" that they had the same excel 97 key used on easily 1000 computers. I told the owner that 888 ru legit is an incredibly easy number to dial and had a check within a week.

Easily missed an opportunity to quadrouple that consulting check. Microsoft license audits can run even small companies $500,000-1mil in legal fees alone and are usually avoided like the PLAGUE.

I've known many guys who've been fired for incurring the wrath of Microsoft's Licensing team.
 

waggy

No Lifer
Dec 14, 2000
68,143
10
81
best is from my last job (one of the reasons i retired).

there was a the VP of it (had a hot personal assistant (very hot))
head of IT
me
peons
well anyway the head of IT was a old bitchy women. she would yell at everyone about everything. people were afraid of calling the department with any complaints because she would go off on them. i have seen people walk out of the office in tears.

Finally one day she got fired. escorted out of the building by security.

i get called into the VPs office. i get to do her job and mine until they pick someone. OK great over the months i take over and am lead to believe i would get the job.

So finally about 6 months latter i get called back in. the VP is there adn his PA. Guess who gets the job? if you said his PA you got it!

this lady had NO real IT experience, her College degree had NOTHING to do with computers at all.

she leaves the office and the VP ask me to keep an eye on her. I got a good pay raise out of it so i figured WTF why not.

well she wanted to make a splash. so she decided that the budget for the IT department was to high and she wanted to cut it. So found out we were doing a daily, weekly and monthly backup and it was costing a lot. So she decided it would be a good idea to cancel the daily and weekly backups. i tried my best to talk her out of it. but all i got was threatened with her firring me (wich wouldn't happen)

so i figured fuck it. I'm not sticking around to get the blame or have to clean up the mess that was sure to happen.

about 6 months latter i got a email that they had a crash and 2 weeks worth of data. not soon after that i got a call asking me to come back and take over the job heh.
 

Red Squirrel

No Lifer
May 24, 2003
68,941
12,854
126
www.anyf.ca
Today actually, well it kinda cascated from quite an old ticket.

This user puts in a ticket something like "please give me access to the G drive in [app name]" where app name is a specialized app a whole other dept takes care of.

I'm like "WTF?" The whole request just makes zero sense. I figured she might of meant "the [app name] folder on the G drive" so I email her to find out wtf she needs because it's really not clear.

She starts explaining this whole report thing in [app name] so I send the ticket over to that group as it it's an issue with the app.

Today I get the ticket back saying the user wants me to copy her permissions to another user. WTF?! Why didn't you say so in first place! i really don't understand why people make things 10x more complicated then it has to be... if you want something just ask for it as it is!


Another similar example, I get this ticket with a 40 page technical document about setting up a cluster environment and a SFTP and the whole shebang. Firewall rules, ACLs, graphs... I gave up reading after page 3 realizing they did not even go through the proper RFC process so I bounce the ticket back.

Next day I get the ticket back, and all they wanted is to know what our external IP is. WTF? Just ask us then. No need for a huge technical ticket. Worse thing is, the user requesting this has no clue what an Ip is, or what this is for. So why do you even need something you don't even know what it is? I really don't understand users. They can be so weird.
 

Red Squirrel

No Lifer
May 24, 2003
68,941
12,854
126
www.anyf.ca
I had an executive secretary threaten to get me fired if I didn't order her a new hard drive---she wouldn't let me ask her any support questions, why she needed it...she just wanted a replacement hard drive for her machine on her desk in the morning or else.

Well, I did what she said, looked up a replacement hard drive for her computer (it was a $600 SCSI drive pair), had it overnighted for $92, had it imaged by the deployment department (which charged our department $150), and dropped it off on her desk by 9am the next day.

We got an angry call the next morning with the secretary screaming "WHAT THE HELL IS THIS????" I explained I ordered what she told me, and went ahead and started threatening my job again. It turns out she was talking about her computer---not her hard drive. She needed her computer replaced.

She went to the president of the company and complained about me, and then my boss played him the recording of her call. She was suspended for two weeks for not following procedures, unauthorized spending, and abuse of her position.

This is my favorite IT story :)

Ha! nice. I can't stand users like that. Always nice to see them get nailed.
 

Red Squirrel

No Lifer
May 24, 2003
68,941
12,854
126
www.anyf.ca
Just thought of another one. When I worked at the help desk, we took pretty much all phone/internet calls for north eastern Ontario, as well as internal, and also managed services. So I could go on and on about crazy stuff as it pops into my head.

This particular call was from an internal user who was at another branch office. He wanted to have access to the intranet portion of the bigger company that owns us. I tell him we have zero control over that and he'd have to call their help desk. He starts freaking out about how he makes more then 3x what I make, has a new management position, and that he's too important to be doing that, and that he just wants it done and that's it that's all. He hangs up. I talk to my boss about it, and he tells me to just go ahead and submit the request under his behalf and if nothing happens from it then leave it. He also mentioned how he'd probably get a call from security asking why I'm trying to gain access as another user but that he'd take care of it.

A few months go by and I heard nothing, and that ticket seemed to always stare at me with doom. I just wanted it out of my queue, but there was nothing I could do. So later on the company lays off 500 employees, including him. Ha, not so important eh! In fact, nobody in the company had even heard of him or knew what he did. He worked in the basement of that branch office. I wonder if he looked like this:

10221_office_space_stapler_with_milton1.jpg
 

ElFenix

Elite Member
Super Moderator
Mar 20, 2000
102,371
8,497
126
i like when my boss can't get his email from his crappy provider that i've tried to move him from and runs to me asking what is wrong with our file server. i had to draw him a picture of the network showing him that the file server is something that a) has nothing to do with his email and b) is something that he has never used anyway.

the other day he asked me how to empty his recycle bin



We got an angry call the next morning with the secretary screaming "WHAT THE HELL IS THIS????" I explained I ordered what she told me, and went ahead and started threatening my job again. It turns out she was talking about her computer---not her hard drive. She needed her computer replaced.
i worked dell sales in the peripherals department and i'd get 3 or 4 calls a day transfered from the computer sales department asking for a hard drive or a tower (sometimes a modem). of course 99/100 of those were people actually wanting a computer.
 
Last edited:

James Bond

Diamond Member
Jan 21, 2005
6,023
0
0
I had an executive secretary threaten to get me fired if I didn't order her a new hard drive---she wouldn't let me ask her any support questions, why she needed it...she just wanted a replacement hard drive for her machine on her desk in the morning or else.

Well, I did what she said, looked up a replacement hard drive for her computer (it was a $600 SCSI drive pair), had it overnighted for $92, had it imaged by the deployment department (which charged our department $150), and dropped it off on her desk by 9am the next day.

We got an angry call the next morning with the secretary screaming "WHAT THE HELL IS THIS????" I explained I ordered what she told me, and went ahead and started threatening my job again. It turns out she was talking about her computer---not her hard drive. She needed her computer replaced.

She went to the president of the company and complained about me, and then my boss played him the recording of her call. She was suspended for two weeks for not following procedures, unauthorized spending, and abuse of her position.

This is my favorite IT story :)

OMG... sweet victory. I wish they could all end like this.