New all time stupidest personal tech support call.

[Faustus]

This is on the level of the cup holder and pedal myths, but really happned.

I just got off the phone with an old guy who didn't realize if you keep tying in a word processor that it will goto another page, he has a 48 "page" document he has created the consist of 48 documents each containing one page. Basicly he angry that there isn't an easy way to print it....

Moral? Not even the imac your kids got you can save you from your own stupidity.

[tgpo]

So he had 48 seperate files, each only 1 page?

Last night on Fox they had a funny wedding videos show, this women got the microphone while they were passing it around and tried to use it on her salad, she thought it was a pepper shaker.

[indolikaa]

Here's one from the IT department archives. It's not a personal tech support call in the normal sense. But it's jaw-dropping nonetheless.

The moral of this story? Not all engineers passed Networking 101.

I used to hand out an award at work each month called Indolikaa's What The ****? Award. It was generally reserved for people who said or did things so incredibly dumbfounding, you were left with your mouth wide open and completely stupified. This guy got the WTF of the Year Award.

The CPO and CIO call me into the Dugeon one morning with very serious expressions on their faces. The Dungeon is the basement facility where our server farms and our patch panel jungle coexist.

One of my premier 'hackers' is laughing uncontrollably. Our CIO explains that about an hour ago, our technicians detected a sudden surge in traffic in one of our T1 lines. Our network is large enough that we practice bandwidth allocation from within, and this was not a high-bandwidth time of the morning.

Naturally, he investigated the connection. As you might expect, if you've been in IT for any length of time, we had an employee watching porn videos in realtime across our network. Shemale porn. Which, if you've never seen such frivolity before tends to grab your attention and hold it. My attention was not on the video feed in question, but on the DVD burner that was churning away on his console. Hackers can be such hypocrites!

Now keep something in mind. This internal network has about as much copper as it does fiber. I'd been told our copper wire ran into the hundreds of thousands of feet and our optical fiber wasn't too far behind. Massive firewalls control intranet traffic as well as Internet traffic. And you're in a facility with an average of 1 PhD for every four employees.

Leaving our hacker-type to 'collect' the evidence of the crime (and probably handle the necessary editing for redistribution as well), we all march upstairs and bring the porn-surfer into my office. Immediate termination was the obvious reason for the meeting, but I had to ask just a few questions. After all, it's not everday you get to fire someone with a PhD from Harvard.

Indolikaa: The reason we've brought you here this morning is to formally notify you of your immediate termination.

'John': What?! On what grounds?!

Indolikaa: Well there's two reasons, John. First, you were accessing the network from a location other than your own desk, and you know full well that is not allowed in a DOD-rated facility. That is a violation of our security arrangements and you have likely invited an investigation by your actions...

'John': You can't prove anything.

Indolikaa. Do not interrupt me again. And given the fact that you could be facing federal charges for your poor decisions, I'd lay off the smug 'I know more than you do' look. The second reason you are being terminated is for accessing pornography over the network.

'John': You can't prove that, either.

Indolikaa: And why is that, genius?

'John': (With all the pride of a father holding his newborn child) Becauase I unplugged the phone before I started using that computer.

Uh...

I fired three people that day. John, and the idiot who left their terminal unsecured. And I mean completely unsecured. Security key sitting in it's card reader slot, NIC actively connected to the network, the whole nine yards.

The third person? Obviously. The Firewall Administrator.

.indolikaa.
Your PhD Amuses Me

[RabidDog]

You didnt fire "john" but you were at the meeting.

[housepig]

indolikka -

nice one!

reminds me of a friend of mine - we were covering night shifts at a law firm, from 11 pm to 7 am. they had just upgraded all their machines, so they had nice, speedy new boxes, and at that time of night they had a fat T1 with noone else on it.

when I was there, I occupied my time with clean surfing - music sites, movie reviews, etc.

my buddy does a stint there, and next time I see him, he has a huge grin on his face.

"wow, it was great - I was surfing Hustler's web site, and all these other streaming pron sites"

alarmed at his stupidity, I asked him how he was going to avoid getting canned for surfing pron on company time, on a client's system. He was all stoked:

"oh, it's okay - they won't find out. I cleared the Internet Explorer History and the Temporary Internet Files!"

I asked him if he had granted himself magical Network Admin status and cleared out the logs that were no doubt on the servers. all the blood dropped out of his face...

"log files? they keep logs??"

they didn't catch him, but I believe he learned a valuable lesson...

[tgpo]

lol.

[indolikaa]

You didnt fire "john" but you were at the meeting.

Oh no, I fired his ass on the spot. And two others; the person who left their terminal unsecured and the person whose only job was to ensure such websites were not visited in the first place.

Ah, porn on a lawfirm network. What a conundrum!

[tgpo]

I fired his ass on the spot.

Hmm...i bet the same thiings was happening in those videos he was watching too.

[rallynavvie]

I worked for a HMO a couple years ago. I was in charge of making sure doctors in a call center were minding their queues (phone lines) and also to oversee what they were doing on their computers. It was interesting to have total domination over about 100 computers in the office, but I can certainly see how it sometimes slips away from you. There must have been some other reason you fired the guy who was supposed to be watching internet usage. I had to let my guard down when I went on a break and there wasn't anyone to replace me.

Unfortunately my current position is more of retail setting as opposed to the IT setting it's made out to be so I don't get any cool stories like that. I only get cool stories from the retail floor. Just yesterday we had a lady trying to use a color copier (one of our nicer units) and instead of placing her originals on the glass she was holding them up at the copier (as in it looked like she was shielding herself from the copier with them). When she asked why she only got a blank sheet when she hit start... well... she kinda thought the copier looked so "high tech" that it would copy her pages right from where she held them in her hands... hmm... I just crawled back into the network room to laugh it off.

[tgpo]

Man. There really are some dumb people.

[indolikaa]

indolikaa wrote:
I fired his ass on the spot.


Hmm...i bet the same thiings was happening in those videos he was watching too.

Bad tgpo! Bad!

There must have been some other reason you fired the guy who was supposed to be watching internet usage.

No, that is why he was fired. When someone gets paid $55,000 per year to do one job, and only one job (administer a firewall), I damned well expect that someone to administer a firewall. This wasn't an issue of not watching Internet usage, this was an issue of being too lazy to properly program the equipment.

I know I can be a diffucult person to work for, but Good Lord!

.indolikaa.
Tits & A-Bombs

[SteveDVD]

haha sweet stories... there was a link to a funny story one time, the link has excaped my memory but it went thing like this -

This old lady kept hearing hisses in her computer and then a few days later the PSU started smoking and her computer wouldn't run anymore. She called tech support and they came and opened up the computer, they didn't find anything wrong, but then they opened up the PSU and what did they find? A dead snake wrapped around all the power components 8)

[indolikaa]

A dead snake wrapped around all the power components

Sweet!

[acd-75]

Forgive my stupid question but where are the logs kept that would show what websites have been visited besides clearing temp internet files?

At home I got XP and clear it anyway, what would I do to delete all sites ive been to?

I do online banking from work and I have been known to also visit an oline dating/chat site!!

Andy

[indolikaa]

@ acd-75,

Download AbsoluteShield's Internet Eraser Pro from cnet.com. It's a trial version that works for 15 days. Look at all the options you have and you'll understand why the Temp files are just a drop in the bucket.

.indolikaa.

[acd-75]

Thanks for that mate!

Andy ;o)

[redwudz]

I have a buddy that works in tech support. He got a call from a lady a couple of weeks ago. She had a problem with a new DVD player that her husband just bought. He had told it was a great unit, would 'play anything you could throw at it'. She had a floppy with some pictures she wanted to see, so she stuck it in the player tray and hit play. She said it was making these scratching and grinding noises so she panicked and unplugged it. My buddy told her to plug it back in and hit eject. She got the floppy out and he told her to try a DVD and if it works she wouldn't have to tell her husband what she had done.

[pizdets]

this was a long time ago, but i was providing suport for ISP. For the first time customer we had a promo first month free but you still had to enter in a CC number. well this old lady called in asking when we are going to give her the credit card back well she said that computer asked her for the credit card she opend the CD drive and placed the credit card in. . we told her to hit Eject but that did not work for her so we advised the caller to take the computer back to the store for service..
some people take it a step further by calling in and asking that the PromoCd they got in the mail for ISP service does not work, further probing for more info turns out that the caller placed the promoCD in the CD-player amd hit play.. " oh i need a computer "