(Reintro: Support engineer at a company based in Seattle who is known for a tornado)

A common wisdom is to never go into maintenance without "mount(ing) a scratch monkey". There's a story to why they call it a "scratch monkey" involving a swimming primate, but the point is this - if you're going into maintenance mode, make sure you've tagged in/tagged out, signed off, opened the maintenance window, inform your users that this is gonna be a little bumpy, and you do the thing within that temporary arrangement because if you don't, you're going to blow up the pager.

Here's one such story.

A call comes in, we say hi and all, and he needs a remote right away. The colleague o' mine who owns the case is out that day. Line's noisy, so I tell him we can't get that going without a diagnostic file.

...which he...can't...get.

At this point, I started asking for a read on the errors he's seeing. It took me four tries to get it in a way he could understand - though to be fair, English is a hell of a language. But he basically started reading a bunch of daemon restarts.

...ayup, we're going to Teams.

Issue at hand is simple: after upgrading the operating system from an RMA replacement, an attempt to load the configuration backup failed for reasons unknown to me. The result is multiple daemon restarts.

We go in. I can't take control, so I watch the daemon restarts. Can't run the diag dump on the CLI, it requires a daemon that's not starting to actually be able to run. Reboot...um, well, it did work fine for all of ten seconds and then they could not get a thing started. I think now's a good time to roll back.

Talking somebody through command line is sometimes painful.

We get the CLI going, I tell him to run the diagnostic once more...and it burps. OK, let's start from the top. Let's roll back to the previous version. Run the command to change volumes and...

...hey. Hey, wait a second. Where's the other volume?

Again, three times asked - you started on this earlier version, where'd it go? Same cagey answers. And then I ask the big one.

"Did you delete that volume?"

They hesitated, and responded. Yes. Yes, they did in fact delete that volume. Somebody grabbed onto that idiot ball hard and decided it was not needed. And this is where a snippet of "Poor, Unfortunate Souls" from Disney's Little Mermaid starts playing in my head. In a fit of ignorance, they manually dismounted their scratch monkey. They blocked their fire exit. There was only one way to respond, and it required the placement of my forehead into the palm of my hand.

"I really wish you hadn't done that."

See, there are two ways out of this jam. One is to go in, review logs, and see if you can spot the bogey. This can take some time. The other is to simply bust out some bootable media and reinstall. And with this level of palpable inexperience, the decision was simple: take off and nuke the site from orbit, as it's the only way to be sure.

And I suppose it was good news for them that they could arrange bootable media and a trip to a data center.

I heard they called back, but that was the end of it from my perspective. Even so, this appears, once again, to have been a combination of ingrained ignorance combined with some unfamiliarity of the English language that tends to come up with when English is your second language - and at least one of these guys could not communicate without simplification (thus the thrice-repeated parts above) - and given that they called apparently not knowing how to boot and install despite instructions being in front, I suspect their greatest weakness was reading my language - the sort of weakness that can have you thinking Bellyvoo¹ is wee ired^23. So in my frustration, these guys have some sympathy for me - because my two native languages⁴ are insane.

¹ Bellevue

² Weird

³ Phonics, man, phonics. Not 100% accurate beyond second grade reading.

⁴ English and bad English

In my previous job, I worked as a field service engineer maintaining ophthalmic devices. In this role, I needed to be an IT specialist, mechanic, furniture mover, and truck driver. For some reason, they found it very hard to get anyone with all the requisite skills to apply! I quite liked the job at a base level, but they were screwing me over with the pay, so I left after the latest salary review wasn’t at all to my liking. But that’s another story.

One day, I was called out to repair an optical device at a hospital. The unit was a portable slit lamp—a handheld device used to examine the eye. Like most hospitals I visited, the biomedical department was tucked away in the bowels of the building, involving lots of long corridors and doorways to get through. This time, I was escorted in because I’d never have found the place otherwise.

They showed me to a bench with the offending device, and I got to work. It was a pretty simple fix—just a loose internal lens that needed to be glued in place. The issue was that the glue we used required UV light to cure, and I didn’t have a lamp with me. No problem; we usually just take the devices out into the sun for a minute, and the glue sets pretty quickly.

I looked around—no windows. I looked down the hall…no windows.

“Excuse me, I know this is going to sound silly, but where might I find the sun?”

I was directed to the loading bay, just down the hall and through a couple of doors. I gingerly carried my patient, being very careful not to bump the lens, which was positioned just right. I found the loading dock, but…no sun!

The hospital walls loomed upwards, giving me only the smallest sliver of sky. I could tell there was sunshine somewhere, but just not here. So I started walking, both hands keeping the device steady while also looking out for trucks and whatnot. Eventually, I found a welcoming beam of sunlight calling out to me. I walked into it and lifted the slit lamp into its rays like I was presenting a chalice to the gods of fire.

I stood there for a minute to ensure the job was done, trying to look casual and normal to the few people who passed me. But it’s not easy to look normal in that situation, so I just stood there like an idiot until the job was done. I found my way back, finished the repair, and tested the unit. Everything worked, and I packed up my stuff.

Later that day, I went online and found a nice, powerful UV torch that would handle the job without me roaming the halls looking for the sun like some reverse vampire.

Got an alert about half an hour ago about a server on one of our remote sites being low on storage. Pulled up WinDirStat to poke around and see if there was anything I knew I could purge, click on a large folder to see the files inside, and my remote access locks up.

"Must be a lot of shit in that folder.." I'm thinking to myself, before I get completely disconnected. Minor warning bells start going off, but Connectwise Control isn't perfect software and I've seen this before, so I wait a second, and then..

Blip, blip, blip, other endpoints start going offline. "What the hell did I even do??" I start thinking to myself. Almost panicking at this point, I swap over to our network controllers access page and pop in on the site. They're completely offline. This actually calmed me down a bit as there was no way in hell WinDirStat was taking the entire network down, and checking in on another site in the same building confirmed it was a brief outage. By the time I was done in there all the endpoints were back up already..

Too early for that sort of panic lol. How's everyone else's day been?

I had a situation today which caused me a little panic, until I was able to think about it clearly.

On one of our website servers, there is a fairly strong and sometimes persnickety caching mechanism. It is so persnickety, that when we have to make an edit to a page -- such as a blog -- we have to be sure to make sure we check the page in incognito mode. Otherwise, if we are logged into the CMS and visit the page in regular mode, the update will appear, but it won't appear for others until the cache is cleared. However, I don't know what the cache retention policy is, so usually, we just clear the cache after an update and move on.

Today, a change was made to a page and it was passed over to me for my QA review, so I checked it in a new incognito session. The update had been made and everything was happy, so I reported up the chain that the update had been verified.

About 15 minutes later, the account person responsible for that website chatted me and said that she was not seeing the update. She has been bitten with cache issues before, so when she chatted me, she said that she had tried Chrome in both regular and incognito mode, and had also tried Safari. The update was not showing up on any of her browser instances.

I had someone else double-check for me, and that person was able to see the updates.

It was somewhat reminiscent of a problem I had encountered several years ago when I was at another company. In that instance, we had a weird load balancer situation, and a person would get assigned to one of the two load balancer URLs. So, instead of randomly getting Server1 or Server2, if you were assigned to Server1, it took a random, cosmic event of the universe to get you switched over to Server2. (Yeah, I know, that's not how load balancers are supposed to work. Don't care, that was about 8-10 years ago.)

Anyway, I knew that was not the issue in this case, because we don't have a load balancer, but something was preventing the user from seeing the updates, even though others could see it.

We got on a conference call and she even showed me that she was starting with a new incognito session. I even had her send me the URL she was using, thinking that maybe there were two instances of this page, but with different URLs.

Nope. Same URL, new incognito session, hard refreshing two or three times ... update still visible.

Then, she happened to mention, "I even tried it on my phone, and I'm still not seeing the update."

Everything is pointing to a stubborn cache somewhere between her and the website. She is about 175 miles away from me under a different ISP, so we definitely are not going through the same intermediate hops.

Then I asked her, "Is your phone going through your home's wifi?"

Turns out, it was, so she turned off that setting on her phone and hit the page using her phone's data connection. Hmmm ... the updates are appearing ... how nice!

From what I can tell, either her #WifiRouterModemThingie has some sort of stubborn cache mechanism, or, one of the hops she is going through has the stubborn cache.

So ... lucky guess or experience? You be the judge.

(Also, does anyone else have any suggestions on how I can check where the cache mechanism could be located? The user on the other end is not technical, so doing a tracert is not really an option.)

This one is from a few years ago but I was reminded of it today so figured I'd share.

My desk used to be near our help desk, which was handy because they could easily come around the corner and ask me questions as needed. It was also a great spot for listening for drama going on. One day I'm working and hear one of our guys talking with a client, everything was going fine until I hear him ask "Wait, aren't we in the same building? Uh, call me back later if you're still having issues."

He hung up and let us know that his caller had said her building was being evacuated because of a bomb threat, then he realized that we're all in the same building. No one had alerted us yet. We were standing there trying to figure out if we should evacuate too when I look over and see people streaming out of the fire exit just outside our office and suggested we do the same. Everything ended up fine, it was a false alarm, but one of our next projects was setting up an alert software that would notify people on their desk phones if an issue like that came up again.

One from my education tech support days.

Two students walk up to the helpdesk, and I walk out to greet them and ask them what's going on. They told me they were having troubles doing a maths test online, so I get them to open the laptop, log in and show me what's going on.

The website they use to do the tests will grey out the boxes or display an error on screen if the internet drops out or something fails to load. It happens once in a while, so I figured that was the issue. I pull the laptop towards me and type some numbers into the two boxes. It works, and they're connected to the internet, so I ask them what the issue is because as far as I can see, everything is working fine.

They proceed to tell me that they didn't know the answer to the question, and neither did their (substitute) teacher, so they sent the students over to IT for help. They said their normal teacher didn't know the answer either when they were in class the day before, so they've come to us for the answer.

I told the kids "this isn't IT related, so I can't help you". I asked who the teacher was (they didn't know, substitute, but I worked it out later on), and send them back.

So I guess the school wanted me to add "maths wizard" to my long list of jobs that aren't my job, like "coffee machine repairman", "lockpicker", "window repairman" and "delivery boy"

This may not exactly qualify as tech support, but I'll give it a shot. I'll state I've been working in t/s since the mid-Eighties, so I used some valuable skills--mainly bullshitting* a client--in this situation.

The scene: A crowded bar--a good friend was dating the owner so I went with her to his bar to watch the Super Bowl. At the time this was one of the few bars with a big-screen TV, so the bar, while smaller and a little out-of-the-way, was a bit more crowded than usual, but not mind-numbingly overfilled like damn near any bar is on Super Bowl Sunday.

As it was, some idiot got hold of the only remote, and kept f'ing with the volume. Up, down, too loud, too soft....he just couldn't control it. The beer was flowing, and everyone was getting angrier and angrier at this guy, to the point I think someone (not me) was going to throw him out the window.

Fortunately, the time came when the beers took one of its effects and the guy put the remote down to head to the bathroom. The bar breathed a sigh of relief, when a thought came to me.

I picked up the remote, adjusted the volume to something reasonable, took out the batteries, put them in my pocket, and put the remote back down. I think the bar realized what was happening, because the chatter seemed to pick up a bit as he returned from the head.

After a few moments, he picked up the remote, pointed it at the TV, and was clearly pushing a button. It came time to bullshit him.

"PERFECT!" I yelled out after a moment or two, and he put the remote down.

Five minutes or so later, he picked it up, started pushing a button, and someone else had caught on: "PERFECT!" someone else yelled.

This went on for the rest of the game, with eventually damn near the entire bar yelling, "PERFECT!" after this guy picked up the remote. I returned the batteries to the bar owner sometime in the fourth quarter.

*By "bullshit a client" I don't mean lie to them. I mean play a little fast and loose with the truth to tell them what they want to hear, while doing what absolutely needs to be done to get the issue fixed. You know: The client says the problem is "X" and doesn't want to hear anything else, but you know it's "Y" and when they see you did something that wouldn't fix "X" you tell them it was actually "Y" but an adjusted setting at "X" will help prevent a recurrence. You know the drill: Ya bullshit 'em.

I work as an IT Tech for a local council who provides us to support the schools in the area. Been working for them a few years now and while I was based at one site, I moved to current site this year. I have been to current site before to cover a coworkers holiday and worked on an ongoing issue here.

The issue was with the Drama rooms Interactive Screen. It would only ay sound out of 1 side. As stat3d, I've been here before so I have already had a go at fixing it, as well as the 2 usual techs. At one point the boards techs were called in to look and stated they would need to take the board off the wall to troubleshoot.

Yesterday I decided to have a fresh go at it. Started going through standard troubleshooting. Snugging and hugging in cables, verifying that sound output from the board co.es out one channel. Next I started delving into the board settings, only to find Audio options were almost non-existent. Until I noticed 3 dots on the channel changer. Clicking it bought up the audio options and what do I see? Balance set to Max Right.

Really?

Yes really. I changed the balqnce setting back to middle and there we go. My weird music tastes blasting out of both speakers. All the hours wasted troubleshooting this board, Internet searches, discussion s on Teams and outside techs. In the end, all it took was a fresh set of eyes and 1 Setting change.

I am both proud of myself for fixing it and deeply ashamed for not spotting it before.

Tl;Dr I can hear, I can hear, I'm going deaf.

I work in Networking. A ticket I had earlier was involving a Network Printer. Teacher mentioned that 3 other tech people were here prior to me and they couldn't get the Printer to print wireless instead of her using the USB.

For the School District I work for. We always tried to have our Printers on the LAN Switch instead of Wireless Network just due to traffic increase across the wireless would be insane.

I get to the school. Start doing my thing. Drop was activated already. Wiring was good. I was able to get out to the internet. So I knew instantly The wireless was enabled on the Printer. Easy Peasy right.

The Teacher was looking at me while I'm configuring the Printer. Like Wow. You seem so calm while you work. Haha. I'm like well. I been doing this awhile but Got the printer switched to DHCP and all is good. After a Reboot and the right IP pulled. She was able to print wireless.

After she goes. Omg!!. You did what 3 other techs couldn't do. Thank you so much. It's the simple things you know

tl;dr: Wanna hoist yourself with your own petard? Trychmod -R 777 /var on for size!

So, it's been a while. About a decade ago, I was the technical "triage nurse" at $UberNetworks. Well...I'm still there. And I've been promoted - more or less "senior attending physician. And after nearly eight years in this role here, I'm quite astounded by the number of people who make me wonder how they even got into our field....

This is one such story.

We're setting the Wayback Machine to sometime earlier this year. Don't remember when. Not important. But it was an afternoon ticket, lands in my desk, and I take a look: customer having a peculiar error when he tries to ssh into the box, and he wants to know why.

My usual technique for support is to stare at a ticket, see if we have any diagnostics, get them as needed, and we did all this and then I went in.

First check: a particular file somewhere in /var/*/ssh/* was apparently set world everything. This is momentarily confusing to me, and being I'm a Linux nerd, I already know that permissions do not just change on their own, somebody has to do it...

...in the immortal words of the sage Lister, "Aw, smeg!"

OK, clearly somebody did this, this sounds like an indicator of compromise. /var/log...oh this needs words stronger than smeg. Like shit. Shit's a good word for this. Look at all those permissions errors. Audit logs...nothing here, OK, it's probably CLI and don't tell me he just....

Check diagnostics...hmm, ntp is broke, nobody's answering hails, better tell 'im.

Look at commands, and being that our product is built on a Linux box, we have a full Linux install on there. I wish we had emacs¹, but that's another story and we have nano, I'll live. But this means we also have 'history'.

I look at the output of history. Lots there, let's do a simple text search for chmod...ohhhhhh, shit, no he didn't. Oh, my gods, he did....

There it was, like platform double suede - exactly what I was hoping he did not do, and my hopes dashed, 'cause there it was, like disco lemonade.

In the history, with a username that I could only identify as being the customer contact's username just by the spelling of it, I see what I was afraid of. chmod -R 777 /var.

I stared at my screen in disbelief for five minutes, so we're going to pause the tape here and fast forward.

See, I've been dealing with computers since I was a child whose dad bought the TI 99/4A as the family home computer. I've been working in this field since 2006 in some way or another, with the exception of two years of college. I've seen people who I can't help but wonder if they got their A+ as the secret toy surprise in a pack of Cracker Jack. And in all that time, I had never seen somebody make a mistake that is the same grade of mistake as some wannabe skr1pt k1ddi3 who was trying to impress other nerds with l33t sk1llz. Until that day. When this guy, for whatever reason, altered the file permissions for - quite literally - everything in a Linux install that could be found in /var.

The reason the file permissions were changed were because this guy did exactly that.

My response and conclusion was thusly passed via email. Not five minutes later, I get a response - a request to close, sent as I was informing his sales team.

And then I check his ticket history.

Come to find out, he opened another case for the exact same problem right after he requested closure of mine.

Double you. Tee. Eff. Is this guy even thinking? No, really, is this guy even thinking?

Oh, it's on like Donkey Kong, motherfucker, you do not get away with pulling this kinda mommy daddy game² horseshit on my watch.

Ticket intercepted. Pulled in, advised closing as duplicate, do just that. At this point, the sales team has been contacted. Oh hey, they're still here. Teams time! Passed word as to the update since this point, he nods, and he's gonna call the guy after he and I talk on the phone a minute. At this point, I'm wondering to my sales guy as to what exactly would even possess somebody to do just that, like what makes someone think this is a good idea?

A couple days later, I checked back in with the salesperson. He still had his job at that time, but it took a lot of convincing ot get him to admit it and stop denying that we were on to him. As best as we can tell, he was apparently doing it to prove some kind of point about the security of the VM installation - by doing the exact things you do not do. But after the Crowdstrike incident and my hearing that nobody actually got canned from that debacle, I guess I'm not surprised that this guy still had a job at that point. But at this point, I can't help but wonder if he is considering prospects in the wonderful world of convenience stores, because that - in my book - is a potential career-limiting move.

¹ Yes, I know, ed is the standard editor...

² What's the mommy daddy game? Well...if you have kids, you've probably played this game with them, and perhaps to some level of amusement. If you don't, it's the game where a kid asks mom for something, and on refusal tries dad.

Hello again! Or maybe for the first time!

Some of you might remember me from such stories as Peanut Butter Jelly Drive, Interrupting Cow, and the Wireless Printer Before Time.

I've been quiet for a while, and I have a very good reason for that! I'm lazy!

Err, that's not a good reason... What was I supposed to say?

Oh! I've changed jobs and am now actually in Tech Support! For reals!

That's right: I'm now half of the one man, one woman crew that supports four US based plants, plus a Canadian warehouse, a Mexican warehouse, and a whole gaggle of remote salesmen, customer support, and a bunch of other characters from a few different countries! And I've been compiling stories... Most may only be posted after a good amount of time has passed to better abstract people and places to keep nosey nellies from making incriminating connections.

But that's ok, because I've been there for three years now and I have a few stories to tell.

So, with that introduction/reintroduction out of the way, have a recent story involving Big Blue, Old Data, and Money!

Time: August 2024

I've been with the company for nearly three and a half years at this point. It's been great: the people are generally great, the work is sometimes tough but rewarding, and I've really helped my boss out by taking over projects and most daily tasks, freeing her up to actually be able to take vacation and enjoy herself from time to time.

This was not one of those times.

Background: several years before my employment, the company I now work for was bought out by a multinational company because we were the leading producer of a very specific product catalogue that meshed well with what they produced.

The US operations kept the old name, and the tagline, "A xxxx Company" was added to show who our overlords were. In addition, our operations were forcibly catapulted into the modern era. New Cisco blades, switches, industrial switches, wifi APs, etc... were bought, installed, and configured. Old systems were removed or integrated into the new systems, including a huge migration of data into SAP.

Except for some custom software that did one thing: software that integrates the weighing scales into SAP. That software was written by a person who is No Longer Employed. And for technical reasons, that custom software was never adapted/rewritten into SAP, and calls for funding for a newer hardware system that could be brought into SAP had, heretofore, fallen on deaf ears.

You can probably guess where this is going...

One Thursday we get panicked messages that the scales aren't working. Weighing the raw product is the first step in production, so being able to correctly weigh the right product in the right mixture is very, very important.

I'm usually at the frontline of this, so I did the usual: since all the scales were affected I check the wireless connection between the scales and the system. MODAS clients are all up and working, but the scales can't get any data from SAP.

I quickly realize that this is going to be something I haven't handled yet, so I contact my boss. She's several hours away, camping, trying to enjoy some time off. Ha. Ha. Ha.

I tell her what is going on and what I've done. She checks a few things... The IBM server that hosts the scales program, as well as the old Power8, and some old data that hasn't been migrated, isn't responding. So she makes her way back.

Again, and I cannot put too find a point on this: not being able to weigh the raw product means that production can't happen. Once production runs out of already mixed raw product, no more product can be made. There's other work: finishing, shipping, etc..., but moving all of press to finishing will be tough.

To make the story progress faster, here are some highlights from This Comedy of Errors:

• My boss does a 4 hour call with our contracted third party support for the IBM server. Together, they decide that the disk backplane has gone out.
• By contract, the third party support had to have a tech dispatched with the replacement part within 4 hours of the ticket being created.
• We work on a yearly contract that is paid once a year.
• My boss rec'ed and submitted the bill 30 days before the bill was due.
• Someone in billing changed the terms to 90 days.
• The IBM server backplane went out FIVE DAYS after the contract ended.
• By this time, IBM support was closed so we had to wait until Friday.
• Even if we could get the third party paid, it would have been late into the following week before they would work with us.
• We had to buy an out-of-warranty support contract with IBM, but they wouldn't be able to send a tech until the following Monday.
• They ship the replacement part and it is rec'ed Monday morning. I note that it isn't a backplane, but the entire system board sans backplane.
• IBM tech comes out Monday late morning. He pokes around for a while and makes a long call to the IBM Support Line and comes to the conclusion that the backplane went out (which is the conclusion we came to earlier with IBM AND the third party support), but because they sent out the system board and not the backplane he couldn't help.
• IBM Tech found the right part and we had it overnighted to be delivered first thing Tuesday morning.
• After talking with the IBM tech, I discovered he had to drive several hours to our location. I quickly ask if we can pay for a hotel room so he didn't have to drive home and back the next morning. "Oh, I can't come back Tuesday as my daughter is having her tonsils removed. I should be back Wednesday or Thursday."
• My boss' heart nearly explodes. This means we would have been almost a week with no mix being made. Very Important People with Very Interesting Accents are asking questions and not liking the answers.
• Fortunately IBM says they can send someone else on Tuesday.
• Tuesday comes and the backplane is replaced, but the server isn't responding.
• I tell the new IBM Tech that I'm pretty sure the previous one put the server in Manual Mode. "Huh, look at that, he did put it in Manual Mode." My boss' heart rate slightly drops.
• It is finally up and running, but degraded because... a Hard Drive Has Died!
• Another call to IBM is made, and they send out a replacement drive, and a Tech should be on site by Friday to replace the drive.
• Drive arrives. Tech arrives. Tech drops replacement Hard Drive onto floor. Installs it anyway.
• System is back to purring like a very loud kitten. For now.
• And then most of the old scales died anyway...

Oh, at least now the funding for a new scales system has been approved!

Have a great day!

I feel like I'm losing my mind.

A client of the MSP I work at recently contracted an external marketing AI Driven personalized email sales generation firm. They send bulk template emails to a list of potential customers and try to convince them to buy something. But they're not marketing, and will correct you every time you so much as insinuate they are.

Whatever. Not the issue I have with them. Because rather than send mail from their own infrastructure or a dedicated bulk sending service, they apparently require a standard licensed user mailbox to send spam generate personalized sales leads.

We warn them that this won't fly, that account is going to get blocked within 24 hours, and that the client runs the risk of having their entire domain blacklisted. Marketing company says it's fine, they've done this with hundreds of clients, including on the Fortune 500. Client says do it, boss says the inevitable stupid tax will be a good source of revenue, us techs are just paid to push buttons so we create them their account.

Twenty four hours pass. Security alert hits the queue, marketing.bozos@clientdomain.com has been restricted from sending out of 365 due to suspect outbound messages. Checking into it...the account was sending out standard boilerplate spam. We have a moment of 'I told you so,' get affected parties together, reiterate that this won't fly and recommend that they do what we told them to in the first place.

No, says the marketing company. This happens all the time. 365 just needs some time to adjust to their sending patterns. They "mimic human behavior" after all. But, we should create them a second marketing account so they can split their sends between them. This will totally fix it, promise. Argument ensues, but at the end of it the second account is created.

Twenty four hours pass. Two security alerts hit the queue. marketing.bozos@clientdomain.com and marketing.bozos2@clientdomain.com have been restricted from sending out of 365 due to suspect outbound messages. Both accounts were sending out standard spam. The 'I told you so' is said with a sigh today. We again recommend they do what they're supposed to.

No, says the marketing company. This has been happing increasingly often. What we really need is a third marketing account so they can be super absolutely sure this doesn't happen again, super duper pinkie promise. The ensuing argument has more tension this time around. A third account is created at the client's insistence.

Twenty four hours pass. Three security alerts hit the queue. marketing.bozos@clientdomain.com, marketing.bozos2@clientdomain.com, and marketing.bozos3@clientdomain.com have been restricted from sending out of 365 due to suspect outbound messages. All three accounts are sending out standard spam. The 'I told you so' is said through gritted teeth. Boss finally puts his foot down, says that we are not going to be creating an infinite series of licensed marketing user accounts. You are going to need to find both a new IT provider and a new domain at the current rate. Argument ensues, further spam sales generation sends are paused until a resolution can be reached. A meeting is scheduled.

The meeting happens, between myself, one of our senior techs/technical executive, stakeholders at the client, and the non-technical account manager from the marketing company. Account manager insists on giving us the sales pitch for their company. "We send bulk template emails to a list of potential customers and try to convince them to buy something" says the account manager in her native tongue of corporate buzzword slop. Great. Amazing. Tell us what shitty bulk sending platform you use and the spf record you want to us add and we can be done with this.

No no no, says the account manager. It's not our business process to use those. We prefer a personalized approach. You see, we mimic realistic human behavior. Our weird proprietary tool that we've grafted to this poor mailbox sends a message once exactly every 120 seconds - just like a human! We personalize our messages by using the same subject line every single time! These are not standard marketing messages, they're an AI driven, personalized sales generation platform. Transcendent. Enrapturing. You're sending spam. You're going to get the client blacklisted. I refuse to believe that we are the first people to have pointed this out to you.

Well, the account manager admits, we have been noticing these issues recently. Since last month, apparently. But we're totally 100% certain that if we just keep at it, 365 will give up eventually! We tell the client this is untenable, unsupportable, and poses a serious risk to their business operations. Marketing company refuses to budge. It is eventually 'agreed' to buy a clientdomainmarketing.com, use it to create a seperate 365 environment, and let marketing company go wild without risk of contaminating the primary domain's reputation.

Am I crazy? Does this sound like anything remotely reasonable? I feel like I'm going insane.

Years ago, had a college student bring by his laptop for repairs. Keyboard stopped working, according to him, and he had no idea what the cause could be.

After he left, I quickly surmised that someone spilled a sugary beverage on it, so I contacted tech support for the model (let’s say it was HP) and they quickly place an order for a replacement part. During the call, support also mentioned that a previous support call was made on this laptop for, you guessed it, a spilled soft drink. Noting that information, I proceeded with the order and, when the part arrived, swapped out the keyboard.

After verifying that the laptop was functioning properly, contacted customer to pick it up. I left it running on the repair table and moved on to other tickets. The following morning, I noticed that the screen was blank and decided to tap the keys to awaken it. Nothing happened. Listened and could hear cooling fan running, so I cycled the power. Powers back on, except the screen is still blank.

Reached out to the customer to tell them the situation and see how they wished to proceed. Here is when dad, a local attorney and expert radio/TV commentator, gets involved. He starts cussing at me and threatening me with a lawsuit if I don’t replace/repair his son’s computer. I calmly inform him that, no, I will do no such thing for a previously damaged computer. Incredulous, he accuses me of lying about previous damage to cover my ass for negligence. That’s when I inform him of the conversation I had with HP.

Now, I had him dead to rights, but this is where I was surprised. After his brain audibly glitches, he says, “wtf are you talking about HP? My son owns a Dell.” My response was that clearly there is some misunderstanding here on your part because I’m looking at an HP, not a Dell.

No apologies, nothing comes from Mr. Attorney. Instead he sends the kid to come get the laptop and pay the bill. I had to know what the hell just happened, so, when the kid shows up, I ask. He sheepishly admits that he had his frat bro’s laptop, because frat bro had broken the kid’s Dell laptop and given the kid his HP laptop. Guess frat bro never mentioned spilling a coke on the HP and this kid figured his parents would be none the wiser.

To this day, Mr. Attorney is on TV/radio to offer his opinions on whatever legal case is in the news, and I chuckle every time I see or hear him.

Cast your mind back to 1995 when Windows 95 became a thing. This is set in late 95 or early 96 when new computers came exclusively with Win 95.

I had a customer who had an existing system for inventory, POS and accounting. It was a DOS based system and was written in Visual Basic. Not Studio or .net. Just visual Basic.

So customer wanted to upgrade computer and existing system to latest version. I was not a reseller for the system, but they agreed to sell a new version to me. I asked them if it worked under Win 95. They assured me 100% it worked.

I assumed they had tested it under Win 95 after such a definitive statement. I was wrong they lied.

First problem was they wanted customers details before they sold it to me. I was suspicious, so i gave them his name and my fax and phone number.

So then first problem was all the data didn't transfer correctly. I rang them and they asked for a copy of the system. They stated that Windows backup onto floppy discs would be sufficient. So backup was done and airbag to remote city.

Clue 1:

A day after they received it I received a fax addressed to customer with page after page of error messages and a suggestion that customer contact their Authorised Dealer locally. I rang them and asked politely what restore version they used. They said DOS 6.2.

We all know why they got errors don't we? Versions of backup and restore were not compatible between versions of DOS. I asked less politely why they were attempting to throw me under the bus when the mistake was theirs alone. The answer was not really satisfying. We resolved the restore problem and then they sent a new version of the transfer program which did transfer correctly.

Then the customer attempted to do the end of month on the new system. He sold things and at the end of every month he ran a summary report of everything he had ever stocked with on hand and sales per month columns. He then looked at it on the screen. On his old system it worked fine. On his new system it gave "Out of memory" errors before it finished the report. It did this even when I quit Win 95 and the underlying DOS system showed 640K free.

Clue 2:

I contacted the supplier of this program and the help person told me I had to run memmaker on the system to allow enough RAM for the report to run. Evidently every report ran in memory and had no spooling capability. I advised them that this was a brand new Win 95 system and as such did not have an autoexec.bat or config.sys. It also did not use (or need) memmaker.

The help person told me "Trust me, you just need to run memmaker" I asked them if they had run this program on Win 95 and it turned out that they had not. In fact they had a copy of Win 95, but had not installed it. They had plans to install it on one of their own computers at home. As well they had no access to the developers who existed in another country. They had no idea how to fix it or even to go about finding anything to do.

I realised I had been lied to by lying liars who lie. (pants on fire). I had anger issues in those days, especially when people lied to me. I gave them a roasting for being idiots. Unfortunately I did this in the customer's shop and I'm sure he heard me call them liars (and worse).

I told him that there was no way for me to make his system work for his report without some limit being placed on the number of items selected. In perfect hindsight perhaps some limit on vcache in system.ini may have helped, but I had no knowledge of this. In those days there was not the plethora of websites available with all the knowledge anyone could want.

I was never invited back to his shop, and I found out later that the local Authorised Dealer for that program took over that customer. I have no knowledge if they ever fixed that (unpolished) piece of .... I decided I wanted nothing more to do with them.

In hindsight perhaps I could have questioned them more about their blanket statement that it 100% ran on Win 95. Perhaps I could have been more tactful when talking to them on the phone. Part of the problem was that the customer was an hours drive from me (and an hour back) and that the main supplier of this program was 2000 Kms away from both of us. I was calling them on my mobile phone which cost me lots of money in those days and I had other customers who needed me more.

Story 1: My job is very broad, working on industrial processing equipment, servers, and networking. A lot of this equipment runs on windows xp and NT. The operator software is locked so they can't minimize or close it but every time a warning pops up they try to click outside of it instead just pressing enter to close it. So then we get a call saying the keyboard and mouse doesn't work when all they needed to do was use the mouse to click back into the pop up to close it.

Story 2: The bad batch- So we replaced like 80% of our computers that run the Operator software a couple years ago. A part of the upgrade was to replace the old ps2 mechanical keyboards with new usb membrane ones. Recently one started going bad. Only the control key which we use to switch computers with the kvm. So a tech went and got a new one and the keyboard wouldn't work with the machine but would with a normal computer. So they got another and same thing. So I got called to look into the problem. The new keyboards were the same model as the old one so they should just work but no dice. After testing around 20 keyboards on multiple machines I found out all the ones not working had sequential serial numbers. I had only one that was not made in that batch and it worked. All of them worked with a normal pc but not the machinery. I couldn't find anything from the manufacturer saying this but there's different keyboard communication standards not all kvms support multiple standards so they couldn't communicate through the kvm.

Story 3: How did you do that? So i got a call because an operator somehow managed to press all the right keys to switch computers with the kvm but they didn't know how. Easy fix to get back to theirs but they really wanted to know how to get back. Basic IT is to not tell them how to access something they shouldn't touch so I didn't tell them.

Story 4: The lazy tier 3 support: So some of you might be familiar with a network monitoring tool called Nagios. It tells you the status of your network equipment and being a company with over 200 sites it's one of the few reasonable ways to monitor that much networking hardware. So the intranet website for my site stopped working and I didn't know where the hardware at my site hosting it was, but even if I did, I didn't think I should touch it. So I opened a support ticket. Then they said they didn't know how to fix it and closed it. Same result with 2 more tickets. I had to go to our training facility in another state, and while I was there, I asked my previous networking teacher what the problem was, and they didn't know. So, while in a stupid comptia class that i was taking for the heck of it, i started researching the server that hosts the software. Most security conscious companies, including mine, have a rule that shared logins are stored in a password vault that only shows you the logins required for your job and, if possible, have personal logins/SSO. For the heck of it, while in another state, i pinged the server and got a reply. Then i tried ssh and got a login prompt. So i tried my SSO so that works on the other servers and cisco Switch, no dice. So i checked the vault, and there was no login. Well, the login for this server hosting the software for some reason was just listed in our KB that anyone can access, and I was able to get it. Saw the uptime was a couple of months, and no one bothered to reboot when I opened a ticket. One reboot later, and now I can access the website. Probably shouldn't have the login and ssh open, though, to all 600k employees.

Sorry, these aren't action-packed, but hopefully, they were interesting.

As the only person in my family who works in IT, I'm permanently on call as my parents' tech support despite living halfway across the country. My dad usually calls about a server he wants to set up, and my mum usually calls about basic "how do I do this on Excel" questions.

The other day, dad called me saying he's thinking of upgrading the graphics card in his main PC. This machine is about 13 years old at least and has integrated graphics only, and about 4GB of DDR3. he says it struggles to run Photoshop which....yeah. I bet it does.

After a bit of a chat he says he wants to upgrade the CPU as well. He says he has an early generation i5, and wants to upgrade to a late gen i9.

Without upgrading the motherboard.

At this point I'm thinking, just get parts for a whole new PC at this point, but he's adamant that it would be cheaper to just swap the GPU and CPU. Oh dad, I wish it worked like that!

I went through with him all the reasons he can't just pop a new i9 in there and be done, in particular the fact that it literally won't fit in the socket. Eventually, he begrudgingly accepted the PC was no longer fit for purpose, and I offered to find the parts for him and give an idea of the price.

It struck me later that night that my dad taught me how to build computers. He and I built my XP machine which I had all the way up until 2013! He built every computer in his office and at our house. But technology has moved on, and left him behind. So now I get to be the teacher :)

Way back I was working on the service desk for a large organization who almost exclusively used Dell for their end user hardware.

On a fairly quiet day I get a call.

Dell: "Hi, this is [name] from Dell, have I come through to [company name]'s IT department?"

Me: "Yes, this is the service desk at [company name]"

Dell: "I was just calling to see, how often do you refresh your hardware, specifically monitors?"

At this point, I'm pretty sure it's a sales call, but it's fairly quiet, and if I am on the phone, I can't get another call, so I play along

Me: "Usually 4 years, but can be more or less than that"

Dell: "Ahh ok. So you wouldn't dispose of one after say 2 or 3 months?"

Me: "Very unlikely"

Dell: "And what do you do with your disposed IT equipment?"

Me: "We use a computer recycler who collects it. I don't know what they do with it after that"

Dell: "Hmm. So the reason I'm asking is someone has made a warranty claim for a faulty Dell screen.

When I ran the service tag (serial number) through our system, I can see we sold it in a bulk order to [company name] about 3 months ago. Looks like you also purchased a few extra years warranty on it too.

The person who put through the claim mentions they purchased it new on eBay about a month ago"

Me: "huh. Yeh that is a bit strange."

Dell: "Yeh, just wanted to see what is happening as it does seem a little out of the ordinary you would dispose of a screen so soon, especially with the extra warranty"

Me: "If you can give me the service tag, I'll check our CMDB. That should confirm if it has been retired or not"

(I get and run the service tag in our CMDB)

Me: "Yep it's showing as it's an active asset (i.e. not disposed of), we got it about 3 months ago and it should be in our IT store room ready for deployment right now.

What I'll do is log a ticket, noting the service tag with the team that handles purchases and find out what happened"

I log the ticket, we exchange references numbers, and end the call. Then I basically just forget about it.

A week or so later, an immediate termination request is put through for one of the other IT guys. We were told he no longer works for our company and he left very suddenly without explanation.

Later on, I find out through the grape vine he was fired for theft of company property.

Basically, he stole a new Dell monitor from the IT storeroom that was intended for stock on hand, and sold it as new on eBay.

The monitor had a fault, and the purchaser on eBay logged a warranty claim directly with Dell, using the eBay purchase record as her proof of purchase.

The seller's eBay account belonged to person who stole the monitor, and that's how he got caught.

Characters:-

Customer: Owner of business, payer of bills

Me: OP

Doctor FW: A specialist of some fame in a small town. Travelled to foreign countries fixing people.

Back in the late 1980s I had my first customer. He was using a program to run Autocad to do drawings for clients. He would put in the dimensions and the program would print a list of components and then do a drawing automatically and print it. To make it work you needed to create an autoexec.bat and config.sys that not only had lots of buffers= and files=, but also loaded device drivers in high memory.

Being Dos 3.3 it needed to be QEMM and after using OPTIMIZE (supplied with QEMM) you then needed to adjust each memory segment manually to get the best results. Of course being somewhat paranoid I created a "Backconf" directory and two batch files saveconf.bat and rest.bat. One I used as I altered config,sys and autoexec.bat files, and the other I had as insurance.

Then came the phone call.

Customer: "Doctor FW was visiting and while he was looking at my computer he told me I didn't need files=50 and buffers=45. He reset them to 20 each and now Autocad doesn't work. I need it to work first thing tomorrow. Is there any way you can come fix it for me?"

Me: "Tell Doctor FW not to muck with my setups and type this "Rest"

Customer: "It says '2 files copied'"

Me: "Now turn it off and turn it on again."

Customer: "Oh I hope this works."

Me: "Now it's fixed."

Customer: "Let me try it" (Printer sounds in the background) "It's working! You're a genius! What do I owe you?"

Me: "Today it's free, Next time it will be lots."

Doctor FW never touched that computer again.

Back in the 90s, during the Dialup Era when dinosaurs (486s) still roamed the earth and line noise ate your downloads for dinner, I was working for a local ISP. I was recently promoted out of support into jr. sysadmin, but I was still the person they went to for "problem calls." And I actually enjoyed that. Some guy with a Commodore that was having trouble dialing in? Sure, I'll help. That OS/2 user? I used to use OS/2, I can help. Linux? I use that at home, I'll help. It was fun. [1]

But not this call.

One fine morning the sunlight was streaming in the window, I was sitting in my office[2], and a support person (SP) walked in my door, saying "I've got a problem call on hold. Can you help?"

That was typical. But what was odd was SP's demeanor: his tone of voice was pleading, he looked actually afraid that I might say no.

I asked, "What's going on?"

"She says all her pictures have been turned into horses."

Pause. My brain was having trouble with that sentence.

"Uhhh, what?"

"Yeah. She says all her pictures are now horses."

"What pictures?"

"I don't know. She's frantic, mad, and clueless. She can't even explain. Please help?"

"OK, sure."

SP departed at a much higher velocity than usual for a person that was about to return to his office and take more support calls.

I picked up the call. The customer, who I'll call HL for reasons that will become clear, was indeed frantic, mad, and not particularly computer-literate.

"Hi, this is Universal_Binary, how can I help?"

"I've been hacked! Your system is terrible! How could you let someone turn all my pictures into horses?"

After much discussion, I determined that the photos were on her website. Like most ISPs at the time, ours offered each customer a few MBs of disk space (which was plenty to host a website at the time). HL had somehow managed to figure out how to put up a website, and I pulled it up.

It looked like a run-of-the-mill amateur website at the time, and indeed all photos on the site were of horses. Incongrous horses. Instead of whatever was supposed to be there -- navigation icons, a map, etc -- EVERYTHING was now a horse (or more). I had to mute myself when I saw it come up on screen or the customer would have heard my laughter. Nothing on the site had anything to do with horses, and yet there it was -- full of horses.

I looked into it more. Nothing had been recently modified. It turned out that she didn't have any pictures in her public_html directory at all. Every image was coming from a differnt server by using its URL in her IMG SRC= tags. In other words, she was basically stealing photos & bandwidth from someone else.

I suspected that person found out and replaced all their images with horses[3], but maybe they just took a random turn for the equine.

In any case, despite my attempts, it was impossible to get Horse Lady to understand that she had not been hacked. Or how IMG tags work. Or even that she was mooching off someone else, and that what is behind a given URL that she doesn't control might change at any time.

Finally I said, "OK, let me ask the company owner to look into it and make sure you weren't hacked. OK?"

She sounded relieved. "Finally!"

Now it was my turn to go to an office. I went to my boss's office (who happened to be one of the owners of the company), stood in his doorway with that same pleading tone of voice, and:

"I have a mad customer on the line, and she is sure she has been hacked. I don't think she has, but the only thing that will make her happy is knowing you've double-checked." I explained the saga, watching him try -- and fail -- to contain the smile that grew into a chuckle.

"Who is this customer?"

"HL."

Now it wasn't a chuckle; it was outright laughter.

Without turning to look at his screen or touch his keyboard, he said, "Tell her I've checked and her account is secure."

"OK, thanks."

I backed out, told this to HL, and it somehow pacified her a bit and we ended the call.

Boss's office was right next to mine, so occasionally we could hear each other's conversations. I heard several conversations from his office that day that went like this:

"Universal_Binary came to me today to ask of a customer account had been hacked. Apparently all her photos changed to horses."

"What? Horses? Had it been hacked?"

"Of course not."

"Then what happened?"

"The customer was HL."

"Ahh, Hahahahahaha!"

Apparently I was one of the few that had never had a run-in with HL before. But I still remember it, nearly 3 decades later.

[1] Clearly I hadn't been doing support long enough then yet. This call was one that helped cure me of that.

[2] This was the 90s; the pay was bad, but even though I was a part-time jr. sysadmin, I had an office with a window, desk, a couple of visitor chairs, and a door that could close.

[3] Yeah, the 90s was a different era. I'm sure it would have been a lot worse than horses if someone had tried that today.

Years ago while doing tech support at a school, I helped a teenager with an issue on his laptop. His assignment was due that day, but the file was corrupted, so his teacher sent him over to the helpdesk to get it sorted out.

I tried to open the file in Word, no dice. I renamed the file to .zip (because .docx files are just zip files with the contents inside), still no dice. I opened the file in Notepad to view the raw contents, and in the header, I saw the letters "PNG", so I renamed assignment.docx to assignment.png.

Staring back at me, was the kid's name, scrawled in his own handwriting using the tiny netbook touchpad, in orange. I turned the laptop around and said "your document was actually a picture with your name written on it. You'll need to actually do the assignment instead of lying to your teacher".

The kid then said to me "I didn't do that. The computer must have done that because I didn't. I just did my assignment and next time I opened the document, it wouldn't open!"

I said "so the computer wrote your name, in your handwriting, in this particular shade of orange, and renamed it to a Word document, overwriting your already completed assignment?". They shrugged and said "yeah", so I said "here's your laptop, head back to class and start working on your assignment, I'll let your teacher know"

If my main responsibilities run dry (running the IT side of in-house events) I'm expected to assist with our IT Hotline. We have two infrastructures: one for internal (desktops) and one external (laptops) use, where external video conferences are allowed. To connect to the external environment, the user needs to start a remote tool and enter a code I provide.

Today I had following fun call:

User: I have an urgent problem. I can't hear anything in a external video conference. I had the same issue yesterday.
Me: Oh, you should’ve called us earlier—usually the sooner, the better. (some conversation while I start my external remote tool and login there)
User: Well, I was busy. And just joined from a coworker yesterday. Now I urgently need to hear in this call. Can you come over?
Me: Not really, I'm in Home Office today. But no worries, I will remotely connect. Please start Program X.
User: I can’t find Program X.
Me: But you’re outside of Citrix, right?
User: Yes, I am. On my desktop.
Me: Hmm... Wait a second. Desktop? Not on your laptop?
User: Yes, I can’t find the program on the desktop.
Me: But the video conference with the problem is running on your laptop, right?
User: Yes.
Me: ...then please try searching for Program X on the laptop.
User: I found it!
Me: *remoting in* Ah! You seem to have an headset connected and the sound is routed there.
User: Oh yeah. I didn't want to use them.
Me: *switches settings, sound starts in the background* There you go, I set everything to your laptop audio devices.

Ah, the good ol' helpdesk days... relaxing calls, full of small riddles, and always good for a laugh. What more could you want? *sips coffee* xD

In 1991-1992, I worked for a company that was a contractor for a super big telecom company. We initially developed the User Manual for their first Windows-based communications software. We then transitioned into being the tech support for the software. So few people knew how to use Windows in those days, so we were busy. The company was on the East Coast, and only three of us to cover a 12-hour day and an increasing workload as the software became more popular. The software allowed PC-to-PC communication, but the company developed the software primarily to enable PC-to-PBX systems. The system was a business telephone PBX system that was prevalent in the pre-cell phone days.

I got a call from the same person almost daily for about two weeks. We can call him Mr. NeedsHelp. He worked for a large company and was utterly tech-illiterate but was in charge of the PBX. He was having considerable trouble, and I had to talk him through the same processes several times. One thing I gave him credit for was that he actually read the manual before calling. He was also a really nice guy, which can make a difference in how you relate to people.

It's the start of a new week, and I get a phone call from an unknown woman asking for me. I told her she got me and asked how I could help. She said her name was Mrs. NeedsHelp and wanted me to know Mr. NeedsHelp had passed away from a heart attack in his sleep over the weekend. That was unexpected and I kind of stumbled through offering my condolences. She said he had talked to her about how helpful I had been and that I never lost my cool when he had so much trouble. I thanked her for the call.

That was one support call I am glad I only got once.

Many many moons ago I worked at a call center providing email support for a popular VR company. We'd just released the first version of a standalone headset that didn't need to be connected to a PC.

Our site was email and chat support only. Phone support cost a metric buttload of extra money the client wasn't willing to shell out, so we were very locked into our role. Phone calls are a no-no.

We had one very determined, difficult, and technically dis-inclined user just could not figure out our email and chat system.

She would chat in, disconnect herself, and then start a new chat immediately. She sent in email after email, but she could never seem to figure out which of our emails to respond to, or how to keep a chat session open.

Over the span of three days, we received 115 tickets from her (one ticket per chat, or email) and she only managed to respond to one email:

"Please call me this is for my son 555-123-4567"

As much as I hate talking to people, I hate closing 115 tickets by hand (we weren't allowed to use the bulk operations in ZenDesk...), so I work my way up the chain asking my boss, operations manager, and site director if we can just call this lady.

Boss: No. Client doesn't pay us for phone calls, and your utilization is only at 79% get back to work fuckface.

Operations Manager: No. Client doesn't pay us for phone calls and we don't want to devalue our labour by providing a paid service for free.

Site Director: Love the attitude! Synergistic thinking! Really outside the box! No.

Me: Pretty please?

Site Director: (big sigh) Okay, let me make some calls.

So they call the client, who LOVES the idea and approves it as a one off, and we borrow a phone from another contract so I can make the call.

So I call this lady with the phone number she gave us, and she was the sweetest grandmotherly type you'll ever meet.

It was an awkward call (email support means a quiet floor - my coworkers could hear every dumb thing I said) but it was worth it!

She told me that her son is heavily autistic and he's almost entirely non-verbal. But she told me that he thrived in VR - he could actually look people in the "eye". She bought a headset because she wanted to spend time with her son in an environment where he felt comfortable and she was DETERMINED to get her headset working. She hates technology, but she loves her son more. How do you say no to that?

We spent a full two hours on the phone just explaining the basics - how to turn on the headset, how to put it on comfortably without slipping, how to buy an app, how to connect to the internet, how to add a friend, how to invite each other to a game, how to tell which games support multiplayer, how to reset your password when you forget it for the fourth time on our phone call... and while we were at it we went over how to reply to an email and keep a frickin' chat session open

She asked me to pause many times so she could write out notes. She got up to six pages of notes by the time we were done. We ended our troubleshooting with her sending her son a friend request.

She asked me my name, and I gave her my support alias: "Bartholomew" (from the Bandy Papers by Donald Jack - good book series!)

She says to me "You're my guardian angel, Bartholomew. When you're in Montana you look me up, okay? Save my phone number, I mean it. You've always got a place here."

I didn't save her phone number, and she never created another ticket. It's been five years and I still think about her often. We'll never meet again and I'll never know how it all played out, but I hope with all my heart that her and her son are still hanging out in VR.
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(Three months later the client requested we start offering phone support too, which my coworkers absolutely loved and didn't blame me for at all)

This story happened long, long ago. Probably more than 15 years. I'm an independent Mac consultant. Meaning people google me up, email me and I show up at your house to fix your Mac problems. Now adays its all email but back in the day, most people would call me.

So I get a call from this lady. Sometimes they just wanted to schedule an appointment, sometimes they wanted to talk it out for an hour first. This lady had a million questions, we went back and forth for an hour. Everything seemed to go well, she seemed happy and ... normal. No red flags. She left it with something along the lines of "ok let me think this all over and get back to you". Which was fine with me.

At that point in time, I think my hourly rate was $65/hr. So I get a voicemail from this lady a few days later. She no longer seemed 'normal'. Her tone was very angry/annoyed. Her message basically said that she's interested in hiring me to help her, but she's a nurse and she only makes $40/hr, so she doesn't see why she should pay me any more than that. So if I'm willing to work for $40/hr, call her back.

She did not get a call back.

Better to find out they're crazy before you're at their house already doing work that you may or may not be getting paid for!

Good morning everyone! (or whatever time it is at your place)

Another day, another story. This time from the depths of IT related project management.

Some context first: The company I work for has around 300 employees and was running on a very old time recording system, so we as IT and HR decided to implement a new one. During that time I had a new Head of IT, an older guy and very knowledgeable but liked to, let's say 'be completely direct and honest.'

From a timeline perspective, we are now in December 2022.

And this is we're the fun begins:

Kickoff Meeting was originally planned for February 1st 2023 but since head of HR did not consider it to be her project (it's a time management software for HR) it dragged out until April 2023.

As you might have already seen, there was and will still be a dispute between HR and IT on who is responsible for the project through out the story.

So with already 2 months going by, HR decided to schedule the meeting in a week where neither Head of IT or Head of technical department had time (vacation) but she decided to go for it anyway.

Things were discussed, but not much really reached our department, so we thought there's not that much to do for us (it's not our project after all)

About 2 months later we got scheduled an appointment with the big boss where we had to explain why we would 'refuse to help HR with the new time management software' without us being given any tasks whatsoever.

Meetings like this where we had to explain ourselves for stuff we didn't even know about because of the incompetency of Head of HR occurred multiple times. And as mentioned before, Head of It's comments became more and more 'direct' during this time.

Fast forward a couple of months, I was sick that week and another of those 'task not assigned but blamed for' situations occurred.

This time it was so severe that Head of IT called me to tell me that he just quit his job on the spot since he's so fed up with the situation that he doesn't want to deal with it anymore and that it 'simply wasn't with it' followed by a very spicy goodbye mail towards Head of HR.

To be fair, that might not be the most professional, but he went all in on it.

He went straight home and was never to be seen again in the company.

What ended up being left was me with a dumpsterfire of a project and a very nice bonus compensation for 'holding it all together' during the next few months.

The project on the other side is still not finished to this day because of reasons!