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  1. #1
    Hyperion Cross
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    Random Tech (or IT Work!) Fail

    I wish to make a thread exclusively regarding tech fail.

    Please:

    - Share your tech fails (Mac, Windows, Linux, your mobile, work equipment sucking etc)
    - Share your tech fail stories (i.e. derp people at work, or retarded policies/constraints, your job)
    - Funny tech pics (real screenshots are a plus, with stuff blurred out for protection if need be) are a plus

    ---------

    So I was recently made aware of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkins..._of_triviality (tl;dr - the time spent on any item will be in inverse proportion to its cost and importance) where although prior to knowing the term I knew it existed in some form or another but I was never fully able to give it a term and understand it.

    Now that I am aware of it, I can't help but seeing it in full force for everything I do.

    So case in point. I had to work over the weekend, 6 hours, to upgrade a server's software, with 2 external parties involved, 3 if it all went shit. At the same time, I also had a seperate piece of work that would literally take 5 seconds (changing a drive letter on another server within an application).

    I done the upgrade work solo; no one questioned it, it was approved with a simple "yes" in our meetings by the client. If I fucked up it would involve 3 parties to get it back together again (2 different backups/restores, and also testing), and is a portal for people to submit information over that could result in lost lives if it's not available.

    The second piece of work (changing a drive letter), was suspended for a while so they could question it more. Due to the suspension, there was some delay in the dates in getting it approved for a deployment date. After a few days I answered all their questions fine; and a date has been set for the week about. Which... I forgot about (due to how trivial the change is).

    Oh dear the (laughable to me) grilling I am getting over this. Despite my protests, I just couldn't take the grilling seriously and kept arguing back sarcastically (not to the client but to my own manangers). They somewhat understand, but were still disappointed in me. No pat on the back for the almighty crucial upgrade I done over the weekend though. Nope!

    (the other point of this law is how willing people are to jump in to have an opinion of something to prove their worth, not initially mentioned but extremely relevant here. Hence, everyone jumping on me because I forgot about such an unimportant change lol)

  2. #2
    Campaign
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    Upgrading a computer today from vista to win 7.

    Forgot to save the users my documents folder before wiping for clean install and they don't use the cloud backup.

    All files lost.

  3. #3
    Hyperion Cross
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    Wait, won't you be grilled for that?!

  4. #4
    Member since 2006 and still can't think of a title.
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    Oh god the horror stories i can share with you. My most recent, handing one of the program directors her brand new 64gb Iphone 6, and the next morning her secretary walks in with the phone completely shattered.

  5. #5
    Hyperion Cross
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    Asked for an extended battery at work.

    I (nearly) fully charged it then unplugged to see what sort of battery life I'd get:



    I'm impressed!

  6. #6
    Faster than Walt Flanagan's Dog
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    A thread I can contribute to! One of my job perks as a sys admin at my company is I can make any VM's I want for personal use and have my own /28 of public IP's. As a favor to a friend I host(ed) his bands website.
    Last night got an abuse complaint from our upstream provider that the IP for his site has multiple spam complaints. Looking into it it's infected with the Ebury virus. (rogue ssh libs found as well as the mail log was over 77gb). Worst part is the complaint was CC'd to my CTO as well so now I might lose my free web hosting and bandwidth

  7. #7
    United States of Smash!
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    Ouch that really sucks. I am excited about this thread. I don't have any stories as of yet I have only been in IT for 6 months now but if I get any good ones I will bring them here.

    Well I do have one story, I work for a small company that is mac only and has around 100ish employees. We also happen to be located in the boonies. About 50 miles from the nearest town. Needless to say our internet connection to the outside world is extremely expensive, very fragile and quite outdated. The only connection available to us is 8 T1 lines that we bundle together into one connection. The only issue is that the copper and junction boxes feeding those 8 T1 lines is very old so every time it rains we lose connectivity. We lost all internet and phone service for 18 hours one time, completely silent.

  8. #8

    The only issue i have with my current job is one person.... out of 10,000+ people we support..... one person has been such a pain. And not for hard to fix things, really easy things, she just bitches so much that she has a one way ticket to Top tier support. I thought when i got this job i was done with ticket system, but the top person one day just came to me and asked me to be this person's tech (I'm guessing they are fucking). She won't even talk to any IT person on level 1-3. All of this would not bother me, but this bitch ALWAYS puts in a ticket before she goes to a meeting. She will even put in the ticket ,"I'm having this issues, i'm going to a meeting for the next 4 hours then i will have the time. This has been happening all week."

    Ok bitch, it's been going on all week, but your ass waits until Friday afternoon to submit the ticket, then go right to a meeting, only to come back 30 mins from when I leave for the weekend.....

    Everything else about my job is a dream (I put in about 5 years in hell to get the exp to get a job like this). I guess no matter what, there will always be that one user that knows how to piss you off.

    Edit: I really need to remember some of the stories from my last job.... I worked for a company that supported schools. These are not your normal public schools, but those top end, you see Lambos in the parking lot, schools. It really jaded me on teachers. I grew up in Oklahoma and have friends from there that are teachers and they tell me how much they make, and i feel sorry for them. Then i work for this school and the teachers are all making 100k+, most of which are tech retarded.... and some just retarded. I blocked most of this time out of my memories. The main thing i remember about that time is coming home and going right to the basement to go to town on my punching bag.

  9. #9
    Salvage Bans
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    How about some wiring fail? ^^ We support quite a lot of companies of different sizes, for some we built their network from scratch, some came to us because they were unhappy with their previous IT folks.
    And some of them apparently have never heard about organized patch panel wiring...

    Just last week we had to fight this beast:
    Spoiler: show

    6 panels, 2 switches, 2 phone systems and a LOT of way too long cables...
    Tooks us ~6h to document and remove the mess, re-order the panels and switches and re-wire everything with new cables. Result may not be perfect, but it's at least a huge improvement.
    Spoiler: show



    Next up on the agenda some time this year will be this mess.
    Spoiler: show


    10 panels, 5 switches and some other networking stuff spread across 3 racks (photo is the center rack, the other 2 are a mess too but don't have that many wires flying around...)
    I really wonder how long this one will take... Especially since we probably won't re-wire it alone but with 2 other parties involved (company that manages most of the network + company that did the building wiring and some other stuff like alarm and monitoring systems in the building)

  10. #10
    Relic Horn
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    Work for a production company, as you can imagine the production floor is not the pinnacle of cleanliness. Had a report that one of the pcs on the floor wouldn't turn on yesterday and the normal green light on the power button was flashing orange. This is what I found when I opened it. Turned out the psu died, who would have thought?

    Spoiler: show





  11. #11
    Salvage Bans
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    Oh, that one looks pretty bad, but I think I can top that ^^; Sadly no photos of it, but one of our customers is a horse clinic. Most of the buildings are basically stables, so they have a lot of straw/hay dust in the air. Had to open up one of their PCs to replace an SSD, and the whole(!) inside was covered in ~1mm of brownish dust. Still wonder how they manage to not lose several of their computers each year, they're all regular air-cooled desktop cases...

    And I just remembered another PC we got several years ago. It looked similar, but probably a lot worse than the one on your photos. Reason for all the dirt was easy: it stood in the working area of a carpenter...

  12. #12
    Member since 2006 and still can't think of a title.
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    Niya, that is a dream compared to what we have in our switch room for 3 floors. You would seriously cry looking at it.

    Some of my other favorite fails. When doing phone support for EA, I had this girl call. She was trying to get her husbands flight sim game to work. Of course it's A.T.F. which was a dos game trying to run on an xp box. Only issue with her was she was talking very quietly. A few minutes later I found out why. Not verbatim, but essentially husband walked in, started yelling at her for being on the phone, called her a worthless bitch among other things and I'm pretty sure was beating the everloving shit out of her as I think the phone was thrown. Domestic violence calls were much more common then you would think.

    Another fun one, though I didn't take it was someone needing help getting a LAN set up for C&C Red Alert. After it was complete, they asked what the techs name was, he told them then the guy loudly yelled Don, this bong hits for you and him and his friends took a loud hit off a bong in the middle of the call, which possibly could have been recorded.

  13. #13
    Hyperion Cross
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    Writing feedback to people in Comic Sans seems to make any possible impact less painful lol

  14. #14

    Last year checking out Bitlocker status in some of our public computer lab machines, checked for a CD/DVD drive in one that prompted a fail. Ejected to find a solidified cheese slice. Weird that it did not mold -_-

  15. #15
    Yoshi P
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    Quote Originally Posted by Reposado View Post
    Last year checking out Bitlocker status in some of our public computer lab machines, checked for a CD/DVD drive in one that prompted a fail. Ejected to find a solidified cheese slice. Weird that it did not mold -_-
    He obviously put it in the wrong place. http://www.hardocp.com/article/2009/...hootout_q209/2 http://www.hardocp.com/article/2009/...hootout_q209/4

  16. #16
    Hyperion Cross
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    ^ wait I don't get the joke, are you saying that block of cheese slice is actually thermal paste lol

    Otherwise, today's top tip: CD drive offers excellent food housing capabilities!

  17. #17
    i should really shut up
    You can safely ignore me I am a troll

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    Quote Originally Posted by Reposado View Post
    Last year checking out Bitlocker status in some of our public computer lab machines, checked for a CD/DVD drive in one that prompted a fail. Ejected to find a solidified cheese slice. Weird that it did not mold -_-
    Lol'd

    That's the shit that makes your day though, right?

  18. #18
    Queen of the Pity Party
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    set up an obnoxiously complicated loop in assembly to simulate multiplication (why? because fucking Y86 that's why)

    realize I only needed to ever calculate multiple of 4, which can be done by putting the value into a register (%eax, let's say) and:
    addl %eax, %eax
    addl %eax, %eax

    WHY DID I SPENT A HALF HOUR WRITING THAT DAMN LOOP. I fail so hard.

    I really hate Y86. I don't know if any of you had to learn it but it's bullshit. you can't even use immediate values in mathematical calculations! WHY?

  19. #19
    Yoshi P
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    I really hate Y86. I don't know if any of you had to learn it but it's bullshit. you can't even use immediate values in mathematical calculations! WHY?
    Wait, what? Can you at least put an immediate value into a register so you can do add immediate with two instructions? Or is it the level of stupid where you can only add powers of 2?

  20. #20
    Queen of the Pity Party
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    no, you can put an immediate value into a register. you just always have to do that - you can't do, for example,

    addl 1, %eax

    you would have to do

    irmovl 1, %ecx
    addl %ecx, %eax

    y86 is a simplified instruction set for teaching assembly and as such, things like that are by design - but they still piss me off.

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