IT Support Mishaps

Best one I recall actually didn't involve me.

We were on a course one day and the chap I was with had been testing SWIFT messages the day before. Unfortunately for him, he forgot to clear the test data and I still don't know quite how this happened but all the live confirmations, payments etc went out the next day with a payment reference of "Mickey Mouse and "Donald Duck".

Suffice to say, he nearly dropped down dead when heard the news come though.. He was asked if he was ok. He said yes but he clearly wasn't. He left the course a few moments later nearly in tears.

It wasn't really his fault, just bad procedures which were tightened afterwards.
 
I've got a brand new mishap today already........ last week two of our techs went around putting timers on to the plug socket of 40 TVs and projectors after we found one teacher had left their projector on for the entire first week of the easter holidays.

Come in this morning and been non-stop running in and out because low and behold, they've set the timers the wrong way around.....so rather than turning off between 8pm - 8am and being powered on from 8am-8pm, they are infact the other way around :/ Common sense dictates that you would have tested one first but noooooooooooo
 
Not one of my own but one I was involved in. I worked in a Datacentre, and one of our customers had gone into administration. Their own internal IT guys logged onto the Exchange server/DC to disable some users from logging on.

The next thing we know is that no-one can log on, this guy had disabled every user account on the domain including the administrator/domain admin accounts. Being a DC there's no local login, and no-one knew the DC restore mode password.

My boss started planning a re-build, but luckily we managed to get in and re-activate the accounts inside a few hours.
 
Few years back now. But while working on an IT Help Desk this one sticks out.

I had my head set on and could here a colleague (actually a mate of mine) starting to get irate with the customer, as team leader I logged in to listen to phone call it went like this..

Colleague: "OK, lets try this again. I want you to reboot your machine, let me know when its off"

Lady: "Ok but ive already tried this a few times now"

Colleague: "Ok, well If you can press "ctrl + alt and delete" you will get a menu appear on the screen. From there you can log the machine off"

Lady: after much mumbling and cursing and what sounds like an elephant being moved...she says "are those buttons under the tray?"

at this point I take over the conversation and assertain that my colleague is trying to get the user to reboot a washing machine.

Our IT support number was a few digits out from the Ariston hotline or something!! LOLZ
 
James J said:
Only one I can think of doing personally was when I worked in a well known electrical retail chain on the high street and a customer brought in his PC to be fixed which he bought 9 months previous from our store. Due to me being the only person who was remotely IT savvy, I was given the job to try and retrieve photos of his kids from his dying hard drive and back them up onto an external one.

However, his windows vista was password protected and he supposedly didn't know the pass. I thought that was very odd (seen as it was supposedly his laptop) so I got past it the old fashioned way (awww yeee) and started looking at his pictures.

Was disgusted at what I found as he had an album of his kids next to multiple albums of him ****ing some woman who wasn't he wife in loads of hotel rooms by the looks of them. Videos and everything...

I refused to do the backup based on the utter filth in the same folder and subfolder as photos of his kids and we reported it and the laptop was confiscated. Customer went mental (naturally) but when we told him why, he just left in a hurry lol. Never saw him again!
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you know when you use the same camera to take photos of different things and then import them windows sticks everything in the same folder just like they are on your camera? its not like he went out of his way to mix xxx pictures into a kids folder on his hardrive :rolleyes:
 
We have an award that goes round the office named after a previous techy that was a bit 'special', known as the Lenny award. It has most recently been awarded to one of my colleagues who was remoted into the DC on the network, then decided to shut down what he thought was his machine :o.

Next morning comes and no-one can log in, so we check the server room and see that the server is off however all the others are on so it isn't a power cut. Next thought is that the server has died, so try and fire it up with fingers crossed. Machine comes up fine so we check the event logs and low and behold at 5pm the previous day there is a record requesting shut down of said machine by said user :D

He still holds the award to this day about 8 months on :)
 
James J said:
I refused to do the backup based on the utter filth in the same folder and subfolder as photos of his kids and we reported it and the laptop was confiscated. Customer went mental (naturally) but when we told him why, he just left in a hurry lol. Never saw him again!
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Completely out of order. The photos were not illegal and had the sex pics been the only ones on there you wouldn't have done anything apart from maybe laugh. It's your mind that has somehow connected the sex pics with the photos of his children when in reality they have nothing to do with each other, that strikes me as a bit weird in itself.
 
Energize said:
Are people really so prudish in 2012? I hope this is a joke. You shouldn't have been looking through those photos in the first place.
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True, violates the data protection act and also any ethical codes IT certified professionals are supposed to uphold. You are paid to do a job, not to be the kiddie porn moral police. If and when there is illegal media present you should contact the police, if not do your job! Who gives a hoot what's on the drive it's not yours.

Refusing to carry out a warranted repair could have easily cost you your job due to your moral judgement call.
 
After about 20 minutes of phone support with a less than IT literate end user trying to get a printer to work he came back to the office with his printer under arm at the end of the day.

USB cable was hanging out of the ethernet socket in the laptop...
 
James J said:
Only one I can think of doing personally was when I worked in a well known electrical retail chain on the high street and a customer brought in his PC to be fixed which he bought 9 months previous from our store. Due to me being the only person who was remotely IT savvy, I was given the job to try and retrieve photos of his kids from his dying hard drive and back them up onto an external one.

However, his windows vista was password protected and he supposedly didn't know the pass. I thought that was very odd (seen as it was supposedly his laptop) so I got past it the old fashioned way (awww yeee) and started looking at his pictures.

Was disgusted at what I found as he had an album of his kids next to multiple albums of him ****ing some woman who wasn't he wife in loads of hotel rooms by the looks of them. Videos and everything...

I refused to do the backup based on the utter filth in the same folder and subfolder as photos of his kids and we reported it and the laptop was confiscated. Customer went mental (naturally) but when we told him why, he just left in a hurry lol. Never saw him again!
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This is why I will probably never ask any random shop to help me fix my PC. People just cannot resist snooping and I'd rather not have my entire life spelled out to complete stranger. What that guy did in his spare time really was none of your business :/
 
Nitefly said:
This is why I will probably never ask any random shop to help me fix my PC. People just cannot resist snooping and I'd rather not have my entire life spelled out to complete stranger. What that guy did in his spare time really was none of your business :/
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Exactly, perhaps he was into film and photography, but lacked subject inspiration :P
 
The Big T said:
I got a call from one of our users a few years back wanting his internet history deleting. We thought it was fishy so we had a poke around.

It was full... and I mean full.. of gay porn.

We reported it. Nothing was done because no-one had complained and we don't count.

Awesome.
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why would anyone have complained? its his PC so he can do whatever he wants, unless i am missing the big picture here?
 
ilcp said:
why would anyone have complained? its his PC so he can do whatever he wants, unless i am missing the big picture here?
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If it was a user it was probably on some sort of company/corporate network.

Fair enough if it was the guys personal computer/laptop. The authorities really should encourage people to report things like this, personal responsibility isn't a one way street. But considering the personality of people that go snooping on others computers, they'd never see it that way.
 
I was dealing with an issue that had to go to a specialist consultant who basically came back and said that the customer didn't know what she was doing and needed training. Unfortunately, the consultant didn't realize the customer was copied into the email. :(
 
That reminds me Burnsy, my dad has a classic one.

One day he recieved an email from two co-workers (a man and woman) in his office. By accident, the man had sent their 2 year long email conversation, which revealed they had an affair and was very sexually explicit, to every one in the whole company (~1000 people!). Both of them were married and with kids.

Errrrr, error!!!!!! :eek:
 
Managed one last week...

Replacing fiber cables and SFPs for VMware hosts in our co-lo DC to take the hosts to 8GB, very nice.
Untill i pulled fibers from the wrong server hosting half our Exchange farm, general purpose SQL server, CRM and parts of many other apps...cue much head scratching and trouble shooting of a server that wasnt supposed to be having work done on it...nice big scooby doo moment when i stepped back to have a think and my eyes just got drawn to the server without fibers and the one beside it which had fibers and shouldnt have...luckily was later afternoon on Friday so managed to get servers backup quickly and only a few support calls were logged! Dont think ive ever re-run fiber cables into a rack and server so fast before. Had to deploy doughnuts the next Monday as pennance, mmm Krispey Cremes for the fat win!
 
bledd. said:
^like a boss :cool:
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The worst thing is that they called almost straight after absolutely fuming. That was an uncomfortable call to say the least. Also, they didn't spend another £20k on licences that we were in negotiations for. Funny that.

Has anyone shutdown rather than restarted a physical server in some data centre somewhere? This is frustrating when you have no idea where the server is an how to get someone to turn it back on.
 
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