Dear Users... (A thread for Sysadmin, Technical Support, and Help Desk people)

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Okay, this is weird. No-one's had a call for over 20 minutes, and our email queue is down to 7. Something's about to happen. I can feel it.
 
Dear Users.

If you forgot your password... just admit you forgot your password.

I promise I won't judge you (I forget passwords and need them reset all the time, there's no shame in it) and it will make the process go a LOT faster than a 30 minute game of you pretending you still remember your password and insisting up and down that the system is "locking you out for no reason."
 
Years ago, while I was working for PacifiCare in So Cal, they had a big meeting one day where they announced we would all be outsourced to Keane.

They called it "sourcing", as if we all didn't know that sourcing meant outsourcing.

Anyway, one operations guy was so mad he flipped the emergency power cut-off switch on his way out the door. Shutdown all the servers and the mainframe. Everything.


He was arrested later that day, PacifiCare claimed $10 million in damages.

I think he probably regretted that decision.
 
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Faydra said:
Years ago, while I was working for PacifiCare in So Cal, they had a big meeting one day where they announced we would all be outsourced to Keane.

They called it "sourcing", as if we all didn't know that sourcing meant outsourcing.

Anyway, one operations guy was so mad he flipped the emergency power cut-off switch on his way out the door. Shutdown all the servers and the mainframe. Everything.


He was arrested later that day, PacifiCare claimed $10 million in damages.

I think he probably regretted that decision.
Click to expand...

We had a similar situation, although accidental. We had some plumbing issues in one of our data centers, The lines were drained so the plumbers could work on it.

Unfortunately, the emergency power shutoff for the data center was linked to a sensor that monitored pressure in the sprinkler system (so the power would cut off automatically if the sprinklers went off).

Oops.
 
The machine rooms at IBM North Harbour were water cooled sourced from the lake beside it. A local "poet" somehow slipped through the badge-controlled doors with his dog so he could use the photocopiers. Somehow when security ejected him his poems got lost. So in revenge a few times he threw plastic sheeting over the intake for the water and shut down the power. It took so long to do the power up and get all the mainframes restarted we'd head for the pub.
 
JoeMorgue said:
Dear Users.

If you forgot your password... just admit you forgot your password.

I promise I won't judge you (I forget passwords and need them reset all the time, there's no shame in it) and it will make the process go a LOT faster than a 30 minute game of you pretending you still remember your password and insisting up and down that the system is "locking you out for no reason."
Click to expand...
Did once come across something like this and the tech support bloke was insisting a colleague was repeatedly mistyping his password, the colleague asked me to type it in, and it still wouldn't accept it. Tech support eventually very reluctantly came down to my colleagues PC and it wouldn't let the tech guy log in with the admin user account password. Took quite sometime to find the problem. My colleague had been evaluating the latest milestone build of the game he was producing. Ended up being a bug in the installer which had remapped the keyboard to an azerty layout.
 
I really love it when someone books and pays for an online training course, and then discovers that the training provider requires an obscure piece of unsecured and untested webinar software that they need to download and install on their computer, which they aren't allowed to do because security. And then I love it when they call me and I have to tell them they're not allowed to use that meeting software. And I love it when they yell at me.
 
arthwollipot said:
I really love it when someone books and pays for an online training course, and then discovers that the training provider requires an obscure piece of unsecured and untested webinar software that they need to download and install on their computer, which they aren't allowed to do because security. And then I love it when they call me and I have to tell them they're not allowed to use that meeting software. And I love it when they yell at me.
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To be fair, I don't really think this is the user's fault. I hope your firm presses the vendor to refund the training fee, and blacklists them until they pay off their tech debt. Or go out of business. Either way.
 
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