Weird and Cringe things you've seen while working in IT - Since everyone is too lazy to make such a thread where IT bros can vent

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Not IT but most people at my job (especially the remote IT department) are tech illiterate so I end up doing IT stuff myself so it can actually get fixed rather than just given an "it's fixed" stamp by some jeet who clearly did not fix the issue.

Anyway, without revealing too much, my job uses specialized printers for barcode labels. The barcodes absolutely can't have any defects or else our machinery can't read them, and the whole flow of work gets interrupted. We have only eight setups with these printers, so they all need to be working- we're slowed down very noticeably if all eight aren't available.

A few weeks ago, one printer stated having some defects. Every ~five stickers would have white spots where the printer wasn't transferring the ink onto them. I told management and they said they'd look into it. The next day, it was red tagged and they explained it doesn't work and will need to be replaced. (We don't have any extras in storage, so we had to take that particular setup out of commission entirely.) For weeks we were down one printer which made things harder, especially since at least once a week someone would decide to take off the red tag and decide to use the printer, and we wouldn't find out until the machines started freaking out about blotchy, unreadable stickers. We finally had a lull in the work yesterday so I decided to look into the issue. I found a guide on the manufacturer's website for troubleshooting that exact issue.

I tried the very first suggestion and the printer started printing normally again.
 
  • Be me
  • get a call from one of my mom's friends
  • Needs pictures and videos extracted from two towers
  • Me: "Are they password protected?"
  • Friend: "uuuuuuuuhhhhhhhhhh"
  • Go to friend house to check towers
  • Both towers are in a back patio under a table that has gone through extreme heat/cold conditions from outside.
  • One of them even has spider webs on it. The cover is also off.
  • She luckily has the IQ and common courtesy to wipe them down for me.
  • Take towers home. One of them is a Compaq WinXP tower with a 160GB hard drive. Other is a HP Win8 Tower
  • Try tower 1, CPU fan doesn't spin, windows won't boot because of it.
  • Try tower 2, screen is black but everything is on. Doesn't even show the HP logo or Motherboard info to boot to BIOS.
  • "Wow, how surprising" /sarcasm
  • O.K. plan B
  • Find USB to SATA/IDE in Microcenter
  • Plug everything into personal computer
  • *crosses fingers* "c'mon, please work!"
  • Personal computer gains access to hard drives and personal files
  • Stick everything in a USB stick (50GB of pics and vids on a 64GB USB stick) and hand it to friend
  • She pays me, says thank you and tells my mom I'm handsome
😁 Giving myself a P.O.B on that one

 
synthetic_glazer said:
printers for barcode labels
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I had to deal with weirdness including these in one of the companies I worked for. This was the same company that had the whole "everything runs on the same account that can be locked up by mistyping the password three times" gimmick I've described previously in this thread.

We had a custom setup involving the printing of barcodes held together with rubber bands and duct tape. It was something like this:
  1. User logs into a website and does work
  2. Clicks "Print barcode"
  3. Website sends a request to a Windows service hosted on some local server
  4. Windows service prints out the label
We've been constantly getting tickets and bug reports regarding this setup. The reason was that the printing service was written in such a way that it would just pick the first printer that would appear on the list of all printers. This worked fine for as long as the printer was connected to the server. There was a jeet in the office (it was a remote branch) who would constantly plug out the printer and take it to his desk in order to "do work". This had the effect of not only fucking up the entire thing but also selecting "Microsoft XPS Printer" as the default printer even when the actual printer was reconnected. Somehow not a single person in their office was able to get that jeet under control.
Eventually I just taught the IT Staff to reset a bunch of services on their own instead of bothering me every time, since it seemed to do the trick. I really wanted to fix this stuff properly but it turned out the whole thing was written by a dude who not only left the company but also had a huge argument with the boss before he left. Since there was absolutely zero oversight when it came to working on anything that guy simply stopped pushing things to the git repository and no one noticed. So the whole Windows service existed as a bunch of DLLs located on a single remote server and not anywhere else. I was a beginner at the time so it did not occur to me to try and decompile the binaries using dnSpy in order to extract the code. Not that I'd be given any permission to do it anyway because my boss owned me with fact and logic and explained to me in detail that the true problem here isn't the shit code but the jeet that keeps unplugging the printer.
 
Yesterday I had the displeasure of trying to make Adobe Acrobat respect default printer settings.

After researching potential fixes, I was relieved when my boss called me to tell me I was being laid off!
 
SIMON THE PIEMAN said:
There was a jeet in the office (it was a remote branch) who would constantly plug out the printer and take it to his desk in order to "do work".
Click to expand...
SIMON THE PIEMAN said:
Somehow not a single person in their office was able to get that jeet under control.
Click to expand...
You know what pisses me off more about this? If this was anyone else, they would have gotten a stern talking to or at worse yelled at so the entire office could hear it. Everyone knows the unwritten rule is that you physically walk to the printer to pick your shit up. Unless you have your own cushy office (and even then, that's a 50/50 regarding actually getting a printer there) everyone, even the department managers, shares the office printers.
 
I've been assigned mandatory training for the next several weeks. It's four hours a day. It's not a background task. It involves an instructor, interactive labs, quizzes, and questions. My first thought was, "how is my Jeet manager going to turn this into an absolutely unbearable experience?" The answer was obvious, and correct. The pinging has increased. Not only does he know where I am, he's in the same training course, in the virtual room with me. Pay attention, there's an interactive lab coming up!
*Slack ding*
"SouthernBitchBob, there's a production issue can you look into it"
*Slack ding*
"Hey a dev team is having trouble testing (this project you have never worked on nor coded in). Can you fix their issue?"

Oh sure, let me just get up to speed on what this project does and its entire codebase real quick while I'm in a call with you doing training homework. Managers neither understand nor care that kind of multitasking is literally inhuman.
 
I am so glad that there are no jeets at my current role and all my issues fall into either "sales over-promised and I have to make it work" or "debt from the last time sales over-promised has just fucked us like I said it would". These are situations I can fix, shitty and retarded as they might be. Jeets are unfixable.
 
Still trying to help out the small community org as a volunteer and it’s gone great. Two of the biggest boomers/barriers to upgrading everything are both on vacation now and we’re doing every possible update we can while they’re gone. Cleaning out the tech storage and came across tons of old 3.5 inch diskettes and equipment and boxes of software that I’d take to tech nostalgia show-and-tell. Into the trash they went.

Just want to repeat how hateworthy the Intuit and QuickBooks teams are. If I was TRYING to bury important functions in 18 layers of submenus I couldn’t do a better job than they have. Training someone new to do basic stuff and realizing anew there’s no excuse for such a bad UX.
 
After working in all kinds of offices for around 20 years at this point, there is no greater black pill than realizing that 99% of the population seemingly can't wrap their head around the fact that simply turning the computer/printer/whatever off and then on again fixes most problems. Do you know how many times a day I am called in somewhere for a problem, I sit down, restart the computer, the problem is gone and the person who called me in says something retarded like, "I guess you have the magic touch." It's not just boomers either. We have 25-year-old civil engineers calling me in because they tried to clear the print queue and it started hanging up, who click OK on error messages without reading them and won't try to restart their computer. I actually think computer literacy across the board is getting worse with younger generations.
 
I live in a world where I may be served in froguese. Sometimes in that world, I need to contact a separate IT team in order to reset someone's password, since we don't manage it directly.

I call the IT line, I press the froguese key, it rings, picks up and... It hang.
OK, I say, let's call back... No answer for 10 minutes...
Doing other chores and trying to contact IT again, making sure to press the froguese button. It rings, picks up and... He speaks english.

Nigger, when I press the froguese button, I expect you to croak at me. Don't tell me you cannot see which language I selected since all of your collegues croaks at me. You fucking lazyass retard, he doesn't even apologize for his mistake, he just carry on in froguese whenever I kindly explain the problem in the language I selected.

I've been given the green light to send a complaint to their team. Hoping they do the needful.
 
I helped a friend nuke their laptop after they got scammed nearly $10k by some fucking jeets. They took advantage of his kindness and naivety essentially. I've told him to just hang up on any Indians now.

Never Scored said:
I actually think computer literacy across the board is getting worse with younger generations.
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Working with old school sysadmins/engineers is great, they can really "crack open the hood" on problems in ways that aren't obvious sometimes. However, if I have to watch someone try to edit a complex YAML file in raw vi again I might lose my mind.

It's been many years since I've met a younger guy who even seems interested in going deeper to learn for the sake of learning. They all want a tool or dashboard you can buy to fix the problem. And don't get me started on how none of them automate shit.
 
The firewall at my job caught an employee trying to access an adult site. Company policy requires me to personally clear their browser history, temp files, etc.

This guy is a certified freak. Dozens of porn tabs and bookmarks.

I'm debating if I should tell upper management. He's not a bad guy and defender found nothing malicious.
 
Disco Inferno said:
This guy is a certified freak. Dozens of porn tabs and bookmarks.
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Told this before I think, but that reminds me of the retard I caught with around 20GB of porn saved to his corporate owned workstation following retrospective checks after a client ransomware event. Nigger had been there 4 months and could not stop gooning, he had visa documents and passport scans on there as well :story:
 
Susanna said:
That won’t really help, they use AI voice filters to change their accents now.
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Now if only they could use AI to help the jeets understand that what I'm asking them to do is really really simple and when I eventually get escalated to a white guy with the same authority he fixes it in seconds.
 
HahaYes said:
Told this before I think, but that reminds me of the retard I caught with around 20GB of porn saved to his corporate owned workstation following retrospective checks after a client ransomware event. Nigger had been there 4 months and could not stop gooning, he had visa documents and passport scans on there as well :story:
Click to expand...
The company I work for is far to lax when it comes to what people do with company work stations, laptops, and RDPs. You can do whatever you want as long as it doesn't trigger Defender or is flagged by our networking team.
 
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