Back when I first started ages ago, a woman called in and said "my mouse isn't working!" I asked her if it was wired or wireless.
"I don't know! Why would I know that?"
"What do you mean? Is it wired or not? Is there a wire on it?"
"I said ***I don't know!*** This isn't ***my*** job to know it's ***yours!***"
So I asked her if she picked it up and walked away, how far would she get.
I was the one that got in trouble.
Had a customer come in with his laptop and a bag of keyboard keys. He said he was working on his computer and received a phone call and stepped out of his home office. His cat found out how much fun it was to pop off the keys on his laptop, one by one and almost every single one.
The unfathomable amount of CP that I have come across both professionally and independently repairing computers is breathtaking. From Mother to Grandfathers, cops to mechanics, youngsters to old folks.
It's pervasive and f*****g disturbs me.
I have an in with one of the local PDs and drop a note each dime every time. No passes here. If I find it on your machine, so do the locals and the stateies.
Anyone who typed the word "RAPTOR" in any text field, would have a Raptor from Jurassic Park fly across their screen with a loud screech. Only 3 of us on the team knew about it.
Little over a year later during a demo of our Asset Management module a manager asked about inputting vehicles, the trainer asked what kind of vehicle he drove, "An F150 Raptor". So the trainer, as a demo, input the vehicle description and BAM!
**"RAAAAAAWWWWWWRRRRR!!!!!!!"** comes screeching with this Raptor flying across the screen in a room of 50-60 people, including our CBO, and most of our upper managers. My wife is one of those upper managers so she sees me in the back of the room trying so hard not to laugh. She gave me this look like "really?"
Our boss just calmly said "Well, that's not a bug or a feature. Looks like we'll need to fix that." He had no idea.
The next day he went back through the commits and saw where it originated. During an after action meeting he kept it low key and just assigned it to me and this other dev who knew about it to take it out. He finished by saying "And please don't put easter eggs in our code.".
Me: "You are charged by the hour, you know that right?"
Client: "Yep"
Me: "What kind of pizza do you want?".
Was informed that a large medical practice that used our software had been infiltrated by a hacker that had posted a video of himself on some kind of dark site walking around their large office (500,000 square feet) and bragging about his expertise and claiming to own our network. They played us the video. He was employed there as the night security guard. We quickly saw that he did not gain access to our net.
They informed us that he had given his notice and his last day would be Thursday. He has posted a bunch of threats to the dark site about what would happen that next holiday weekend, after he was gone.
It did turn out that he had gained access to the network of the surgery center in the same building. And he has used that access to remotely disable the HVAC system for hours at a time during surgical procedures.
On his last day, the FBI rolled up at night. Waited for the older security guard to leave the building to patrol the parking garage. Then knocked out all power and lights to the big building, lock all the doors, pulled up in about eight black vans, about 30 guys with submachine guns jump out, sweep the building, arrest him and quickly leave.
We were counseled to shut down the network for a week, in case he had planted time bombs to be triggered near the 4th of July. We did.
Turns out he had a young wife and two kids. Was offered a plea deal for three years in prison. Decided to go to trial. I was a witness.
He was sentenced to 11 years.
A twist. The pastor at his church testified as a character witness. Said he had never had an issue with him. Turns out the FBI had hacked the Church computers with a warrant and found that he had been fired as the IT guy at the church. Pastor was charged with perjury and sentenced to prison too.
A week later, the same customer said his computer was miscalculating formula amounts, so I drove there again. He says, "Look...I type in that I want a pint, and it prints out a formula for sixteen ounces." After giving him an elementary math lesson, I drove 40 minutes back again and requested that he have his computer taken away.
On a laptop filled with everyone's information (SSN, names, addresses, and more), Limewire, games, p**nography, and more. The two who worked on this laptop just used it like their personal laptop with occasional work being done on it.
The laptop was promptly disconnected from the network, confiscated, and returned for analysis. Yes, there was spyware and we don't know how much personal info got out. This was reported to higher management. The two who used it disappeared quickly and quietly after that.
Fast forward a few weeks and the disk usage has gone down, but still really close to full, so the lowest paid member of staff, me, was to find the worst culprits and report back on what the largest content in their drive was.
The very first person I checked had a huge drive (most under 500MB, this was 10s GBs). Sorted by size, 2GB+ .mov file, named totally randomly with numbers, like 93829084320834 - Opened it, CP. FML. The subsequent police-led s**tshow was not what I needed to be involved in at 19 years old.
"The sky is falling and waters in the way"
Meaning
"It's raining really hard and the streets are flooded"
As the IT helpdesk, of course there's nothing we can do about that.
As a consultant software dev, I got called into a client office on a Saturday to help fix a hardware issue because the regular IT staff was non-responsive (they sucked).
We were changing a bad memory card on a server, and my boss asks me to unplug the top box. I was averaging about 90hrs a week so I was f*****g cooked, and I unplugged the wrong machine.
This was a travel agency call center doing $1M/day and this machine was in the call center server stack. We freaked out of course, and my boss walked out onto the call center floor, quietly asking if everything was running ok LOL.
Luckily it was a benign marketing server and everything was ok. Lesson learned, don't let the software dev in the server room.
Emergency flight from CA to GA because they were getting alarms on their new system, flew out at like 4am, got onsite at 9am, told to come back at 9pm. got a hotel, slept, came back onsite 9pm.
Customer stated that someone used a cable from the PDU to log into system but plugged it in wrong when done. But they were no longer getting alerts.
I looked at it, it was correctly cabled, apparently someone had noticed and put it back correctly.
Left site and flew back home.
23 hour day just to LOOK at a cable label... they probably got charged like $10k to have me go onsite if not more...
I was a solo IT department for many years.
Had to run manual backups on sales people laptops.
I run into a huge folder, check if it needs to be backed up.
Turns out it was a s**t ton of pics/videos of the married sales guy and the young receptionist getting it on at a company event (the company used to get us all hotel rooms).
I sat the guy down and said I found some s**t that shouldn't be on company property. He turned white as a ghost. I said it's all good if he deletes it/doesn't do that again. So I never told anyone about it.
I would've found a way to tell the wife if I hadn't run into screenshots of their texts-the wife had recently found out about the affair. It was really messy, kids involved.
Had to spec out a state of the art, no limit small computer for the CEO. I give two options, one best in market skull logo on the front. The other not as good and no skull logo. I submit to my boss and he says CEO will probably never go for the skull one as it's unprofessional. I look up a plate to cover and add that in.
Like a $10k computer alone, 5k monitor.
CEO went for skull icon one without plate cause it was best in market and skull looked cool.
My boss wasn't happy to be wrong.
She was insanely unstable when it came to service workers. She was the head economist at the specific company handling a lot of money. So she was basically babied no matter how many times we complained to her boss.
She would call in screaming refusing to let us do anything while expecting us to fix her problems telepathically. She had non issues every day, so we basically existed so she could torture us.
I set an appt time up in outlook for her, block out an hour off her schedule and swing up there.
There she is, a very large elderly office manager sitting in her desk. There under her desk is the tower I was to replace.
I introduce myself. She backs her chair up about a foot and says "OK, have at it." and powers off her system.
I stand there looking at the one foot of space between her lap and the spot under her desk. "I am going to have to ask you to slide your chair back as I need to remove and replace the tower." I state.
She skootches maybe another foot back and blankly stairs at me.
So, I hold my breath and go down under her desk. Thats when I notice the 10-12 filled pee bottles under her desk. Yes. Pee in old Gatorade bottles just tucked away under her desk.
I ripped the tower out and said "I will be back ASAP I need to clone your hard drive." and GTFO.
I sent my intern to go install the new one.
