One time while working IT...

Janx · Mar 25, 2016

back when I worked in IT at college:

I got a call that the department head of the English department had a problem.

This was an old, old guy, and his PC was one of the last IBM XT's we still had in deployment (hooked up to our Novell network even).

He was trying to print or save his poem he had typed.

Into the DOS prompt.

One line at a time.

With "Bad Command or Filename" message per line.

As I wasn't going to try to back through the history and scribe his opus for him, I had to break it to him that he wasn't typing in a word processor where it could save and print his work.

His response was something classic like "We live in an ever increasing technical world, and I guess I want no part of it"

Umbran · Mar 25, 2016

This one only barely fits, but what the hey...

Back while in grad school, I did a bit of work on the side doing tech support for a veterinary practice. I'm by no means an IT professional, but I can hook up a new printer to a network, make the scanner put things to the right folders, shepherd OS updates, and so on. They paid me reasonably good money to do that, and handle some occasional things at the front desk.

One day, I'm busy with the scanner, when one of the techs comes out front to tell me they needed a hand back in the hospital portion of the building. I figured that one of the workstations was misbehaving, but I was incorrect.

It is important to note that these days, the veterinary profession is mostly female. I was the only person in the building over 5'3" in height and associated build.

She walks me back to see... a great dane, rather than a workstation. I'd met him when he came in, and he was a happy, friendly, goofy galumphing fellow, in to have certain bits removed. His owners had wanted to breed him at least once, so he'd reached full size before having the procedures, so he was 150+ lbs. I was the only creature in the building to outweigh him. But, rather than his energetic, goofy self, he was quite placid. Completely unconscious, actually, flopped out snoring on a very narrow staircase. Pre-medication for anesthesia is supposed to make animals a little drowsy, but this big fellow had had the idiosyncratic reaction of becoming entirely unconscious. The tech had gotten him halfway down the stairs when he'd decided to sit his butt down, and she couldn't get him to move before he just decided to lie down and nap it off.

So, there I am trying to play forklift with 150+ pounds of deadweight, floppy, gangling legged dog, trying to get him onto the surgical table for the techs who have no hope of being able to lift this guy.

That was when he decided to let loose his apparently extremely full bladder, and pee all over me. Here I am, in my tidy button down shirt and khakis, now covered in extremely smelly doggie fluids, which make him *slippery* on top of being limp and heavy. I eventually manage to get him onto the table, and all is well...

Except, I have five hours left in my shift, and I'm soaked and stinky. Normally, they have an easy answer for this - there are always extra surgical scrubs around in such places. Except, as noted, everyone else in the hospital is 5'3" of small women, and all the scrubs are for them, not the one 6'3" well-over 200 lb me. Somehow, I managed to squeeze myself like an overstuffed sausage into the one set of women's large scrubs they could find in the hospital while my clothes went in the laundry.

I think I may be the only person who got peed on and had to dress in drag while working in IT. If I'm not, I don't want to know about it.

Ryujin · Mar 25, 2016

Umbran said:
This one only barely fits, but what the hey...

Back while in grad school, I did a bit of work on the side doing tech support for a veterinary practice. I'm by no means an IT professional, but I can hook up a new printer to a network, make the scanner put things to the right folders, shepherd OS updates, and so on. They paid me reasonably good money to do that, and handle some occasional things at the front desk.

One day, I'm busy with the scanner, when one of the techs comes out front to tell me they needed a hand back in the hospital portion of the building. I figured that one of the workstations was misbehaving, but I was incorrect.

It is important to note that these days, the veterinary profession is mostly female. I was the only person in the building over 5'3" in height and associated build.

She walks me back to see... a great dane, rather than a workstation. I'd met him when he came in, and he was a happy, friendly, goofy galumphing fellow, in to have certain bits removed. His owners had wanted to breed him at least once, so he'd reached full size before having the procedures, so he was 150+ lbs. I was the only creature in the building to outweigh him. But, rather than his energetic, goofy self, he was quite placid. Completely unconscious, actually, flopped out snoring on a very narrow staircase. Pre-medication for anesthesia is supposed to make animals a little drowsy, but this big fellow had had the idiosyncratic reaction of becoming entirely unconscious. The tech had gotten him halfway down the stairs when he'd decided to sit his butt down, and she couldn't get him to move before he just decided to lie down and nap it off.

So, there I am trying to play forklift with 150+ pounds of deadweight, floppy, gangling legged dog, trying to get him onto the surgical table for the techs who have no hope of being able to lift this guy.

That was when he decided to let loose his apparently extremely full bladder, and pee all over me. Here I am, in my tidy button down shirt and khakis, now covered in extremely smelly doggie fluids, which make him *slippery* on top of being limp and heavy. I eventually manage to get him onto the table, and all is well...

Except, I have five hours left in my shift, and I'm soaked and stinky. Normally, they have an easy answer for this - there are always extra surgical scrubs around in such places. Except, as noted, everyone else in the hospital is 5'3" of small women, and all the scrubs are for them, not the one 6'3" well-over 200 lb me. Somehow, I managed to squeeze myself like an overstuffed sausage into the one set of women's large scrubs they could find in the hospital while my clothes went in the laundry.

I think I may be the only person who got peed on and had to dress in drag while working in IT. If I'm not, I don't want to know about it.

I'll just say that I learnt, about 20 years ago, to always keep a complete change of clothes at work. And I do mean "complete"

Scott DeWar · Mar 25, 2016

heck, as an electrician, I use to carry three shirts in my vehicle!

Hand of Evil · Mar 25, 2016

Back in the day, our branch office were connected to by satellite, which required them to have rather large dishes. Every day we would come in and check the status of your sites and make sure they were online and then call them to find out the cause. Normal fit was to reset their device but there were a few that I always thought was funny.

The dish was gone, someone stole it. This was not noticed until I contacted them and asked if there were any obstructions.
Their was a pelican nesting on the dish.
The dish just was blown away in a storm.

Started to hate printers in my last few years working in IT, would always get calls about printers not printing. Causes:

Out of paper - this one would tick me off to no end, the users did not even check!
Trays not set correctly - some user would put paper in the tray but would not set the guides and paper would be loose in the tray.

Also, back in the day, when desktop just started to get in the work place, they had locks built into them. They indicated this by a key symbol on the CRT. Would get at least one call a week from someone with a locked PC. Told them to turn the key.

Once back in the day, our card reader failed on third shift and the female tech showed up only in a trench coat.

She was very cute and sexy.

Had an employee on second shift, that was in the printer pit throw a box and hit the fire alarm, this did a hard shut down of the data center. It was a Friday night so I ended up working a 24 hour shift.

Building basement flooded due to water main breaking, causing power outage for six months. Generator brought in and had to run everything from our training center and rented space but the biggest issue was it seemed everyone needed "their" PC to due their jobs, had to move and transport about a 100 workstation from the building to the alternate locations. Issue with this was only the data center had power, the rest of the build was dark and no elevators!

Report we had to fill out:
LTR - Lost Time Report - this was when a job cancelled and recorded response time to get the issue resolved. It was to be filled out in RED ink. Manager saw the same guy that threw the box filling it in black in and sent that pen across the room.

Had an employee on second that referred to himself as a "console operator". I was cross training as shift manager and sent him to the printer pit to allow another employee to train on console commands. Guy was so pissed he reported me to Data Center Manager, who told him to go to the printer pit.

Had a very HOT model doing a nude photo shoot (illegal) using Tunnel Vision (painting on our building) as a backdrop at 3AM.

Was told to stop using the phase "user" as it was derogatory.

Umbran · Mar 25, 2016

Hand of Evil said:
Also, back in the day, when desktop just started to get in the work place, they had locks built into them. They indicated this by a key symbol on the CRT. Would get at least one call a week from someone with a locked PC. Told them to turn the key.

My brother has worked as a sysadmin at several universities. One time, early in his career, he was working in a terminal room (yes, terminal, not workstation), and someone came to him asking for help with a printer. Well, fine, it was way below his pay grade, but he's a helpful guy, and it was a professor asking.

They walk over to the printer, and the professor picks up and moves the big "Out of Order" sign that was on the printer to reach the controls and show how it isn't working....

Ryujin · Mar 25, 2016

Scott DeWar said:
heck, as an electrician, I use to carry three shirts in my vehicle!

It's a little different when you work in IT, in an office environment. You don't really expect that sort of thing; like looking under a desk to check that a computer is connected correctly, then getting back up to find a chocolate stain on your entire lower leg. At least I hope that it was only chocolate.

Hand of Evil said:
Started to hate printers in my last few years working in IT, would always get calls about printers not printing. Causes:

Out of paper - this one would tick me off to no end, the users did not even check!

Trays not set correctly - some user would put paper in the tray but would not set the guides and paper would be loose in the tray.

Slamming the paper into the tray, causing the size bar to slide back, is a frequent one. Sending jobs to network printers and changing the paper type to something like "letterhead" is another.

Also, back in the day, when desktop just started to get in the work place, they had locks built into them. They indicated this by a key symbol on the CRT. Would get at least one call a week from someone with a locked PC. Told them to turn the key.

I spent three days in a Montreal CEGEP trying to figure out why the computers we sold them were randomly freezing until the west coast product manager finally figured it out. Hint: plastic chairs and keylocks.

Report we had to fill out:
LTR - Lost Time Report - this was when a job cancelled and recorded response time to get the issue resolved. It was to be filled out in RED ink. Manager saw the same guy that threw the box filling it in black in and sent that pen across the room.

All of my work is tracked, so everyone knows what I've done in a day. We had a director who thought that this was a good idea for the whole department until everyone started to add a line that said something like, "Thirty minutes to fill out this report."

Was told to stop using the phase "user" as it was derogatory.

Try "PEBKAC error" (Problem Exists Between Keyboard and Chair)or "UBD failure" (User Brain Dead).

Hand of Evil · Mar 25, 2016

Ryujin said:
Try "PEBKAC error" (Problem Exists Between Keyboard and Chair)or "UBD failure" (User Brain Dead).

For us in the south, it is a PICNIC error, Problem In Chair Not In Computer.

Scott DeWar · Mar 25, 2016

Well, as an electrician I was sent to a house for a new build install [totally wire a new home] then called to go to a service call to crawl under the house i cobwebs and dust then as I just got started on the new house again I got called to the office. They wanted me to troubleshoot a computer problem. I laughed inside so hard, but all I could do is rub the bridge of my nose and explain I worked on the wires only . . . . .ONLY!

they still needed me to try and fix a problem that was only a software problem. I had to call a friend to get some help, charged them double for my time and my friend's time and still more just because they were too lazy to have called an IT person in the first place. My Boss was happy with what I did and gave me the extra I charged.

It was something to do with a setting or another that had been changed somehow but I have no good recollection of what it was. 2005 ish.