Antifreeze Head posted:

I'm in a non-IT role, as is my co-worker. He can rival your grandmother for how bad he is with technology.

I was in on Sunday, and he was. I saw him sitting at his computer typing out his timesheet in Microsoft Word. He finished the document, printed it, and closed Word without saving.

He walked over to the printer (multi function device with fax, copying, scanning, etc) with a USB drive. He plucked one of the two copies he made, and put it into the document feeder, plugged the USB drive into the MFD and scanned his time sheet into a PDF which was saved on the USB drive.

He then threw away the physical copy he just put through the scanner, took the other physical copy and the USB drive back to his desk.

That's where he plugged the USB drive into the computer, opened up his gmail account, and attached the PDF to a message that he sent himself.

From there, he downloaded the file from his inbox onto his computer, so he could have a backup.

He does this every week, because that is what someone (who I assume hates him) told him to do if he wants a copy on the computer. And you might think that to be an isolated incident done to mess with me, but he doesn't have anything saved on his computer, he has never saved anything. It took me a long series of questions to determine that he had no idea that a computer could actually ever save anything, so he's been using some variation of this system for years to preserve copies of things.

Wilford Cutlery posted:

Speaking of going down the rabbit hole, I had a client call today who had trouble sending email. Now let it be known that he and his brother who run this 5-person company are notorious for trying to send 20MB attachments thru AT&T's provided email service.

I encouraged him to break up today's 20MB PDF into smaller files and send those maybe 2 at a time. He called back when he got to the last one which was stalling, I remote in and see that it's 6MB but trying to go out. I have him wait for five minutes and out it goes.

I then asked him how he comes upon these massive files to send:

1) Receive 2MB PDF attachment
2) Print it out
3) Scan it thru the big Kyocera unit
4) Send 20MB scan of exact same loving thing



I then advised him to not do the whole print/scan thing - just forward the email directly, or save the attachment and attach to a new email. He thought those would be introducing extra, unnecessary steps!

Antifreeze Head posted:

I'm in a non-IT role, as is my co-worker. He can rival your grandmother for how bad he is with technology.

I was in on Sunday, and he was. I saw him sitting at his computer typing out his timesheet in Microsoft Word. He finished the document, printed it, and closed Word without saving.

He walked over to the printer (multi function device with fax, copying, scanning, etc) with a USB drive. He plucked one of the two copies he made, and put it into the document feeder, plugged the USB drive into the MFD and scanned his time sheet into a PDF which was saved on the USB drive.

He then threw away the physical copy he just put through the scanner, took the other physical copy and the USB drive back to his desk.

That's where he plugged the USB drive into the computer, opened up his gmail account, and attached the PDF to a message that he sent himself.

From there, he downloaded the file from his inbox onto his computer, so he could have a backup.

He does this every week, because that is what someone (who I assume hates him) told him to do if he wants a copy on the computer. And you might think that to be an isolated incident done to mess with me, but he doesn't have anything saved on his computer, he has never saved anything. It took me a long series of questions to determine that he had no idea that a computer could actually ever save anything, so he's been using some variation of this system for years to preserve copies of things.

Segmentation Fault posted:

Segmentation Fault posted:

you're loving with us. I refuse to believe this is real.

Antifreeze Head posted:

I wish this were the case. I may be slightly incorrect in stating that he doesn't think computer CAN save anything, but it is certainly true that he has no idea HOW to make a computer save something. We work in a radio station and he will routinely take calls by recording them in Soundforge, but he never saves them. That isn't unusual if they will be used in the next five minutes, but he'll leave the program open on the desktop with the .wav hanging out in memory until he can play it for the next person, even if it is days later. I know that to be true once I closed something on him and he was upset that he couldn't get it back. I told him to just load in his saved file and he looked at me quizzically, like I suggest he harvest bananas from his rectum.

He's kinda generally bad at his job. He's on air "talent" but he smacks his lips a lot, says "uhhh..." about every three seconds (we've timed it), and has a lot of dead air in general. He also panics really quickly, angers even faster and has straight up admitted that he can't adlib anything to the point that if there is an incorrect word in a script, he'll read it. Like, he'd talk about the Florida Panthers being in the Super Bowl even if that was just a mistake in the copy from the newswire. He knows the Florida Panthers are a hockey team and that the Super Bowl is for football, but he cannot make that correction on the fly.

He also can't pronounce things all that well, particularly many names which is a constant source of amusement for us because he insists on reading out about four minutes of celebrity birthdays every day. My personal favourite is Gilbert Gottfried, who he declared to be GOT-fried. It's his birthday again in nine days and several people around here are excited to hear that he has learned absolutely nothing in the past year.

In case you are thinking he's really old and maybe can be excused because his brain is scrambled from serving in Vietnam or something, he turns 48 in April and has been in the industry for a couple of decades. He'd probably still be using actual physical tape if we didn't take the machines out of the studio. The one thing he can do really well is follow precise directions, which is how that method of saving came to be.

Antifreeze Head posted:

I'm in a non-IT role, as is my co-worker. He can rival your grandmother for how bad he is with technology.

I was in on Sunday, and he was. I saw him sitting at his computer typing out his timesheet in Microsoft Word. He finished the document, printed it, and closed Word without saving.

He walked over to the printer (multi function device with fax, copying, scanning, etc) with a USB drive. He plucked one of the two copies he made, and put it into the document feeder, plugged the USB drive into the MFD and scanned his time sheet into a PDF which was saved on the USB drive.

He then threw away the physical copy he just put through the scanner, took the other physical copy and the USB drive back to his desk.

That's where he plugged the USB drive into the computer, opened up his gmail account, and attached the PDF to a message that he sent himself.

From there, he downloaded the file from his inbox onto his computer, so he could have a backup.

He does this every week, because that is what someone (who I assume hates him) told him to do if he wants a copy on the computer. And you might think that to be an isolated incident done to mess with me, but he doesn't have anything saved on his computer, he has never saved anything. It took me a long series of questions to determine that he had no idea that a computer could actually ever save anything, so he's been using some variation of this system for years to preserve copies of things.

neogeo0823 posted:

There aren't enough styled emotes for that. I mean, you can't get more head-in-the-sand, blatant-disregard-for-security, bull-headed, nor preposterously, monstrously, negligently stupid than that, can you? I mean, as far as network security goes, not like, burn-down-the-building-with-kerosene-soaked-shoes, anyway.

I firmly believe that some companies should never have graduated beyond paper.

Antifreeze Head posted:

I'm in a non-IT role, as is my co-worker. He can rival your grandmother for how bad he is with technology.

I was in on Sunday, and he was. I saw him sitting at his computer typing out his timesheet in Microsoft Word. He finished the document, printed it, and closed Word without saving.

He walked over to the printer (multi function device with fax, copying, scanning, etc) with a USB drive. He plucked one of the two copies he made, and put it into the document feeder, plugged the USB drive into the MFD and scanned his time sheet into a PDF which was saved on the USB drive.

He then threw away the physical copy he just put through the scanner, took the other physical copy and the USB drive back to his desk.

That's where he plugged the USB drive into the computer, opened up his gmail account, and attached the PDF to a message that he sent himself.

From there, he downloaded the file from his inbox onto his computer, so he could have a backup.

He does this every week, because that is what someone (who I assume hates him) told him to do if he wants a copy on the computer. And you might think that to be an isolated incident done to mess with me, but he doesn't have anything saved on his computer, he has never saved anything. It took me a long series of questions to determine that he had no idea that a computer could actually ever save anything, so he's been using some variation of this system for years to preserve copies of things.

FreshFeesh posted:

A good buddy of mine working at another MSP called me with a horror story that luckily wasn't his fault.

He texts me early in the morning with "do you know a lot about Bitcoin?" I ask how bad the crypto infection was and he says that the ransom is approaching $10k. The company pays and ... nothing.

Turns out it wasn't a generic crypto variant that ripped through their four interconnected locations and all of their online disk to disk backups, it was a malicious hacker who wormed their way in, somehow got domain admin rights, and then went to town nuking everything from their AD structure to shadow copies, encrypting things on a lark.

The company had no offline or cloud backups, instead duplicating data between remote sites, which were all accessible through the same network link and with the same credentials.

This 100-person civil engineering firm has public and government contracts, which when added to their existing projects puts their potential losses in the tens of millions.

While all of this is bad and terrible and post-worthy, what really brings it all home is the fact that they had been hit with crypto variants twice before and just assumed that paying the ransom was part of doing business, without ever having improved their security or business practices (sometimes actively fighting my friend's company's recommendations like "changing passwords" and "disabling former employee accounts").

Just boggles my mind.

Antifreeze Head posted:

he can't adlib anything to the point that if there is an incorrect word in a script, he'll read it.

Antifreeze Head posted:

So there you go, not every broadcast engineer is incompetent, but they will probably all make you jump through hoops if they don't like you.

Steakandchips posted:

Lime Tonics, is the boss man in your story the owner?

If not, has he been sacked yet?

Segmentation Fault posted:

you're loving with us. I refuse to believe this is real.

Wrath of the Bitch King posted:

I'm pretty sure it's just where I work. Either that or behind the scenes a lot of churches are just hosed up.

Here's a story:

The church I work for is very into pageants and theatrical stuff. They'll have plays with the thematic subtlety of a sledgehammer, usually centering around or at least alluding to going to hell.
Personally I find some of the stuff they put out there fairly objectionable but I won't derail the thread with that kind of a powder-keg. Just to preface, I'm not going to inject my personal opinion of the subject matter into any of what follows, i'm merely presenting what happened. The gist of the play they want to put on is thus:

There's a young, attractive woman riding in a cab. The devil (literally) decides to hop in shotgun next to the cab driver and "orders" him to force himself on the girl. The girl is horrified, the terrible act happens, and the cab driver somehow gets away scott free after doing the Devil's work. As if it wasn't horrible enough the woman gets pregnant and has recurring nightmares about fire and brimstone whenever she seriously thinks about abortion, so she's effectively guilted into having the kid. She has the kid, gives it up for adoption, and life continues but she can't live with the guilt of abandoning her child. She gets into drugs and ODs, which counts as suicide, which means she goes to hell. The intent is to show this on a Sunday afternoon to a mixed age audience.

So the powers that be approach me and my boss about something they want to do: they want to set the lady playing the poor woman mentioned above on fire as part of the show. Instantly the word NO launches itself from my face before the conversation really begins in earnest, but that just means I'm ignored from that point on and it's a conversation between my boss and the pastor. To this day I'm thankful for how level-headed my boss is; there have been a number of times where I've nearly lost it over stupid bullshit at this place, and setting a lady on fire as part of an act definitely ranks up there. Like most people in this place, the "actress" is a volunteer.

They're talking about this while I'm red-faced and fuming and the Head Pastor is very animatedly pontificating on kevlar and fireproof dresses and such. Clearly not anyone I want messing with pyrotechnics. My boss is completely on my side and is having almost as hard a time as I am keeping it together, but he's a veteran. He's been in this crazy trench waaaaaaay longer than I have, so he knows how to speak the lingo. My boss pretends to do the speaking in tongues bit and walks off, waving back at me and the pastor saying he'll need to think on it. A minute later my phone starts to buzz and I know that's my cue to head back to the office with him.

I get back there and I unload. They HAD to hear me screaming, they just had to, but to this day I've never heard a single word about any of it. My boss looks at me and tells me, "Look, they're going to go ahead with whatever stupidity it is they're planning. The best we can hope to do is minimize the impact. Once <pastor name> gets an idea in his head he's going to run with it no matter how negligent it is."

We talk for a while longer and get into a creative groove. I had the idea, but he put the finishing touches on it: instead of setting the girl on fire we'd use her high heels as a form of symbolism. It'd be easy enough to rig something together that would set them on fire with a switch of some kind, and we had the time to plan it so it wasn't a rush job. We ordered one of those fire starter kits that magicians use and had our plan of attack in order.

The next day he presents the idea and the pastor loves it, but he wants a practical demonstration. We don't have any high heels and the pair being used for the show are the only ones they have, so we're charged with buying a pair ourselves so we can demonstrate. The pastor is a huge rear end in a top hat with regards to scheduling and making himself available for questions/concerns, so we know he'll only be around for maybe an hour before he vanishes into the darkness for a week. We break off from the pastor and make the quickest dash for PayLess shoes that a human has ever made, returning with these red sequined abominations. They're perfect.

It takes ten minutes or so to get everything prepped, but we get it done. The presentation goes off without a hitch and the ugly shoes are burning on stage on top of an industrial rubber mat. It's a slow burn too, which I thought was a nice touch if you're going for subtlety in how you present the theme (slow encroachment of sin, damnation is a gradual burn, that kind of thing). The head pastor sort of grunts at us and tells us it's good enough, but I can tell he's not super thrilled. Dude really wanted to set this poor lady on fire, I guess. We never got comped for the shoes OR the remote starter, either.

I'm not a member of the church, so I didn't see the production. I just work there. My boss though, he saw it, and the next time I saw him was a few hours after the show and he was obviously stricken. Something was wrong. "Yo dude, you alright? You look pale as hell."
He tells me that the higher-ups didn't think the shoes burning was obvious enough. The fire was too small, not evocative enough. So they doused the shoes in kerosene and set everything up the same way we had it otherwise. "Bitch King, walk out to the stage with me. It's easier to just show you."

We walk out and the left half of the stage is charred black. I'll never forget the sight of it: the piano they keep on stage had collapsed when one of the legs burned through, the electronics and lighting were all disabled since the damage was so extensive, and apparently they had a tough time getting the fire otu at all because all the fire extinguishers were expired and barely worked. Apparently, mid-fire, someone ran out to Wal-Mart and bought two of the cheap ones while the rest of the church battled the flames on the stage with faulty equipment. Thankfully nobody got hurt, but sitting there right in the middle of the stage were a pair of high heels, completely unblemished and untouched by the fire. Mocking the absurdity of it all. I'm told it burned for twenty minutes straight while people sat around waiting for Wal-Mart guy to get back, just doing their best to contain it somehow with the power of good intentions.

To this day I don't know what they did to gently caress up so badly, but I took it as a sign that maybe there is a dude up there punishing us for our stupidity. Just maybe. Needless to say there was a prayer drive the following week and the damages ended up repaired rather quickly. I'm still just thankful they didn't try to set some poor lady on fire. And to this day they still haven't updated all the fire extinguishers, just the ones around the stage.

Malachite_Dragon posted:

Every time I start to think maybe my opinion on religious nutcases is a bit unfair, I'm going to go back up and re-read that post. What the loving gently caress.

Mo_Steel posted:

I'm going to dub it Karmic Entropy. For every action taken by a competent IT worker that reduces repetitive, time consuming tasks (e.g. writing a powershell script to automate a process) a user must equally and oppositely duplicate their work. Balance in all things!

You just saved an hour a week by revamping the process you use to import csv files? The coworker two cubes down just determined that because they couldn't save a read-only file they opened they have to burn it to a CD and then drag the file from the CD to a new folder on their desktop.

Collateral Damage posted:

Have you tried changing his script to end with "Go gently caress yourself, San Diego" ?

neogeo0823 posted:

And yet, literally the very next post. What the gently caress? What even the gently caress.

Segmentation Fault posted:

you're loving with us. I refuse to believe this is real.

e: an e-waste recycler came in. Or more specifically, someone my boss hired off of Craigslist to move out all of our old poo poo. A different boss wanted to make sure the guy taking our stuff would destroy the hard drives so that any potentially sensitive information that we didn't know was on them would be gone. To that end, he wrote this:



"Guarantee" used to say "guarranty" until I corrected him, which I regret now honestly.

The Lone Badger posted:

A small drill-press can scrap a pile of hard disks pretty quickly. Put a 12mm hole through each unit (casing and all), any subsequent attempt to spin that platter up will end badly.

Antifreeze Head posted:

Until they shut that service down, this guy would print off the various weather reports, cut them apart with scissors, tape them to another piece of paper, photo copy that and use the copy for his weather reports.

Wibla posted:

The generation that grew up with DOS and early Windows has some advantages over both younger and older people in my experience. Kids these days generally don't give a gently caress about how stuff works, they just want their games to work. Back in the early 90s you had to be somewhat computer literate to get poo poo working. Especially games. Now? Install steam, done.

Collateral Damage posted:

I'm pretty sure the minicomputer/mainframe greybeards from the 70s said the same thing about MS-DOS and the PC.

ErIog posted:

This is mostly a UI failure on the part of the tools they're using.

Ghostlight posted:

I wish I were still naive enough to believe that one day someone could invent a non-lovely printer.

The Lone Badger posted:

A small drill-press can scrap a pile of hard disks pretty quickly. Put a 12mm hole through each unit (casing and all), any subsequent attempt to spin that platter up will end badly.

Segmentation Fault posted:

A customer came in.

"I went on a porn site and I got hit hard."

... Points for honesty I guess?

divabot posted:

I wrote this a while ago and just found it again. Need to record a version. (In particular, I look forward to the whiskey and cigarettes recording it will require.)


the keyboard has been drinking
my bluetooth set's asleep
the tech team went back to new york, and left me all alone
the server has to take a leak
have you noticed that the carpet needs a haircut?
and the monitor looks just like a prison break
and the telephone's out of cigarettes
as usual the mail server's on the make
and the keyboard has been drinking, heavily
the keyboard has been drinking
and he's on the hard stuff tonight


the keyboard has been drinking
and you can't find your netapp
even with the geiger counter
and i guarantee you that it will hate you
from the bottom of its raid
and all of your friends remind you
that you just can't get served without it
the keyboard has been drinking


the keyboard has been drinking
and the webmaster's blind in one eye
and he can't see out of the other
and the nt admin's got a hearing aid
and he showed up with his mother
and the keyboard has been drinking
without fear of contradiction i say
the keyboard has been drinking


our father who art in heaven
hallowed be thy glass
thy kingdom come, thy will be done
on earth as it is in the office
give us this day our daily splash
forgive us our hangovers
as we forgive all those who continue to hangover against us
and lead us not into temptation
but deliver from evil and someone you must all ride home


because the keyboard has been drinking
and he's your friend not mine
because the keyboard has been drinking
and he's not my responsibility


the security guard's this sumo wrestler
kinda cream puff casper milquetoast
and the ceo's just a mental midget
with the i.q. of a fencepost
i'm going down, hang onto me, i'm going down
watch me skate across an acre of nylon axminster
i know i can do it, i'm in total control
and the keyboard has been drinking
and he's embarassing me
the keyboard has been drinking, he raided his mini bar


the keyboard has been drinking
and the aerons are all on fire
and all the news sites were just fooling
and slashdot has retired
and i've got a feeling that the keyboard has been drinking
it's just a hunch
the keyboard has been drinking and he's going to lose his lunch
and the keyboard has been drinking
not me, not me
the keyboard has been drinking
not me

Kaizoku posted:

If they admit to a porn site, the truth must be far more nefarious.

divabot posted:

I wrote this a while ago and just found it again. Need to record a version. (In particular, I look forward to the whiskey and cigarettes recording it will require.)