xarph posted:

From a former life, names changed to protect myself although I could care less about the subject:

I worked for a large company of the sort that gets to dictate terms to the likes of Microsoft and Apple. One fine fiscal half, an advertising company was acquired. Some employees of the advertising company were kept. Others were dismissed. A subset refused to sign certain papers and thus were disappeared.

One of the employees that survived the culling was a man who, for the purposes of this story, shall be named Jack Brentwood. Jack's job was to create banner advertisements. At the old company, he received certain concessions from IT as befitting his stature. This was not the case at his new employer, despite his unwillingness to believe such a thing.

Upon arrival and orientation, his user account was created. The automated system in place doled out his new username, which was jbrentwood. He did not like this. A ticket came into my queue, requesting in very firm wording that his account be renamed to "ImJackBrentwood" (caps inclusive).

Now, requests to change user names is nothing new. Women requested them all the time to dispose of their maiden names. However, this was generally discouraged given the extremely large infrastructure in place at this company. Instead, an offer was made to create an email alias with the desired new name. Ninety percent of the time, this was acceptable. If it wasn't, we could change the name, but the user would be unable to log in to any network services for round-about four hours.

Jbrentwood was insistent that we rename his account. An email alias would not be acceptable - he MUST be able to log into any internal service using "ImJackBrentwood." To reinforce the fact that he had to be able to log into any internal service using "ImJackBrentwood," he attached his email signature, which contained his Skype name, AIM screenname, Yahoo screenname, MSN screenname, and Twitter, all of which were "ImJackBrentwood." Presumably, the passwords for all of these services were either identical or variations on a theme, but this was mere theory on my part. It was the only sane excuse I could think up - perhaps he had a strange condition that necessitated muscle memory in order to fill in a username box.

And so, jbrentwood became ImJackBrentwood, and there was much rejoicing.

A month later, another ticket came into the queue which I immediately grabbed due to the unusual username - ImJackBrentwood. ImJackBrentwood, it seemed, required some internet-facing web space on which to store preview advertisement banners for clients. This was not a simple request. Any content that faced the internet at large was handled by a very specific group of gatekeepers. What ImJackBrentwood required - a windows file share where he could drag and drop files to appear magically on the public internet - was flat out against the rules.

The company had many services that were exposed to the internet and allowed user-generated content. Surely one of those would suffice? Negative - the 20MB quota would not do for such important tasks as previewing advertisement banners.

And so ImJackBrentwood's request was escalated, per policy, to the first gates of Network Security. Network Security understood the request, and described an enormous list of checks, bylaws, and regulations that would have to be satisfied before an easement could be granted between ImJackBrentwood's explorer.exe and The Internet.

All of IT rested that evening, for no one had completed the herculean task of satisfying Network Security's boilerplate regulations without support from The Almighty.

A week later, an email roughly the size of a professional athlete's prenuptial agreement appeared in the ticket. Network Security's bluff had been called by ImJackBrentwood! Newspapers were stopped and the ticket, per policy, was duly sent to the Black Gate of Sysops.

The Sysops denied the request within fifteen minutes.

ImJackBrentwood raised a fuss and had the ticket escalated.

The BoFH on duty denied the request within ten minutes.

ImJackBrentwood raised a fuss and had the ticket escalated.

The King Sysop denied the request within five minutes.

ImJackBrentwood raised a fuss and had the ticket escalated.

The Emperor Sysop of the Western Hemisphere examined the ticket, and wrote an email which to the best of my memory read verbatim:

quote:

Dear Sir,

This task you have described would require a redesign of our infrastructure and incur an estimated cost of $100,000 in new hardware purchases as well as $10,000 in labor.

From examining the ticket and inferring time spent on this issue, over $1,500 of company time has been consumed on your request. This could have purchased several years worth of third party hosting which would have satisfied both your needs and our security policies.

Request denied.

ImJackBrentwood resigned a month later and moved to Mexico.

AlexDeGruven posted:

Our children will never get to experience the hilarity and rage of a good old fashioned Reply All storm.

DACK FAYDEN posted:

a Brother?

Paladine_PSoT posted:

I genuinely love that every iteration of this thread since the dawn of time has included ImJackBrentwood

A Frosty Witch posted:

Aaaaaaand they ghosted me

Internet Explorer posted:

Snip

Internet Explorer posted:

yeah, I'm sorry, this is just too good and too new of a title to get swapped out

A Frosty Witch posted:

Dream job turned me down, big surprise.

I have decided I'm completely unhirable.

I'm going to retire from job hunting for a bit, I think.

The Fool posted:

this was extra fun when I was managing a phone system because I live in a state where we only have one area code

for a long time if the number is long distance, the area code is required, but if the number was local, you couldn't use the area code

people would have all kinds of problems with this because cell phones helpfully connected the call regardless, so the tickets were often "can't call number from desk phone, works on cell phone, phone system sucks"

I spent a whole lot of time building a translation table with local prefixes in it so people could dial out without this issue

last year the phone companies got together and decided everyone needed the area code all the time

A Frosty Witch posted:

It's me, the dumb bitch that just sent out like 18 cover letters with "Dear [recipient]" instead of an actual salutation because I thought I was slick making a template.

A Frosty Witch posted:

Hughmoris posted:

Oof! How did that play out?

A Frosty Witch posted:

I got the second interview

Thanks Ants posted:

klosterdev posted:

Ticket came in where a new email accepting the same meeting invite keeps repeatedly showing up in the recipients inbox every minute, even after the sender rebooted their laptop. What the hell Outlook, can't wait to see what's causing it later today.

Sirotan posted:

The word printer no longer exists on my resume and I will disavow all knowledge of them if asked.

johnny park posted:

Just put what I hope is the cap on one of the dumbest series of requests I've ever had to deal with.

A little background information: there currently exists in our system an email distribution list that I'll call D1, whose only members are this guy in our real estate department and his two assistants.

Last week he asked me to create a new email distribution list and a new shared mailbox. This new distribution list I'll call D2. He asked me to:

1. Give him and his two assistants access to the shared mailbox
2. Remove him and assistants from D1
3. Add the shared mailbox as the sole member of D1 and D2

So, emails to D1 or D2 both just go to the same shared mailbox. Seems kind of redundant, but whatever. Distribution lists are free.

Then a few days later, he asked me to add him and his assistants to D2 as well. So now an email sent to D2 would go to the three of them, and then also go to D1, which then sends the same email to the shared mailbox that they have access to. This is apparently for 'tracking purposes'.

Then, yesterday, he wanted the three of them added BACK to D1. So now an email sent to D2 would go to their inboxes twice and to the shared mailbox once. Again, for 'tracking'.

And now today, he wanted the shared mailbox itself to act as a distribution list, with the three of them as members, while maintaining its function as a shared mailbox. The only way to do this is to set an auto-forwarding rule on the shared mailbox to forward to a new, separate distribution list (D3) with the three of them as members. So an email sent to D2 would go to their inboxes THREE TIMES. I explained this to him and he agreed it was stupid, and had me remove him and his assistants from D1 and D2. So now, an email sent to D1 or D2 goes to the shared mailbox, which then gets auto-forwarded to D3, which then gets sent to this guy and his team.