Fools from your past?

[vetran]

come on you guys must have some more gritty stories I led with one of my best, the picture of Bazzer grunting on a car bonnet pen & contract in hand always amuses me.

[courtg9000]

I did a lot of work with Microsoft System Center products.
There were a lot of pre-install tasks and post-install tasks with these products often involving changes to Active Directory and some SQL server stuff.
On almost every site there was a sysadmin or junior who says "you just mount the ISO and click install and thats it - job done and it will work! Cue an idiot sysadmin and the levels of stupidity always got worse from there.
If I was very unlucky the levels of stupidity would permeate upwards to the IT Director or CTO/CIO.

My best one though was a PM back in 2005 who was discussing email alerting with me. 800 servers all in a bad state with techs working across the lot and Microsoft Operations Manager going mental with alerts. He says "I want all email alerts from MOM sent to me"
Me: "Ok go and set up a folder in your Outlook and a rule to divert all emails from this address to that folder"
10 mins later from PM: "done it"
30 mins later from PM shouting at me at my desk "Courtg9000 you b****** I have 40,000 emails in my inbox and I can't see my other emails"
Me: "did you do exactly as I told you"
PM: "Erm"
IT director was walking up to my desk just as I said rather loudly "For the love of the baby Jesus and contraception, your mother should have never have etc"
IT director: "Hi courtg9000 mate,bla bla, beers after work today? oh, PM can we have a chat in my office now? courtg9000, take it easy mate, chat later!"
This wasn't the only reason the PM was walked offsite 20 mins later!

[MonkeysUncle]

Not so much idiocy but naivety

Doing an O365 migration project for a very large rail company. Had a young engineer who was doing some work importing PSTs into mailboxes. Something cocked up and the PSTs imported into the wrong peoples accounts. To make matters worse, this all happened to the finance and legal department.

Cue the young engineer panicking, and instead of escalating up or even telling anyone about it, he took it upon himself to fix the issue ( 1st mistake)

So he emailed the the affected people something along the lines of:

Due to an issue, you may find emails that dont belong to you appearing in your inbox, please do not worry, I am working on resolving this (2nd mistake)

He then proceeded to give himself access to all of these peoples mailboxes, go in and start deleting said emails (3rd mistake).

Where he got screwed...at this precise moment the head of legal (who was affected) and head of IT security was having a meeting with our programme manager. The Head of Legal just casually turns his laptop to our PM and says.....errr what the **** is going on.

The PM was livid, he runs out the meeting, obviously has no idea whats going on and who done it, and basically says to our programme team, whoever finds out who did this...you have permission to fire them!

As it only effected one department we managed to get it sorted quickly.
The initial c*ck up wasnt his fault, I had to sit with him till late in the night righting up an MI report (something he had never done before), explained what he should have done, information governance etc.


The young engineer didnt get fired, although he did ask me after writing up the report if he should come in tomorrow. One the PM calmed down and we sorted the issue it was fine. He was a very good engineer, just made a mistake and then in trying to take the initiative to fix it, made a couple more.

[vetran]

The PM was livid, he runs out the meeting, obviously has no idea whats going on and who done it, and basically says to our programme team, whoever finds out who did this...you have permission to fire them!

Third mistake a toxic workspace where senior managers threaten the sack in public.

Thanks for helping him though lots of people would treat him like a pariah.

[xoggoth]

Glad Gibbon hasn't posted here.

[MonkeysUncle]

Third mistake a toxic workspace where senior managers threaten the sack in public.

I found out recently this PM started a consultancy with a couple of others. Got a good contract with a Fortune 500 and some other companies and then got kicked out of the consultancy for his antics. Behaviour was so bad at the F500 they cancelled the contract. Hes still a shareholder for the consultancy but they dont want him anywhere near clients!

Thanks for helping him though lots of people would treat him like a pariah.

He was a good engineer, made a mistake and in a panic tried to fix it, just went the wrong way about it.

[Gibbon]

Glad Gibbon hasn't posted here.

I don't remember you doing anything foolish from those days (16 yrs ago now!).

I do remember that nasty permie who took joy to kick all the contractors out at 6pm, until we were going to miss a delivery.

I remember BB doing the old timesheet 'to sign or not to sign' every Friday. That was a cr*p contract only you and Riddler made it bearable and your mad dancing

[xoggoth]

16 yrs! Gordon Bennet, time flies. Yeh, was a crappy contract, all the aircraft things were boring!

[ladymuck]

I've not worked with any CUK regulars so my foibles are all under wraps, where they should be

[d000hg]

I do remember that nasty permie who took joy to kick all the contractors out at 6pm, until we were going to miss a delivery.

Contractors working past 6pm? Complaining about not being allowed to? What on earth!