What's the wierdest or dumbest thing a co-worker said to you?

I just recently had a senior IT security specialist who is training me look at a network diagram in a meeting and ask "is eigrp the name of a company?". The diagram had a few datacenters on the map from a few of the business we were looking at..made me want to slap myself.

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Comments

Polynomial

If we're all so smart on here we should just start a consulting firm ourselves. =P

Iristheangel

Heh. I'm sure plenty of people here do work in consulting.

Random Network Engineer with CCNA/CCNP with 10+ years of experience:
"But I don't understand... What's the benefit of pruning VLANs on a trunk?"
"Router-on-a-stick has always worked for us. Let's leave the routing to the router and the switching to the switches."
After I explained using an EEM applet to solve a problem in the data center: "EEM applet? I've never heard of it. That sounds like one of those silly things you would read in a certification book."
After a broadcast storm in the data center and I asked about broadcast storm control: "What's that?"
"iBGP? What's that?"

We definitely aren't perfect by any means but there are some common sense things people should know after enough time or if they studied/renewed their certifications at all.

Alexsmith

Iristheangel wrote: »

Heh. I'm sure plenty of people here do work in consulting.

Random Network Engineer with CCNA/CCNP with 10+ years of experience:
"But I don't understand... What's the benefit of pruning VLANs on a trunk?"
"Router-on-a-stick has always worked for us. Let's leave the routing to the router and the switching to the switches."
After I explained using an EEM applet to solve a problem in the data center: "EEM applet? I've never heard of it. That sounds like one of those silly things you would read in a certification book."
After a broadcast storm in the data center and I asked about broadcast storm control: "What's that?"
"iBGP? What's that?"

We definitely aren't perfect by any means but there are some common sense things people should know after enough time or if they studied/renewed their certifications at all.

I agree, we all say silly things at times. But there's no excuse if it's something like a CCNP with a decade of experience who doesn't now about i/eBGP or about Broadcast storm control..sometimes you have to wonder how some of these people keep their position

MickQ

Alexsmith wrote: »

sometimes you have to wonder how some of these people keep their position

Seniority/management.

gorebrush

It's the ones who are supposedly certified and ask the silliest questions that get me.

W Stewart

A friend of mine told me that an old co-worker of his would always bs the managers at his job to seem like he had technical knowledge. He said something along the lines of "I have to reprogram the sql server in the bios".

Another former coworker was on a wireless laptop in the datacenter pinging one of the servers to test the speed. For some reason, he thought if he walked to the other side of the datacenter further away from the server, it would affect the results of his ping test. It had nothing to do with the wireless AP in the building. He just didn't understand that the distance between his wireless laptop and the server wouldn't affect ping speeds.

Cloud admin at the same job came in at night to do some maintenance on the network. They were taking all of the redundant switches on the cloud network and migrating them to non-redundant switches of a different brand. Eliminating redundancy in the network infrastructure of a webhosting business was dumb enough by itself. None of the customers were notified of the maintenance because as the cloud admin said, There wouldn't be any downtime. 12 hours of downtime later, they finally managed to get the network back up and repair the configuration on all of the broken server instances that never came back online.

Iristheangel

MickQ wrote: »

Seniority/management.

Yep. In that scenario, it was seniority and nothing more.

kohr-ah

Iristheangel wrote: »

Yep. In that scenario, it was seniority and nothing more.

If no one here has read the book "The Dilbert Principle" it makes me think of this.

The basic concept of the Dilbert Principle is that the most ineffective workers are systematically moved to the place where they can do the least damage: management.

CodeBlox

Psh... We had a manager who always did more damage than good. He is no longer with our company either. These people simply have no place.

MSP-IT

The general incompetence of middle-management is what gives me hope for the future. I certainly wouldn't mind being a c-level some day.

bugzy3188

"In SonicWall land, setting “virtual interfaces” is setting “VLANs”. Subnetting and VLANs are very different. We do not want to segregate traffic by a simple subnet as it does not offer the security necessary to keep traffic separate. Meaning, it is easy to enter an IP address or change a subnet so you can communicate with other devices on the same network"

This was said to me in an email...verbatim by my boss today. The kicker is, I don't work for a "suit", I work for the owner of a MSP, one who has been doing IT for a long time. I actually got booted off the project for sticking to my guns and correcting him. No big deal though, I have secured another position and am putting my notice in soon

FloOz

Dieg0M wrote: »

A Network Admin asked me for some help to configure an ACL, he needed to know what port was ICMP.

Maybe he was referring to blocking echo replies? Which would be port 7

As for dumbest thing said to me..."Certs aren't worth it"

MSP-IT

bugzy3188 wrote: »

"In SonicWall land, setting “virtual interfaces” is setting “VLANs”. Subnetting and VLANs are very different. We do not want to segregate traffic by a simple subnet as it does not offer the security necessary to keep traffic separate. Meaning, it is easy to enter an IP address or change a subnet so you can communicate with other devices on the same network"

This was said to me in an email...verbatim by my boss today. The kicker is, I don't work for a "suit", I work for the owner of a MSP, one who has been doing IT for a long time. I actually got booted off the project for sticking to my guns and correcting him. No big deal though, I have secured another position and am putting my notice in soon

It's my understanding that your boss is correct. VLAN segmentation resides as a separate "virtual LAN" as seen by the switch/router, whereas a subnet is a single implementation of a LAN where no address overlap can exist. I haven't done much networking, but I think he's right.

bugzy3188

But you can't just change the address of a host to communicate with a host on another subnet, you would have to change the default gateway, LAN interface IP on the router. I'm not saying VLANing isn't a better way to go but if one were to utilize multiple WAN interfaces on a router to simply implement LANs, its not as if it is an open network....right?

bugzy3188

I should add that we are talking about /24 addresses here each on a different interface on the router

DrB1986

I may be a bit late on the thread, but got something interesting to add to this..

I knew this one guy when I was working for a couple of months doing tech refresh and some other IT work when I was in Japan in 2012, on one of our days off me, him and some guys went to a japanese store to do some shooping there, long story short the werdo got some japanese school girl dolls and said to me about being with an actual school girl. A bit later on me and him got assigned to the naval hospital nearby and when we were in the car he was talking about underage school girls again, this time in a more inappropriate way, I never spoke to him again and stayed away from that dude for good....