Your IT anecdote or mistake

phaneuf1

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Tackle

Hopefully there was a good reason you were looking at his call log. Though it may be tempting to look at others personal stuff (e-mails, sites visited, personal directories), it's highly unethical and could easily get you fired.

Edit: unless you're instructed to do so, of course.

The only mistake I've ever made was thinking I made a mistake.

phaneuf1

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joshmadakor

, OP +rep'd for deleting his posts and making me laugh

powerfool

Eh... once I deleted the Exchange .edb file for my company incorrectly assuming (because the individual communicated this to me) someone copied it off already to the new server... That was on Exchange 5.5 way back in the day.

onesaint

In my early days as a Jr. SA I GhostCast an image unicast to a production workstation. I had 90 seconds to run across the building, to the workstation, and tell the user I needed his computer (a supervisor). There was a warning on top of all the other windows stating "The Administrator has chosen to shutdown your computer" or something to that extent. I killed the Ghost process and his workstation was left intact. Needless to say, I made sure I never did that again.

ptilsen

P to V'd a PDC Emulator setup for hardware time to an ESXi server not setup for the correct time... or month. Most of the other servers in the domain were tombstoned. I have since resolved to never let PDC Emulator's time source be set by anything but NTP and to always, always configure the system time immediately before (in BIOS) and after installing the OS.

SteveLord

What's important...is how you cover it up during the time you are fixing it. Depending on who you are explaining yourself to of course. "Server issue, corrupted file, Microsoft bug" etc etc seem to be acceptable explanations for most people.

Hypntick

SteveLord wrote: »

What's important...is how you cover it up during the time you are fixing it. Depending on who you are explaining yourself to of course. "Server issue, corrupted file, Microsoft bug" etc etc seem to be acceptable explanations for most people.

Corrupted file and Microsoft issues are always a good fallback. Even with non-tech savvy users a "Well you know how Microsoft can be..." usually gets a chuckle and nod out of most.

the_Grinch

I once had a job working for a school district and during the summer we would do reimaging of all the PCs. Well one of the VP's was always complaining about how much his computer sucked and that he didn't use it. We finally got a new PC for him when he was on vacation and the admin said to set it up as like a gift when he came back. Now I had been told that everyone was religious in saving everything to their H drive and if they didn't it was on them. So after setting up his PC, I took out the old one and redeployed it for student use. He returns and tells the admin he had some files on it that he needs. The admin asks what I did with the PC and I had to tell him I redeployed it. The VP assumed it was the admin who did it and began to bad mouth him while I was in his office working on getting speakers setup. I told him it was me, to which immediately I got the silent treatment (I never liked that guy when I was a student), and then got called to the director of technology's office. She didn't say anything about it so I pretended it didn't happen...

SteveLord

Hypntick wrote: »

Corrupted file and Microsoft issues are always a good fallback. Even with non-tech savvy users a "Well you know how Microsoft can be..." usually gets a chuckle and nod out of most.

Exactly. Sometimes it's just easier to use your BS Shield and move on with the day.