Most Embarassing IT Story

TeKniques

That's right, post them here!

Since mine just happened to me today I figured I would have to share it.

I was wiring some CAT5 cable through one of our office buildings from a server on one side of the building to a switch on the other side. We wire above the ceiling, so as I was almost finished I tripped on one of the conduits in the ceiling and that's right .... I fell through the ceiling right in the filing office with 3 ladies in there doing filing!

They all screamed as I fell through and made the 10 foot drop. LMAO I took out a whole 6 ft section of the ceiling. Needless to say it was embarrasing to say the least. I got the job done though and now I'm off to a wedding rehearsel.

jescab

That is a funny story and I don't think anyone can beat that story.

mobri09

First off, Thats prob the best story i have ever heard. You rock! Glad your safe man. I am laughing as i type this. The only story that i have is getting electricuted at best buy in front of customers because of my clumsyness.

jd_mattos

LMAO! That is too funny. I have always been afraid I was going to do that when running cables in the ceiling, but I have never done it.
Good thing you are ok though.

janmike

Ouch! That's something they don't teach in Network+ study materials!

Glad you're OK.

jacev1

mobri09 wrote:

The only story that i have is getting electricuted at best buy in front of customers because of my clumsyness.

This didn't happen to me, but it's one of the best tech tales I've ever read. It took me almost 1 hour to find it again online. ( C & P from another forum)

Here's the story for ya!

I mention to a coworker that I was going over to Best Buy to buy a computer game, and she asks to tag along because she has to return a DIMM that she purchased in error.

We get there and approach the counter. A kid comes up and my coworker explains her deal. The kid says that he has to verify that the memory isn't defective before he can issue a credit. Fine. Sounds reasonable.

He steps back into the repair room and through the open door I see him step up to a computer that is clearly on (power LED's lit, and a windows desktop displayed on the monitor). A little red light appears in my head, but it all happened so fast...

He stuck the DIMM into the PC (I think it was an HP) and BOOM! A shower of sparks. A puff of smoke. A hellish shriek from the kid as he's thrown back from the PC.

"Holy ****, that must have hurt," I said. In hindsight, that was kinda insensitive of me to say.

The kid turns to face me and the whole front of his pants an part of his right leg are soaking wet.

A manager type person comes over and inquires what happened. We basically told him that the once perfectly functional DIMM was now almost certainly not so anymore, the kid probably needs an ambulance, and the HP system now appeared to have bigger problems than it had when the customer dropped it off.

The kid was ok, but I just couldn't help laughing my *** off for about 20 minutes after that. Never seen anyone piss their pants before, either...

Noods

I remember being in a IT class once with a friend of mine. Ill never know why, but he puts the RAM in backwards. "Its hard to get in the slot!" he tells me, so he jams it in. Everyone turns their PCs on. Instead of the familiar hum of the PC fan the rest of us hear, he gets a sort of crackle, along with a flash and a stinky cloud that made the classroom smell like butt. Great jorb!

I wish I had some funny IT stories from where I work. Here, when things dont go as planned, the place gets...tense. I work in network monitoring, which basically means Im responsible for watching everything, I dont have the authority to get things fixed, and when something goes wrong, I get the call :P

jmc724

Totally funny!!! You are so lucky you fell into the filing room, what if you have fell in the restroom stall on top of someone doing their business....

reloaded

It's funny when you trick the new guy into doing something dumb like...

One time a few of us told the new guy to go into the back and find the "bit bucket." He goes in the back where our tools and supplies are and starts looking for it. While he's looking for it, all of us up front at the help desk are cracking up. He finally comes back and looks at us funny, saying he can't find it. We just laugh in his face.

johnnynodough

^
incorretly installed memory, havet done that a few times in the past


While I dont have nearly as great of a story as you, I have lost of smaller ones, you build up quite a few after a decade.

When I first started out I was working on a monitor at a customers site, didnt discharge the degausing coil, bumped it with my hand, got zapped with 20K volts (no current). Couldnt remember my name for like 5 minutes. After everyone realized I was going to be OK they laughed there @55's off. I didnt for quite a while. Havent worked on a monitor since.

Went to install a printer one time, when the brand new HP lasertJet 4000 came out. Pulled it out of the box grabbing the inside of a paper tray bay on one side, and the legal size paper tray cover, which I though was solid, on the other side. It wasnt. It fell and crashed on the ground, pieces of HP shot out all over the place. Customer laughed there heads off. I still put the thing on the desk. Turn it on, a pieces falls off. Open the toner door, a piece falls off, open the paper tray, more pieces fall of. Needless to say I killed it. God that was funny.

Talking to a customer as I was trying to remove a CPU from a heatsink I had pulled, one of the phase change pads when they first came out, if they werent warm the CPU just sticks to thea heatsink. I dropped it, and it landed on the case pins down. Customer didnt laugh that time.

Many other smaller ones, but those are the most memorable.

filkenjitsu

bit bucket Last modified: Tuesday, August 03, 2004




(bit buk´it) (n.) jargon. A computer’s trash can or recycle bin. In networking scenarios, the term is used to refer to the place where a firewall, router or proxy has discarded a packet.

shadown7

reloaded wrote:

It's funny when you trick the new guy into doing something dumb like...

One time a few of us told the new guy to go into the back and find the "bit bucket."

That is too funny! I had that happen to me on my first internship as a helpdesk tech. The only difference is that I'm not that dumb to fall for that. But, to go along with the gag I said ok and pretended to go look for it. I went into the supply closet and got a small bucket and a marker and wrote "Bit Bucket" on it. I then went into the IT storage room and grabbed a couple of old RAM chips and put them in the bucket. They had a surprised look on there face when I brought them a "Bit Bucket".

paige1

(bit buk´it) (n.) jargon. A computer’s trash can or recycle bin. In networking scenarios, the term is used to refer to the place where a firewall, router or proxy has discarded a packet.

I've always wondered where discarded packets went.

lordy

Ok, here is one that happened to my boss when I was working at an ISP.

We were offering dial-up internet access and one of our customers seemed to have announced to commit suicide in some chat room. The chatroom administrator (who was obviously clueless) looked up information to the customers IP address in RIPE's whois database.

Of course the dynamic dial-up IP address where not registered to specific customers but to the boss of our department. However, this didn't stop the chat administrator from calling the police and tell them that our boss was about to commit suicide.

What happened from then was nothing short of emberassing:
The police called our human resources department to ask where my boss is and if he had behaved strange lately (of course they didn't mention why they where asking). The human resource guys then called him on his mobile to find out that he was doing home-office that day.

As his home-office was in a different town the police there was informed to check. They drove to his home and rang the bell. My boss was in a telephone conference and didn't bother to open as he wasn't expecting anybody. The police then went on to ask the neighbors if they had seen him lately and how he behaved.

When my boss still didn't open the door (still on the phone) after a second try the police kicked in the door. It took him a while to understand what was going on and to explain to the police that he was definitely not about to commit suicide. He then extracted the customers data from our database to clear the situation.

The next day he had to write a long email to everbody involved to explain what had happened. The police asking for you surely doesn't leave a good impression...

Today we all laugh about this story

mikey_b

I've got a few, like the time my intern was helping me lift an HP Laserjet 5550DTN onto a table and put a little too much pressure on his abdomen, let out the loudest, longest fart I've ever heard in the middle of a data processing pool, imagine letting a huge one fly when there are 20 really, really cute college students in for summer work typing away in almost complete silence. He didn't come back the next day, or the rest of the week for that matter.

Or the time I was in the subfloor running wiring and popped a floor tile up to get my bearings and wound up coming up beside a judge's bench while court was in session. The judge had a good laugh, at least. The bailiff wasn't so kind to me!

The best was trying to figure out what was wrong with this womans CD burner. It was an external SCSI unit sitting on top of her tower, which was on the floor under her desk. So I was crawling around under there when her phone rang. I never noticed she came around the desk, so when I went to crawl out from under her desk I looked up, my head went right up her rather short skirt, and I got a faceful. She was pretty upset until I calmed her down. Nicknamed her the "gitchless b!tch".

There are a lot more to share, but I need to get back to work!

jmc724

Here's a story, the IT dept normally check all end-user room whenver there's a fire drill or loss electricity. So we were going and turning off all UPS's since they will continously beep like hell and eventually drained battery power. Going from one suite to the other were we finding stuff like: lamps, small refrigerators, x-mas trees, aquariums, TVs, home stereo, microwave, floor standing fans and a baby's portable bed....damn its like there people were living in the suites the work in....why the hell would they want to have all that in their suites. No wonder there's always loss of electricity.

Chivalry1

I have worked as a Technology Instructor for a company. This day I was teaching a entry level / beginners course in Microsoft Word. Well I was teaching students shortcuts using Microsoft Word. These students were truly beginners. I mentioned that F7 is use to do a quick spell check. I noticed that one young lady was becoming upset. She says F7 does not perform a spell check. So i asked here to try again, and again, and again. Well eventually I had to stop the class to try to figure out what was the problem. Come to find out the lady was actually hitting the letter "F" and the number "7".

3000GT

Come to find out the lady was actually hitting the letter "F" and the number "7".

Get this all the time at my call center

My stories involve customers ringing in with problems, here is what ive had so far.

Customer calling to swap his monitor and he plugged it in and switched on it blew him across the room, said his hand was bleeding from the shattered glass but more importantly wanted to know if he was covered..

PC world sell a compleatly blind customer a computer, she managed to stick 3 floppy disks in a CD drive??! how i dont know! engineer reported this on the visit.

Had one customer fall down the staires while running up and down the stairs to do diagnosics on his video card, heard an thud then nothing for 6-10mins...came back with a sprained ankle.

Engineer calling to get police out as a customer has locked him in and wont let him out till hes fixed it..

Many more...i could go on all day

JDMurray

TeKniques wrote:

They all screamed as I fell through and made the 10 foot drop. LMAO I took out a whole 6 ft section of the ceiling.

I've seen a leg punch through a drywall ceiling, but not an entire technician!

garv221

A guy in my hardware class was bragging about the entire computer he bought from pricewatch. He brought in an Asus board, 32MB video card (awesome then) ram, the whole works..a good chunk of money...he was off in the corner mounting everything together...He called us over to look at it & the teacher inspected the ribbon cables & made sure the RAM was mounted...Turned it on & blew the board..Dumb Ass had mounted the board directly to the case & not used pegs..I'm pretty sure he cried...He kinda swayed his head back & forth a little bit then dipped out... Reminded me of the movie "Friday" when deebo took that guys necklace & he said "My Grandma gave me that chain" then runs away.

TeKniques

hehehehe, funny stories from all who have contributed. For me, I have been getting a ton of grief for falling through the ceiling.

Things being said to me like:

"Hey Crash"
"Don't forget your bungie chord next time you run cables"

all in fun though. One thing I did not mention in my initial story was: As I was lifting the ceiling board away so I could crawl up there, something fell on my head. I didn't look right away because I didn't want to fall off the ladder, after I moved away the ceiling piece I looked down and it was a dead rat that had hit my head and fell to the ground

Guess that was my clue not to go up there