I got called in to handle a situation where an employee was spying on his boss’s emails. He got caught when a read notification went out from his account.
He got called into a meeting and when they explained what it was about he didn’t say a word, but left the meeting, went back to his office, removed the hard drive from his computer and left with it.
I just had to figure out what he’d done, make sure he didn’t have any further access, and fill in until they hired someone permanent. No idea what happened after that.
Holy shit, that’s some sketch there. When you decide the least incriminating thing is to say nothing and abscond with a drive… damn.
Yeah the company I work at security would’ve 100% got that hdd from him…
Once upon a time before there were smartphones…
The internet existed already, e-mail as well.
We got a letter on real paper.
The guy was asking about some weird stuff going on in our software on his PC screen. He had included some screen shots, and referred to them in his questions. Smart guy, so far 😉
It turned out the screen shots were Polaroids. Smallest possible size! And they did not just show that window on the screen where the software was doing things. It was also showing his whole desktop. And his real desk. And the wall shelves around…
I have kept one of the photos to this day 😂
no link to pic?
What’s your address they’ll mail it to you ;p
lol
One monday morning an employee called and said she forgot her password. I told her that I need her username to reset it. She told me that she had also forgotten her username. I guess she must have had a fun weekend :)
Btdt. Forgetting a username is often more annoying than a password. Many login and reset forms let you use an email address or phone number or something instead for probably just that reason. Some places will need a support contact.
That’s why most companies with fewer than say like a thousand people choose a username that’s almost always first letter of first name, last name and then a couple of numbers.
If you can’t remember your own name then there are bigger issues than whether you can sign into the computer.
I got a call from this woman in Boston, out was just a product activation call so I had to read her a 20-character activation string. We use the NATO Phonetic Alphabet for those, to reduce confusion over the phone.
The last character was Y-Yankee. I followed that up with “but I guess that’s a politically incorrect word around Boston, huh?” And she goes on an absolute tirade about how people are way to sensitive, throwing out a few racist dogwhistles along the way.
I just said “Ma’am, I was making a joke about the rivalry between the Boston Red Sox and the New York Yankees.”
She went silent for a few seconds and hung up on me.
I guess not everybody’s that much into tennis :)
Me: Here’s the URL for the web service I’ve just deployed. I’ve set up users and permissions so just copy it into your browser and you should see a very similar system to what you’ve been trained on with all your data in there.
Customer: All I’m getting is a blank screen.
Much panicking and headscratching later…
Me: Waaaiiiiittt, did you press Return/Go after copying the URL?
Customer: That was not in the instructions.
Anytime you make something foolproof, the universe makes a better fool.
PEBKAC is the only universal truth…
PICNIC is the other universal truth
I know pebcak but not picnic.
Problem in chair not in computer :)
Had an older coworker who was on a long call with a user; his hands got tired so he put it on speaker after a while.
At a certain point my coworker fell asleep… and so did the user on the phone (snoring).
This was way back but had a basic support call for someone who couldn’t get their mouse to work.
After speaking with them for over ten minutes and just being generally confused I cut to the chase and asked, “Ma’am, what are you doing with your mouse right now?”
The answer? She was moving the mouse around on the monitor.
Was working the counter at a repair shop. This really old guy had come in for a data backup and a wipe/restore. We performed said service, and reloaded the data from the backup back on, and his outlook data was encrypted with a password he couldn’t remember.
This infuriated him, he specifically asked me if I wanted HIM to “Shove the desktop tower up his ass, stick his head in after it, and give it a sniff.”
People are wild.
Apocryphal: user reports laptop frequently crashing. Tech is putting it through paces, can’t make it crash. Tech slides it over and asks user to show them what they do differently. User touches the laptop (before they can do anything with it) and it crashes. I was told about this, I didn’t see it happen.
I’ve heard that some laptops with magnetic closures register lid closes when someone with a magnetic wrist watch puts their hands near the keyboard!
Nonono it’s electromagic energy being emitted…source am in IT
Tru tho …
hada user like this, we joked she was allergic to laptops. we could never replicate the issue until she touched it
Did she name her car “dick turpin”?
I firmly believe some people emit some sort of electromagnetic interference that we don’t have a reliable way to measure yet that makes technology buggy in their hands. My spouse is one such person. I’ve watched them from across the room do exactly the right steps and not have it work. Then hand it to me and it works instantly. There’s no logical reason for this. Their mere presence near by can make some things error it seems. It’s given me a lot more patience when people describe problems that should be impossible.
Of all the tech related professions IT people are by far the most supersticious. There is a reason we put bags of ramen on top of server racks and do other weird things when preforming high risk tasks.
A college advisor gave me the nickname of Morris Virus. Computers would go haywire, even crash (at least one death), if I was near them (and sometimes when I was about to arrive). I got kicked out of the Computer Center dozens of times. I got in trouble in other places, like at the local ISP, and got banned from touching some computers.
Streetlights would turn off as I approached and come back on after I passed them. A friend used that to find me.
A great aunt and a brother would meet up from time to time to exchange watches since watches would run faster for one and slower for the other.
Many years ago I worked for a small company who’d just hired a new CEO - and the guy hated me for some reason. He used every chance to make inappropriate remarks, and at times he’d just get angry and start yelling at me because his MacBook wasn’t doing something the way he wanted it. Keeping in mind, I didn’t do support for endpoints, my specialty was servers and network. I’d just let him go off because he wasn’t local, and would only come to the office for a day about once a month.
One day he called into the office and asked for me (again there are other support people who could easily help him with his macbook issues). He states he’s on a train, and can’t send or receive e-mails. Assuming he’s done basic troubleshooting, and not wanting to piss him off further, I go through normal troubleshooting steps. After several minutes he gets angry again, and starts yelling at me, so did what anyone would do - I put him on speaker phone so everyone else in the office could hear his rant. We all had a good chuckle.
Once he’d gotten it out of his system, I suggested he give me his remote access info (we’d installed remote access software on his macbook for this very reason) so I could remote into his system and see for myself what was going on. He states the software won’t display the one-time access code…so I asked him if he was connected to the WiFi, there was a pause, and then and the phone went dead, he just hung up on me. Magically his email started working after that
When I worked help desk, a coworker of mine took a call where someone called in because one of the thin clients was on fire. The user was advised to call 911.
I was helping a user reset their password and the convo went something like this: Me: Ok, your temporary password is Password1. Log in with that and you’ll be prompted to change it. User: Is that a capital 1? Me: No, just a regular 1.
When I worked help desk, a coworker of mine took a call where someone called in because one of the thin clients was on fire. The user was advised to call 911.
Well, did he try to turn it off and NOT back on again?
“We would have been here sooner, but we don’t usually get emails to inform us of fires.”
The IT Crowd: New emergency number: https://youtu.be/HWc3WY3fuZU?feature=shared
The IT Crowd: Fire! https://youtu.be/1EBfxjSFAxQ?feature=shared
Rule W25 of Rules of Tech Support - Users will try to do things like type in uppercase numbers.
https://graphicdesign.stackexchange.com/questions/54423/why-dont-upper-case-numbers-exist
Plot twist, user was running a contest for Capital One credit card and the correct response should have been “what’s in your wallet?”. OP would have won the grand prize and gotten to retire early. But instead lost the game.
I accidentally wiped a column in a police department’s evidence database 😁😅
Thank you for your service
people that use their recycle bin as storage. there have been multiple. once I was at their desk, looked at their trashcan next to their desk and asked if it would be smart to store stuff in there. they got the point after that.
or the new user I setup, went to lunch, came back and needed his password reset because he forgot it already.
The “store things in the recycle bin” people are the victims of a Lotus Notes-ism. The Trash folder in Notes was (is?) excluded from storage quotas, so some people started storing anything they wanted to keep there. Those people told other people to do the same without explaining why and it took on a life of its own as a technological fairy tale.
Had a colleague who did this regularly, till I put his new pw on a postit, and that in his coat pocket. Worked as long as the weather stayed same… It escalated away, until he let his gf call me for his password, because he did not dare to anymore. We finally gave up and set his pw fixed to “123456”. He was really good at the job, only not with his pw.
Should have given him a USB with write protected password in text file. Tell him to keep it on his person
Ok, I’m at my computer and plugged in my USB. Now what do I do?
“Can you tell me why my printer won’t print yellow?”
“Well first, it is a color printer? And there is yellow ink in it?”
“Oh, yes!”
“Can you print green?”
“Green works fine!”
“. . . That printer only has 3 colors of ink, if you’re printing green that means yellow is coming out…”
Tried uninstalling and re-installing printer drivers, changing cables, cleaning cycles, examining the print head, everything seemed to be fine…
“Oh, oh, oh! Should I be printing on WHITE paper?”
“. . . Are… are you printing on yellow paper?”
I was on a call once where some guy initially wanted to like block channels or something. After like 2 minutes it turned into some crazy Trump-esque rant about basically nothing. Some of my favorite quotes:
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These people out here talking like they no what’s what. They don’t know shit. But big daddy… he knows.
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I see these fools running around here playing games. I don’t play games. I play real life.
I read that in the voice of Dwight Schrute
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