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10 stupid user stories: The madness persists

One of our branches experienced a utility power outage. After the outage was resolved and they had power restored, their branch manager sent a note to support requesting wireless network access, so that their employees could work through a power outage in the future. I had to call her and explain that wireless networking also uses electricity.

Our office is in an area which is undergoing major new construction, and we have had a large number of power interruptions over the last year.

We do have a number of UPSs in our computer lab, and our mail servers and internet connections are in another city. With my laptop, I've managed to work through power outages of over an hour, including using mail and surfing the net. Now most users here have desktops and they don't have a solution unless we provide each of them a UPS, but it is possible to keep some levels of service going during a power outage.

Was 8 hours. The battery backups were only for hour I believe. So that would not have mattered.

So the client decided that the server was taking up useful space. They sat it on a table on wheels, pulled the cables out of the walls and carpet and ran them across the floor, into their lunch room, and behind the fridge. They then pushed the fridge up against it.
Hopefully everyone here knows how hot it gets behind a fridge. The server actually lasted several months before the hard drive actually melted down.
To top it off, apparently they had stop doing backups because it was too difficult to move the fridge each time to access the tape drive.

just wow.

One day, I get a call from one of the training rooms at my office that the power in that room doesn't work and their laptops (there were around 15 people in that room) wouldn't charge. I rush over to discover a couple of my co-workers scratching their heads around some extension outlets on the floor, that were "daisy-chained" between them. Now, this was a fairly large room and all the power outlets were on the walls of the room; that being said, it was fairly obvious when i entered the room that all the extensions were in the middle of the room, with no cable going to the side of the wall where the outlets were... The extensions were connected between them, but nobody bothered to check whether one of them was actually plugged in

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Also , one of the best stories from this category is one i've heard a couple of years back, and i thought i'd share it, although it didn't happen to me:

So, there was this server that rebooted every morning at around 5 A.M, day after day. The IT admin checked for software errors, checked for hardware errors, scheduled tasks, processes that might cause this to hang at that specific hour, every morning at 5 A.M. He called the hardware guys who didn't find any problems with it. Frustrated, he decided to wake up one morning and drive to work, to be in front of the computer when the unexpected shutdown occurs. Needless to say, at 5 A.M the cleaning woman would come into that room and unplug the server to plug in the vacuum cleaner, after which she would plug the computer back in. :P

P.S: Lol at no.3 Cracked me up

I once had the cleaning people forget to bring their extension cord and use the only available outlet on the very large UPS that kept a retailers POS system server going. Loaned them a temporary in hopes it was just a blown fuse inside the unit but no such luck. Every electrolytic capacitor inside had exploded and numerous other components had actually melted beyond recognition. They bought a new UPS!

I support industrial robots, with computer control cabinets. Each has a 3 Amp outlet for plugging in a computer while programming. Its covered by a small swing door that is stickered with a warning not to use the outlet for anything else.

I get people plugging in things like reciprocating saws, drills and vacuums on a pretty regular basis. Blown outlet at least once every three months.

Why take that risk, and not simply put the outlet as a separate item next to the robot?

Its the only 120VAC outlet near because everything else but the computer runs on 480 3Phase VAC.

...To install several 120 outlets around the room, It seems no one wants to plug in their saws-all into a 480.

You must have a few robotic arms lying around that you could rig up with boxing gloves...

too much fun involves the police.

Reminds me of the B-st-rd Operator From Hell stories, where users were constantly being given a hard time by the jerk of a helpdesk tech. These stories did make me wonder about the flip side of the equation, where you had jackass or clueless users who are more trouble than they are worth and the techs and programmers get back at their tormentors.

Boxing gloves won't be as effective as spiked maces, swords, or electric pain fields. ]:->

Cardiac patients have been killed when a nurse inserted the ECG lead plugs into an auxiliary AC outlet on the ECG machine or some other handy device. (Nowadays, auxiliary AC outlets are pretty much banned on electromedical equipment.)

but do they use them there? No.
They only use those to stop consumers using the same plugs for all devices - i.e. only to inconvenience, never to prevent harm. *grumble*

Hey, one plug looks like the next. Does anyone really know how much 3amps is? Do you really? Sounds to me like you should get an industrial quality extension cord which can supply at least 15 amps and afix it to the case with a sign to use this. Then you can seal the 3 amp plug. Why is it only 3 amps when most equipment already has at least a 15 amp connection?

Yeah, I've had that happen plenty of times with cleaning people. To the point where I've said "I'll break your fingers if I find out". I've been lucky though, it's usually just tripped the breaker in the UPS at worst, and at best made it freak out for high current draw.

If I had 1c for every time I heard that story, I would have retired many years ago

back in the day I had a cleaning person unplug a system 34 IBM because they thought it had been left on by mistake. took two days to recover.

I had a nightly scheduled job that produced reports for all executives (including the CEO) in the company every morning. One morning, I discovered it had failed to run. After kicking off the long-running job, I performed a little investigation. It turned out that the power failed during the night, which normally wouldn't have been a problem, except the night security guard was disturbed by the beeping of the UPSes -- to shut them up, he shut them off.

I love the old stories like that. Mine was when I worked in a distribution facility for a textile manufacturer. They only received products during the day, but picked and shipped at least 2 shifts a day. Well the conveyor systems where all run by computers that were networked with a Token "Broken" ring network. Unfortunately, they would kill power to the receiving portion of the building by shutting off all of the breakers in the receiving office. Including the one that stated, DO NOT TURN Off, with tape and a metal cover over the breaker. Invariably, this would happen about 20 minutes after I left the building for the evening. Once you shut off the repeater, it would then take the entire network down, (even after bringing the repeater back up) because our Novell Servers would beacon like crazy until restarted.

I hope they hired a new security guard after that when they found out what happened.

Being there!! Suffered that!!!

We had a data center in the US where I worked that had the server consoles/control room separated from the network controller room that connected us to the home HQ in the UK, and for most US operations. The power door between the rooms was controlled by a big red push button, and a few inches away from that button was another big red push button ... for emergency power-off to the entire network room. So guess what happened one night when a new cleaning person wanted to go from one room to the next?

Hey, they were "clearly labeled"! The power button did get a cover that took several steps to open up after that.

Is that cleaning woman still working there?

I got a call one day from an office that is @ 2 hours drive away. They stated that their printer kept jamming. Having issues arise like this quite a bit, I asked the staff to check the printer to make sure there was nothing jammed in the printer. They could not find anything. I got in the car and drove the 2 hours. Walked to the printer and looked down in the slot where the paper comes out and there was a hugh paper clip just sitting jammed between the rollers. I removed the paper clip and the printer worked just fine for 3 more years.

i drove an hour to remove the transparent tape on a ink cartridge from a printer that was not printing. you know the packaging tape that covers the inkhead! i charged them travel time and everything.

to press the NumLock key when a user couldn't enter her password

WTG!

to press a monitor power button...

To plug in the power cord that had slightly come off the back of the monitor when the user pulled it closer....

When I worked in a S& L in the 90's DOS Era, We had IBM PC's with a cloth antiglare screen, that was attached to the "Green on Black" Monochrome Monitor. This was also in the early days, when copier's were expensive. Many of the Secretaries and Clerks used Mimeograph machines, that had Stencils that were created on typewriters. When the stencils had a an error they used a special blue correction fluid. You guessed it. I had to cut the anti-glare screen cloth off of the monitor, because there was no way to remove the correction fluid from the screen.

Many of these stories are crazy and have extreme consequences, but the user applying correction fluid to a monitor really takes the biscuit.

Makes me wonder what sort of adventures this person had with their television at home.

than CD readers, we had a user force a CD into the floppy drive, pull down the handle, and "CRUNCH!"

Many years ago (25+) we had a payroll clerk that would print out every report from her Payroll system and check the totals manually. One day she came to me with a problem, she'd found an error in the totals. I then spent most of the day trying to see how my code could possibly get the total wrong, with no success. Just before 5:00, she came back to tell me she'd checked and it was her error!

Some months later, she had a problem with another report. This time, she'd made a mistake the previous month and her report had n incorrect value. so, she'd covered the incorrect value with correction fluid and written in the correct one. Now she couldn't work out why the reports for the next month had the wrong balance! After all, she'd corrected it the previous month!

I lurvs me some magical thinking.

You know there's a horrible joke based on that kind of incident, right? ];->

Reading stories like this reminds me that my users aren't so bad after all.

this actually happened to a Dell PowerEdge server:

as the office environment expanded and OSes / workstations were upgraded
the company was moved to a Domain from a workgroup

a Dell PowerEdge Server was ordered with Server 2003 standard and the required CALs were purchased
and most of the workstations were pulled and new shiny XP -Pro boxes were deployed
with only a couple of the 2K boxes remaining

after all was said and done that nice shiny new PowerEdge server was stuffed into a non-ventilated, closed & locked cabinet (about the size of an average kitchen cabinet)
several months later after summer was in full swing with 30C + days the IT guy starts getting repeated "warning emails"

Lo and behold Drive 0 was cooked and seized

a new HDD was ordered and installed

when I arrived the day it was being changed out
the dead disk had been sitting on the repair table for a little over 30 min.
when I tried to pick it up it burned me

after the repair, the server was stuffed back into the same cabinet with the goal to find it a new home

about 6 months later it was moved into the phone closet (a much bigger space)
it's still running today as BDC for the Domain as a newer 2008 server was ordered a few years later

but it could have been a worse disaster,
both Drive 0 and 1 could have fried necessitating a full rebuild.

Yeah I had a client that built homes so he made his office look like it was a home. Including desks with small little cabinets that they expected the computers to go into so they wouldn't be seen. Needless to say there was a higher than average failure rate of equipment there...

We had a server room about ten feet square holding 8 servers. One weekend the aircon failed and when I unlocked on Monday morning it was like an oven in there. The four Windows boxes had all failed but the four HP boxes were chugging along quite happily. That was in 1996. Wonder if HP quality is still at that standard.