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Confessions of an IT pro: My nine biggest professional blunders

Do any of these tales sound familar? Can you trump Becky's mistakes with one of your own?

For most of my time in the IT field I have dealt with software training and support. I committed one of my biggest blunders, however, when my company was giving free software out at a trade show. The software had a free 60-day trial, but in order to access it, the trade show attendees needed a special access code. I had helped produce the software, put it in the packaging, and prepare all of the documentation the reps needed at the trade show. What I failed to do was enter the access code into the server so the free software would work.
Needles to say, as people tried to activate their software the only thing that happened was our office was swamped with calls asking why our terrific software didn't work.
Yes, I know it was a newbie mistake, but that's just what I was. Lesson learned: always have a checklist before rolling out any product.

Long story short....I was the IT Manager for a fortune 500 company. The PRESIDENTS laptop was screwing up (IBM CrapPad). Didnt know security had been enabled on it. The motherboard, harddrive locked themselves out (doing a firmware upgrade) and i could not retreive his information. Unfortunately he never saved documents on the network (so i find out). He had just finished all the budget changes the CFO sent him but hadnt emailed them back yet.... ALL GONE. I thought I was a gonner too...i worked for days trying to get the stuff back - but failed. He was forgiving and I laid a little blame on him for not saving to the Network...but I worded my response VERY carefully. In the end he said it was his fault (after i pointed this out) and not to worry about it. He knew i worked my ever loving A** off on it.

WHEW!

Instead of blaming IBM - you should re-read your own statement - "Didnt know security had been enabled on it"

Ignorance is no excuse. LOL

I never heard of the IT Manager of a Fortune500 company working on anything but future plans...Sound fishy to me.

Ok, I'm really not a bad IT guy...dont judge me too harshly... read the story first...

I was senior engineer for a big company. An engineer in New York (a smart A** kid, harvard degree - whoopie!) decided to change our domain structure and name....the whole enchilada. I had no authority over him but kept telling him no.....the CTO (in london) thought this little twirp was God's gift to IT. I pleaded with him not to change anything until we were sure we had a good backup of everything. He went ahead (on the spur of the moment) and made his changes......

The backups were bad... the new domain structure didnt not have credentials to access ANY and ALL users files on the main file server. The CTO was looking to fire somebody because critical data was lost forever. Even Microsoft couldnt help us get it back (on the phone for over 2 days). At first he tried to blame me, but i had logs where he had remoted in and "FIXED" the backups.... he actually had screwed them up.... in the end he didnt get fired but i got alot more responsibility and was finally able to find a better job and get away from this jerk.

and this slug will do anything in his/her power to become the favorite among management. The problem here is that when something gets f**ked up, it is you who will be blamed, not him/her because this person will be in cahoots with management and will find a way to worm out of it and blame you for it. This has happened to me on numerous occasions while working for a lawfirm and I have learned to document everything and have a hardcopy of every email and conversation leading up the point where something got screwed up. This may or may not help you from getting fired, but if you do decide to sue for wrongfull termination, you will have the sequence of events documented and will have a strong case against those ass kissing pompous morons and their managers.

Every IT person will make mistakes in their career. The most important lession is to stand up and admit the problem so it can be fixed.

I was working on a mainframe computer and was developing a patch for the billing application. I needed to delete all the records in the test copy of the master detail file that contains all the billing and payment records for the last 15 years. As you may have figured out, I dropped the live MDF and brought the company to a stop. I immediately went into my managers office and said, "Jim, I really f***ed up". We restored from the overnight backup, but were still missing the days activities (Pre-database days). Fortunally, I had patched to I/O routines for the mainframe to install transaction rollback a month before. While I couldn't perform a forward rollback, I did produce a list of transactions since the backup and the various departments were able to manually reenter all their previous transactions. I sweated bullets, but there were no lasting problems. The lession I learened was to always check a least twice before ever doing any action to make sure I was on the correct dataset.

Becky:

Thanks so much for the 'bare-all' article. I can't help but feel as if we're kindred spirits as several of these experiences were identical to mine, especially the last two.

I had a career cut short at a company because of an email response that was wildly misinterpreted, not ingratiating enough I surmised, and have walked away from several jobs with nothing more than several years experience with no formal documentation of my skill set.

I now treat email as a formal communication medium, except with friends and family but never co-workers, and always take advantage of every training class thrown my way.

Best wishes...Marcus

My biggest professional f***kup on the job was when we had a policy against using corporate email to advertise sales of personal goods or other services that clogged the email system. Such messages were to be posted on the corporate intranet, and everyone knew this. Anyhow, being the admin in charge, I responded to an email about movie ticket sales, asking the sender to "stop sending spam emails" that clog the corporate email system. Shortly within a minute, I get an angry call from the CFO's secretary who stated that the email was authorized by the CFO and that if I had a problem with it, that I should take it up with him. Needless to say, I almost crapped my pants and started sending an apologetic email to save my own ass. The IT director was notified of my email repsonse and I was called in to explain myself. I said that I was simply enforcing corporate email policy regarding such emails and was not aware that it came from the CFO. Needless to say, the IT director let me off the hook, but that event started a whole series of other events to unfold for me, basically pushing me out of the company with consecutive crappy reviews because the CFO had a personal vendetta for me. Now, being wiser and taught by experience, I simply don't get involved and let someone else wave the enforcement stick, because I refuse to get involved and burned again by this. I was just doing my job of enforcing corporate email policy, and here I was being reprimaned for doing it because some jackoff executive thought that he was exempt from corporate policy. To make matters even stranger, this was at a lawfirm that preaches strict adherence to corporate policy. "Do as I say, not as I do" is pretty much what it boiled down to.

My wife was fired from a firm because she applied for a position that she was well qualified for, but the (out of town seagull) supervisor was recruiting a hatchet gal for.

I got let go at one becuase the attorney threw the file up on the credenza and forgot about it for six months.

That and most law firm hiring practices (even with a HR department in place) make an pedophile look like an angel.

I was terminated because an accident put my car out of commission and I had no other way to get to work other than public transportation which would have cost most my day's pay. I didn't have a home phone so I had to walk to a pay phone to call my work. I was also 4 months pregnant at the time.

They basically fired me for lack of communication. However, they never offered any assistance..not even a weekly train pass (which should've been no big deal since we got those all the time to get to the downtown location).

They even denied my unemployment benefits too, after almost 3 years of faithful service (returning after the birth of my 1st child and everything)

Ah well. C'est la vie! I'm much happier now!

P.S. My boss at the time was newer than me and strictly by the book. I know the original person who'd hired me would have helped me out as much as possible for sure. I know this because when I returned from maternity leave all my data entry work from the time I was gone(and this is in accounting mind you) was left in a neat pile waiting for me.

"However, they never offered any assistance..not even a weekly train pass "

Why should they offer assistance? It's your job to get to work, it's not the company's problem.

Sounds like your pushing the blame on this.

I guess I am in IT hell. I have worked for Attorneys in one form or another since 1990. The first 7 years working for an IT support company that specialized in Law Firms. We also worked for Doctors and Dentists. As bad as Doctors are, the very worst situation for a computer person proved to be in a Dentists office where the Dentist?s wife was the office manager. I wouldn?t be in IT if I had to work for Doctors or Dentists exclusively. I was hired out of that company (A 10K per year raise) and offered the IT Admin position in one firm. Two years ago I switched to the firm where I am today. The first place lost 5 Attorneys and there just wasn?t enough work to keep me busy. This was compounded by the Managing Partner retiring. His replacement had absolute no interest in Computers so he turned the IT part over to a junior associate. Her and I did not get along. Another position opened up, luckily, and I left. When you work in Law Firms, you are a managing partner away from unemployment.

I really do not have any complaints about working for Lawyers. I have learned that they are demanding, impatient and ?thrifty.? I get around the demanding and impatient by always keeping in mind that: Attorneys want their computers to work, and they do not care a rats ass in hell how they work. If they think you know what you are doing, you can do no wrong. The first firm I worked for covered my salary when I had an extended (One month) stay in the hospital. As far as the thrifty part, I always watch the bottom line and don?t advocate spending money needlessly. So far, this has worked out well.

For the most part, the Attorneys aren?t too much of a problem. The real challenge in working in a Law firm is contending with the Legal Secretaries. The biggest problems are the women who are in their 50?s and 60?s, single and have a better chance of getting struck by lightening than finding what they want most, a husband. A Law Firm IT person HAS to get along with the Secretaries as they have a direct line to the Attorneys and can do a lot of damage. The very worst situation is a secretary who her married lawyer has slept with. From then on, she controls pretty much and whether or not the Lawyer realizes it, he is now working for her. This is especially bad if he is on the management committee or one of the firm founders. I have seen two of these night mares.

Like I said, for the most part, I have weathered the storms. The pay and benefits are excellent and, being in my late 50?s, I plan on holding on until retirement.

I have had similar experiences both working for a small IT company supporting law firms or as a contractor. In all over the past 15 years about 5 law firms.

With lawyers you can never win, they practise being argumentative for a living, and they all firmly believe they are never wrong.

Lawyers are litigious and argumentative.
Doctors are the cheapest SOBs you will find.
Realtors have less patience than rattlesnakes.

(I used to tell our people that realtors were VERY patient - some will wait up to 10 full seconds before going berserk).

They pay slow, they are only interested in whatever puts money in their pockets and they view IT only as money out of their pocket. If they were as smart as they think, they'd realize that a well planned, well executed IT infrastructure SAVES money and headaches in the long run. We have one here who runs their network on unsecured access points (belkins) becasue they didn't want to pay to run cabling. I just cannot support dumb customers.

I don't try to be the network cops around here anymore; my boss has micromanager tendencies anyway and loves to be involved in everything, so if I find evidence someone's engaging in prohibited activity with our equipment, I pass it on to my department director, and let HIM enforce the policies. That way, if there are administrator-level toes being stepped on, it's not me doing the stepping!

The dumbest that jumps to mind is one where I changed the admin password on one of my systems. Sounds like it wasn't so bad, but I kicked out all of the users. It was easily corrected with a reboot, and the users logging back into the application. The problem is that it is a 14 server system, and it takes an hour to get it fully back up and running. I knew better, and knew the second that I did it that I'd messed up. My brain just took a vacation.

My most recent? Two weeks ago, I downed 2 interface engines, with over 100 threads because I didn't proof the code I'd just entered. I put an "o" where a "p" should have been, and downed the whole thing. It took 4 hours to find the problem and get everything back up. Hmmm... guess that's why they included the testing tool, so you can test your interface you just built before you put it in production.

I have ?been in IT for 35 years. When I apply for a new job I am often met with "We can get a much younger person for less, and who probably will do what we tell him/her to do". My reply is always, "Yes probably you can, but the difference is that I already made all blunders known to man, including a few of my very own - and I don't make them twice". Usually I get the job.

Anyways. When I was a young programmer in the early 70'es, I worked for a rather temperemental boss who never made mistakes - the type still exists as we have seen.

We were programming on a Honeywell/Bull 16k bits (not bytes) thing in assembler. That means the programming language was numbers only, ouy had to take care of everything, clearing fields of garbage before writing to them, removing old print before printing a new line e.t.c. We were using a very novel and advanced thing called machine-readable checques, using magnetic printing ribbons and a character set called CRM-7.

Sometimes the fields were given a CMC-7 prefix, even if it wasn't supposed to be printed, and I couldn't figure out why. I had two solutions, ask my boss and be told off to be a complete ignorant, or do some creative thinking. The choice was easy.
The problem was the CMC-7 prefix, so why not solve the problem at the root ? Change code, check for presence of offending charcter, and put in a blank remove if present. No sweat, program compiled and the character had gone.

Some days later accounting complained that figures looked wrong, something was amiss. Digging into programs and specs I discovered to my horror that a leading CMC-7 signalled a negative amount. Change of program, one week reruns during night shifts and we got back to normal.

Lessons to learn:
Bad temper is not an asset for a boss.
To fast education is worse than none.
There are no stupid questions - only stupid replies.

Another one showin that haste makes waste:

I was running an IBM iSeries, which is built on many subsystems. One of these are called qinter, which handles all interactive tasks - read displays. You can have many of these or only one. Inside these subsystems you have tasks runing the workstations, each one having it's own subtask.

I had problems with a workstation being blocked, and in half an hour I had to leave on vacation. It wouldn't budge - can't recall why, time was slipping, holiday plane would surely leave without me, and in the end I by mistake killed 250 sessions spread all over europe, instead of the offending one in the next office. Then my phone started ringing....

Never assume your daily backups ran correctly. Always physically check session contents. We lost a weeks worth of MS Office type docs after a fileserver crash. Near term backup hadn't run correctly in almost a week (disk) so we had to resort to a week old tape archive.

It ended up costing me my 11 year old position.

Sorry you had to pay the price - I must admit I have made a few assumptions in my career - but luckily got away with them so far (generally)

You won't thank me for reminding you of the old saying "assume makes and Ass of You and Me".

(Sorry)

I'm sorry to hear that last part. We are considering adding audits to the backups. Both on the "did backups run" (some of that is already in place) and "are the employees backing the right stuff up?" We don't back 100% of the bits on each desktop harddrive, but that requires that employees know when they are creating a new folder that needs to be backed up.

Am I glad I read this article. Turns out #4 is added to my personal list.

I realized after reading, that I had never actually checked a backup for the physical files since we got the new server. So this morning, lo and behold I check and find out for the last 8 months the drive that all users' working files are saved to...was never backed up!!

I remedied that in a flash! Keeping my fingers crossed nothing wacky happens today so tonight's backup will cover my a**. Whew!

The biggest blooper of my life happened some years ago while I was looking after dealing room systems in Sweden. However, it taught me one of my biggest life lessons ever.

I was working with some very new software on the dealerboard telephone system of a very busy merchant bank during a very busy trading day. I had heard that it was possible to provide some new ANI features with this release but had not been shown how to do it, and I did not know anyone who had made it work either. In short, I experimented, and thinking that everything should be ok, went offsite to buy some cigarettes. On my return some 20 minutes later I found the dealing room in uproar owing to them not being able to receive any incoming calls. I think that pure adrenaline kicked in at this point and I was able to undo the changes and get the system back online.

I thought that this would be the end of my telecoms contracting career in Sweden but, not seeing any way out of it, I came clean with the head trader and admitted to my mistake. By absolute chance they had somehow come back online with a better position than when I had inadvertently shut them down! I was thanked for my honesty and the incident was never again mentioned - nor repeated, I hasten to add!

Bravely assuming (a) that American corporate executives ever gave a damn about anyone in an economic class below theirs; (b) that today's corporate "strategic thinking" extends any further than this coming Friday's "earnings guidance"; and, (c) that "shareholder value" is anything except code-speak for "destroy the middle class in America".

I love your comments, Too Old for IT.

Regarding Blunders, wasn't it Bohr, the quantum physicist, who said that an expert was someone who had made every mistake what is was possible to make, in a very narrow field. By this reckoning, blunders are to be applauded.

I have also heard that in the USA, you are thought well of if you have started a couple of companies that have crashed.

Dilbert is a wonderful cartoon. I would not mind doing a management course if it was based on studying Dilbert comic books.

Richard Mullins

We all make mistakes

#1
My blunder starts off as do many...no backup...then, well, you know how Microsoft Access creates those .LDB files? Usually they get deleted if Access closes properly? Well, I had a few I wanted to get rid of in a live common data directory..after hours...but accidentally typed DEL *.MDB....hmmm...with Access, there is a big difference between the letter "L" and the letter "M" when it comes to file extensions...

Never did 'fess up to that one. Microsoft Access is notorios for data corruption, after all...more notorios after I was done...

#2
I just can't stand a workstation filled up with junk files...I thought I'd clean some old profiles off a client's XP machine...gee, look at all that disk space I got back...oh, where did that special folder of documents go? Oh? You were linking to that old user's my documents? Why the heck would you do that? Sorry, that was me. Hey, I did 'fess up!!

Anthony

In some versions of MS-DOS, if the user typed
"Format C:" the response would be
"Press any key to format Drive C".

At this point, the ONLY correct action was to
turn off the power -- any keystroke whatsoever
including Ctrl-C, Esc, Ctrl-Alt-Del, etc., would
start the formatting process.

After Microsoft received MANY complaints from
people like me, they fixed this.

Early in my IT career, when computers were still 486's, with AT power supplies, I was assembling a new system. Now if alot of you remember that have been in this field more than a "few" years, the AT computer cases were not as easy to work on. The bigest problem I had was trying to understand the 4 wires to the ON/OFF swutch, that were at the time not usually plugged into the switch. So very carefully I read the wiring diagram printed in the Power Supply, and proceeded to send the P/S up in smoke with an incoorect connection. So I called my supplier, told him his P/S was "bad" and went to pickup another. Low and behold, this one was "bad" also, ie: another puff of smoke. So a third one was picked up, but surpisingly, this one worked. I guess I had almost run out of "correct" combinations for those dang 4 wires. In the end it took an extra 2 hours to assemble, running back and forth for working power supplies.

But all it did was trip the breaker on the power bar. I guess I was lucky, or chose the right wrong combination.

Yeah, I'm the guy that took stuff apart and tried to fix it as a kid, at some point in my tinkering career I actually repaired more items than I damaged, then I got better and better. I am more a hardware guy, and really know little about theory/concepts/programming except for my computer 101 class in '77, where you had 15 min. of CPU time for assignments, the rest had to be done on punch cards. I searched the trash cans for discarded printouts and found many passwords entered as usernames and accumulated (stole) other peoples' CPU time, only did one project (mandatory) on cards. I like to think I invented computer crime, leave me with that fantasy.

Anyway I am a Landscape Architect (freedraw, no CAD) in a small (8-user) network, and computers became and still are my hobby. We had a professionally built and configured NT4.0 server w/ Exchange 5.5, Veritas BE, SCSI 4-8GB Tape drive, 10GB SCSI drive. I started fiddling around and I became the IT guy, totally self-taught. Biggest blunder w/NT: Changing Admin password and nothing worked on the server, I learned about dependencies in that one.

I migrated us to SBS2003 last year, boy was that an education, still in progress. Biggest blunders during testing:
Deleting the Admin account and locking myself out of the server. Start again. Finally got it up, went to clone the data drive to the data array w/ Ghost, you guessed it, went the wrong way and formatted the wrong drive. Luckily I was able to recover almost everything from tape. I will never forget the blood-draining-out-of-my-head feeling...

The best part of any blunder is the LESSON LEARNED. It may not be on the same scale as some of these posts, but every blunder moves us forward. I appreciate reading that I am not the only one...even seasoned, schooled pros make dumb mistakes!!!

Tony

The "blood-draining-out-of-my-head" feeling...that's a feature of every one of these stories, and something everyone here knows all too well.

First, I must admit I didn't make this mistake, I witnessed it and its aftermath. But I think it's worth hearing if it can prevent others from making the same simple mistake, because the consequences can be devastating.

The IT shop involved (for a very large financial services firm; yes, even the big guys screw up) spent a good amount of time working with external consultants to develop a comprehensive disaster recovery and business continuity plan which they subsequently stored in a shared drive on the network.

Anyone see where this is going?

Yup, the first time they had a need for the plan, the server where the plan was stored, as well as the network itself, were out entirely so they couldn't get to it quickly. They had not printed a hard copy and the networks were down so they had to... lets say, improvise... until they could get a remote site backup printed and delivered on-site.

Don't forget to print at least two copies of your DR plan and keep a copy off site or in a readily accessible, secure, fireproof location.
If you're a small operation and think you don't need a DR plan, think again. You probably need it more than the big guys because they can marshall their resources and deal with multiple aspects of recovery concurrently. You and Joe single-threading it could take awhile to get everything up and running again, especially if you're winging it as you go.

We just recovered from a disaster and got all system back online within the last hour. What did we learn??? Print all of our vendor contact list and co-worker contact list and put with the DR plan. We keep the DR plan in a plastic sleeve on the interior server room door, one in another building where our department is, and one in the "master" policy book. Luckily, we all had our cell phones and each of us had at least 3 co-workers numbers programmed.

Number 5 - the bad backups problem reminded me of a similar situation. A user who relied on our backups was burnt not once but three times. The third time cost him over two month worth of data. The first two times I had notified the responsbily parties of the backup problem. The third time I was royally pissed because the responsible parties were not only making us look bad and totally undermined user confidence in our department but they costing us time/money.

So even though it was against policy, I set the user up with a local backup, documented the local backup, tested it, taught the user how to recover his data, and documented the resolution.

A couple weeks later I got called into my managers office I was given the standard 'against policy' speech and told I needed to remove the local backup and get the users machine back to standards. I replied that when we started doing our jobs right I'd be glad to and enumerated the three backup failures and the cost of each. At the end when my boss tried making excuses, I pleasantly indicated that when we've demonstrated to the user's satisfaction that we adequately backup his data that I would gladly remove the local backup and walked out of my bosses office. He wasn't happy.

Lesson learned is that sometimes you have a choice - following policy and 'rallying around the flag' or doing what's right for your users.

For me it was an easy choice, the customer is my priority - I provide a service. That philosophy has endeared me to my customers (sometimes to managment's chagrin) and that has allowed me to be 'politically incorrect' - I do my job well and I'm a valuable asset even though I sometimes butt head with management. It's not without risk but at least I can look at myself in the mirror.

P.S. I ran into a colleague earlier this year - he told me that the backup I set up a dozen years and 3 or 4 PC's ago is still running...

It wasn't E-mail, but I once took a lighthearted approach in a helpdesk software memo.

It was Halloween and a developer forwarded a request from a user. The user wanted to store a food quality percentage in a protein percentage field. The developer wondered if this was OK.

Visions of hundreds of reports and screens with bogus, misleading data flashed before my eyes. I quoted some song lyrics in the memo field ("No. No. A thousand times NO."). The developer got a good laugh from the joke.

Unfortunately, we were not the only people who read this. A helpdesk tech blithely forwarded this response to the user! The both of us were called onto the carpet and warned never to use humour again.

One time in tech support we got an email from a customer who had set their display name in their email client to "A love letter from Vancouver!", so every email she sent had that as the sender's name. She emailed us about something, I answered it, and signed it

"Love,

Acme Tech Support"

Never did hear back from her.

it's not learning from it that's the real error. I'll cut nearly anyone slack for making a rookie mistake every so often - if they never make that same mistake again, if they show some interest in finding out what they did wrong, how to avoid doing it again, and what fixed it. Anyone who tries to avoid admitting an error is not going to learn from it.

As to myself - well, I've been in this field since 1978. Have I made mistakes? Rafts of them. Early on, I got one piece of advice pertinent to the last point in the article, one of the best bits of career advice of my life. Never, but never, make yourself "indispensable." No one is indispensable; they can always function without you if they're willing to. Don't even try. It doesn't make you more secure in your job (and it's a damn dumb way to get job security anyway), and you'll never be able to take a vacation, sick day, have a weekend, without being bothered. SHARE your knowledge. It doesn't matter how much you know; if you don't share it, it's useless.

My own biggest mistake was probably last year, following my Active Directory migration. I migrated our entire enterprise - some 5000 accounts and 30 domains - single-handedly. Following the migration, there were four domains that didn't seem to migrate quite right. None of the users' Exchange properties showed up in their proper Active Directory accounts - they showed up as properties on disabled AD accounts in another domain.

Now, rather than doing the proper research and discovering that the correct approach was to run AD account clean-up to merge the disabled accounts that had the Exchange properties with the enabled accounts that did not have the Exchange properties - I deleted the OU that contained the disabled accounts. They were disabled, right? However, what I didn't quite comprehend was the way the Active Directory Connector works when you have it set to replicate AD changes to Exchange 5.5 and vice versa.

A few minutes after the deletion, my phone started to ring. I'd deleted all those users' mailboxes. And all the contents. Including three directors' mailboxes. I had to start recreating AD objects from ldp.exe and adsi edit (I don't recommend having to do this, it's very tedious) and creating new, empty mailboxes so the users could at least communicate with the world, but all their mail was gone. Thankfully, I did have Exchange backups, but restoring single mailboxes from a mail store that contains 3000 mailboxes is NOT fun, and I was hesitant to do it that way.

It took me two weeks and an emergency purchase of Ontrack Power Controls (which is an amazing product, by the way), but I got back every single solitary email message. I owned up to the mistake, apologized profusely to the users who'd had to do without their mail for two weeks, and never, EVER have deleted an Active Directory object without thinking about what the hell I was really doing. And now I have multiple mail stores for my user mailboxes, so I never have all of them in a single store, or a single backup. It's just too scary if that single backup doesn't work and you need to restore everyone!

I'm in the position of being the only one who knows how to do *most* thinks pertaining to clients\network . I specifically do not want that (because as is so accurately mentioned, I would get phone calls 24x7 when I'm sick, on a\leave etc.etc.etc. mostly about total no brainers) However - I've mitigated this by creating a Notes database detailing (almost) everything I know how to do, accompanied by screenshots. Thus my manager knows that if I'm not there, he can refer to this db and pick up most things for at least a quick fix. If there's a *BIG* problem I'd want to be called anyway, and I've told my manager what my expectations are (i.e. use the DB if I'm not there, call me if you *have* to)....and it seems to work fine most of the time.

I know I am. Thanks for the article!

Tony

Circumstance: A particular dumbass client was regularly making the same mistake & screwing up the Unix data entry system that was in use - the client had root admin rights (not my call) and screwed the system regularly.

After weeks of this, 'it' happened again. The client sent the usual email to saying (pointedly) "sorry, but the system has broken down. Yet Again". I responded to this email & said in effect "yeah, well - we all know whos fault it is, we all know who's too dumb to learn how to push buttons in a particular order etc.etc.etc."

Problem : THIS time it WAS the system. Looked like the client's usual problem, but in fact wasn't. Aaarrrggghhh. Never before & never again did that actual problem occur (an AIX consultant fixed in 20 mins).

Boy, did I (have to) stay quiet for a few months after that. Nobody of course remembered that the client was regularly shagging the system, only that I sent a sneery email. Never again - nowadays, I raise my eyebrows, sigh and just think those naughty thoughts.

I don't fully agree with #8. I think in this situation the problem appears to be the failure to tell the user what you intended to do about the problem (if anything), rather than the little quip itself. Also, I believe the user or the management are partly at fault for making a big deal about it. The over-sensitivity of user and management suggests quite a stressed individual or environment, to over-react like they did rather than simply asking you to clarify what you meant.

Humour can offend some people (a vast minority), but that's not a reason to act like some sort of robot, issuing only the most neutral and soulless responses. Humour, or other less-formal communication is part of an individuals personality, and needs to be accepted as such. Noone should be subjected to blatently offensive (racist, sexist etc.) humour, and there will be occasions when you should be careful about being flippent, but don't trade in what can be an advantage to your personality because you're scared of some humourless drones.

A sense of humour, an ability to see the lighter side can be an asset. Users can find talking to the tech support people daunting, threatening, and even loathsome. You can break down many barriers between you and a defensive user by intelligent use of humour. It makes you appear more human. Likeable even!

1. at an ISP, I wanted to show a customer there was nothing wrong with our mail system so I asked his permission to retrieve his email onto my computer. He said yes. I failed to set my computer to leave a copy of each message on the server. Then I deleted them. Then I emptied the deleted items folder. Then they were gone. Then I was sad. Then I confessed. Then he was sad. Then I went out and bought a copy of Norton Utilities to find the files. I was able to find who were the senders of the missing emails and told him.

2. At another ISP, in a higher position now, I was doing an audit of inactive accounts, and asked a sysadmin which ADSL accounts showed no activity in the last x months. He gave them to me, based on the phone number of the ADSL line. I then asked the incumbent phone company to cancel the ADSL service. Turns out he didn't check if those same numbers had been reused by subsequent customers. I ended up deleting the ADSL service of 6 businesses. I called the incumbent and they were able to save 4 of them before the customer's saw any down time. I had to mea culpa to the other two, one of which was a travel agency. Anyone who works for an isp knows about travel agencies. I sent chocolates to the woman at the incumbent who saved the 4.
3. Through various experiences I have learned that when sending an email, whatever you say will be interpreted more seriously or negatively than you intend, so don't be negative or sarcastic at all, and when you are reading someone else's email, it is usually not intended to be as mean ast it may seem.

One of my biggest blunders was being just a little too courious. One rainy afternoon, I was loading some network client software at a small Credit Union. I was sitting at the president's desk updating her client software...waiting for the time to enter the next diskette, of many. (this was back in the early 90's)

Being a little bored, I started scanning the room and noticed the that there was a 'phone jack' mounted right there under the desk. I also noticed a telephone modem cable snaking across the floor to a jack on the other side of the room. I figured that I could just plug into the jack under the desk and prevent the tacky looking phone line from being tripped over.

As I studied the 'phone jack' under the desk, I couldn't find the the place to insert the plug but did notice that the one side was a little loose. I slid the side in until it 'clicked'. And then my face got hot.

It was then that I realized what I had just done. I had pushed the panic button to the local police station. The phone rang within 30 seconds. It was the security company wanting the secret password. Nobody knew the password. It was written down somewhere.

By the time they found the password, it was too late. The police where surrounding the building. The security company was contacting the police to let them know it was a mistake but contact would have to be made between the police and the credit union. There is also a special sign that needs to be displayed outside to give an 'all-clear' signal to responding officers.

I offered to go out in the cold, pouring rain with the sign but the president said, "Oh God no! The police know that no men work here. They'll probably shoot you!" So I had to stand by as some poor, young teller went out into the cold, driving rain and walked around the building with the all-clear sign.

I re-learned a lesson my mom was always harping on me. "Don't touch."

yes we had a test system of our stock control package. I was asked to make some modifications to the stock import routines and so went to get a copy of the live system over to test to work on my ideas.

Simple case of dragging and dropping files on the Windows 2003 server from the data directories. Which are both called the same thing. Can you guess ...?

About 10 seconds later I realised I was quite calmly copying the test system (>2 months old) over the live.

Spent the next 5 hours trying to patch together a working copy from the previous night's backup, and the live systems.

Lesson - don't drag and drop files in Windows - too easy to misroute.

I now have an MS-Dos batch file to copy from the Backup area to the Test Area (modification of one I wrote to copy live to a backup area during downtime). Creating the test system now consists of running the Live->Backup script, and then the Backup->Test.

Oh and when writing these scripts you need to follow the handy pointers:
1. Write the script - slowly, thinking about each command carefully
2. Read it and make sure it makes sense
3. Go get a coffee or something other than working on the script.
4. Read it again to make sure it still makes sense.
5. Test in a test area if possible
6. Deploy
7. Deny all knowledge

. o O (Wonder what data we lost - never did find out)

I invented an operating system called CPM that ran on the first Intel microprocessor (8086). When IBM was developing their personal computer repreentatives visited me in Seattle to discuss licensing my software for their new machine. I blew them off and that snotty Bill Gates bought the rights to a competing product for $ 50K and ended up sub-licensing that O/S to IBM. He became a billionaire and I died in 1994 at the age of 52 nearly broke.

As an IT consultant, going in and being the expert for different companies, when things go wrong it can be ugly. I had one customer interstate who had a Windows NT 3.51 server running Citrix, with Windows XP Pro desktops which was started causing problems with files saved back to the server having their date changed to 1901 or similar. I happened to be just up the road at another client the week after I was first informed of the problem, so I'd had time to download a patch for the server before I went over. Last thing Friday, after spending 3 or 4 days at the first customer's site, I dropped into apply this patch. I knew things weren't looking good when I rebooted the server and got the blue screen of death after applying the patch! Last known good didn't work, nothing would allow the server to start. Another 2-3 hours later I piled the server into the back of the work car, stayed at a friend's place that night, caught the boat back home with the car and server and spent Sunday and Monday "upgrading" their server to Windows 2000 with terminal services, which we'd wanted them to do anyway!! Tuesday morning I flew back with a rebuilt server so that they could catch up on a day's lost work from both head office and an office in another sate that used Citrix for all accounting, and everything has been running well since.
Next on the list that I can remember is a CEO's laptop keyboard. His keyboard was causing poblems, some of the keys weren't working. They had a spare laptop of the same model, so why not take the keyboard off that one? The keyboard came off ok, only problem is that the ribbon to the motherboard snapped in the process. Lucky I didn't try to take the CEO's off first! $100+ later, I bought a new keyboard and carefully replaced the CEO's faulty one. I have the one I snapped stuck to my wall at home!