Oh, is that the one that has the benefit of being “consequence free”?
Not just consequence-free, but also “I know your boss, and I will be emailing/phoning him about what happens here.” Ugh. Normally the supervisor wouldn’t say anything, it’s telling that he commented at the end of the day.
Since you folks asked for stories…
You chose to break all request policies and demand an office be moved the day after the Fourth of July holiday. That means cabling, phone, and hardware all have to be in place, first thing in the morning, on July 5.
When did you submit the request? Five minutes to closing on the day before the holiday. Stay classy, $luser.
I realize the IT people are like magical elves to you, but we DO have homes and families and we get vacation days. Yes, there are some people on hand for emergencies every day, but THIS IS NOT AN EMERGENCY. This is a planned move, you were just too lazy to plan ahead and pick a better week.
Security really enjoyed having to keep reopening a locked space for all the teams. I made sure they knew it was YOUR lack of planning that caused their extra work.
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Yay, TF be back! 
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Here’s an oldie but goodie, from when I worked at Cingular (straddling the time they bought out AT&T). We had like eight different systems we had to use, plus a handful of web-page applications.
I come in at 11 am, my usual time in, those days. About two hours later, every system goes down. We can’t even access the web applications, or our fricking time clock.
They send the team leads around, telling everyone to restart. Still nothing. They send the managers around, telling everyone to restart. Still nothing. They send the managers around, telling everyone to reboot, which we can’t do because the computers are locked behind a panel under each cube’s desk.
They send the team leads out again, who insist that they are logged into the systems just fine, we’re not doing it right.
A couple hours have gone by, with managers and team leads screaming at everyone. The head of IT comes out, on his way to get a soda from the vending machine. He asks, what are you doing? I tell him that we’re trying to log in. He says, you can’t all the systems are down, they’re down for everyone, since 12:30. I tell him, but the team leads are logged in. He says, bullshit.
I follow him over to one of the team leads, who says $otherteamlead is the one logged in. We trot over to $otherteamlead, who says she logged in at 8 am and she didn’t have a problem with the systems. We drag her back to her computer, and make her bring up the systems. Oh, no workee.
Another hour goes by, with managers and team leads trying very hard not to piss any of us off any further (several threats to life and limb have been made by people the managers and team leads who were screaming at us and threatening to fire us).
The call center director comes barreling out of her office, demanding to know why we’re not taking calls. She’s ranting and raving (not unusual, she ranted and raved if her pen ran out of ink). We explain that we can’t access any of the systems to help customers. She says, I don’t care, you can be taking calls. We ask, what are we supposed to tell the customers then? She says, well if they have a question that requires that, transfer them back into the queue and one of the other call centers can help them.
I looked her straight in the eye and told her no. Either we don’t take calls, or we just tell customer we can’t help them. None of the call centers have access right now, we’re not adding to their frustration by transferring them back into the queue so they can be told the same thing, over and over.
She starts foaming at the mouth, ranting about “we have a contract”. I tell her, we have a contract to provide customer service, and we can’t do that right now.
Finally, around seven, the systems are back, and we have the queue from hell.
I’m on my break and see the head of IT and ask him what the issue was.
Some idiot higher up the food chain had decided to “straighten up” the server, and moved a whole ton of files into different folders “to sort them”. So all the DLLs, drivers, data files, databases, were strewn all over hell and back, because he thought the servers were too messy, and if he sorted everything, the servers would run faster.
I volunteered to head up the firing squad. I also volunteered to head up the firing squad for the blithering idiot that gave the first blithering idiot admin privileges.
A couple days later, I’m in the process of being written up because I talked back to the call center director and called $otherteamlead a moron. In walks the head of customer service for our region, and catches part of the lecture. He blows his top, drags the call center director into the conference room where my manager and I are, and reads her the riot act. To top it off, he tells us that some of the other call centers had done what the director had tried to tell us to do, and it wound up generating a shit-ton of complains.
That was a few weeks before I left the company.
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What a clusterfsck. Good on the CS Head for seeing the stupid and making it hurt those who needed to stop being stupid.
I saw a user “tidy up” a PC that way: one folder for anything starting with A, another for B, etc. PC kept running until he was in the Ds. At least that was only hurting one PC.
An ex-girlfriend of mine did similar back in Win95 days.
She rang me late one night in a panic because her PC wouldn’t start, and she needed to finish an assignment.
Turns out she’d been “cleaning up” earlier that day and moved msdos.sys, io.sys and command.com to a directory called “Computer Jargon” (along with autoexec.bat and config.sys.
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Bwahaha! Good on you for standing up for your customers.
Nice!
The rule at my last few jobs was “Don’t fnck with his customers”
And I defined “my customers” as anyone I had every served, was serving, would ever serve, and anyone that could be considered, under that same criteria, the customer of one of my trainees.
Yeah, that would have been nice too. This is the job that was, a few months later, raided by Federal Marshals and the Department of Labor, when they tried to lock all of the employees inside the building - with mandatory overtime (per day), reduced breaks, confiscated cellphones, and a host of other extreme indignities (like refusing to let a diabetic woman have anything to eat, check her blood sugar, or take her insulin).
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sheesh, hope somebody’s a$$ got thrown in jail for that…
Last I heard, the call center director was suing the managers, claiming they had misrepresented her instructions, and Department of Labor had seized a bunch of emails.
And now I can’t even find the news report.
Gag order on newspapers etc?
It was on the newspaper’s site for at least a month after the incident. Who knows why/how it’s gone now?
Anything on the Internet Archive (archive.org)?
Nope, the local paper, it seems, is excluded.
Since I’m leaving my sysadmin post and going over to software support (sql databases etc) I’m bound to get my fair share of new crap as well.
Will post my misadventures here! 
Hoping ToasterFairy is alive and well 
By the by, is it possible to post past bitching hours, esp from the older forums here?
Not sure anyone retained an archive, @Ook.
If I rememeber correctly, @RRabbit42 was working on one… maybe? We’ll see if anyone else chimes in.
Otherwise, it’s all up to @ToasterFairy.
Hmm. I don’t know that I saved very much, TBH. I didn’t think people cared for them much. It’s a bit narcissistic of me to complain into the ether.
See, I think it’s cathartic. I read about someone else’s bullshit, and I feel better about mine. Either because mine isn’t so bad, or because mine is worse and I’m handling it OK.
Like, there is no real reason for me to post about my daughter not cleaning the cat litter so my home office smells like old cat shit, but it might lift up someone else’s day.
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Same here. I need to let out the negative experiences, and it is good reading about other people’s trials and tribulations.