IT Fails/Lack of IT skills in the workplace

[GordonD]

Not a lack of skills story, but I read about a guy whose boss always set a flag on the e-mails he sent so that he would be notified when they were opened. The guy decided not to open the e-mails but read their contents in the preview pane. His boss never said anything because the guy clearly knew what the e-mails said so it didn't matter. Until the day the guy decided to clear out his inbox and his boss got several hundred messages at the same time saying "The e-mail you sent has been deleted unread".

[WeAreElgin]

These days I don't speak to users anymore (thank f**k) so I am mostly shielded from the idiocy, but I used to come across some amount of morons in my old job as 2nd line support.

What doesn't help is that a lot of companies with remote help desks make sure to pay as little as possible and so end up with equally thick analysts trying to fix something that they know nothing about.

Anyone that prints an email is a c**t.

[D.A.F.C]

I faxed something to a Chinese landline once. I double checked with my boss and got the number right. We did it five times in a row to hear the angry Chinese guy shouting at us.
[emoji38]
Some of the IT skills of people at my work can be surprising. It asked for basic office skills but I'm always asked to help with things like how to count cells or values or even basic formatting. Do I get any extra or thanks for It? Nope.
Another thing that annoys me is when the same people point out basic errors with data entry then be told we can't use data validation as 'excel isn't verified or properly tested'. Yeah right enough nobody uses this obscure program. We might break the internet with it ffs

[BFTD]

3 hours ago, Jaggy Snake said:

My boss (who, to be fair, is in his sixties) regularly asks our engineer to print out drawings for him, only to scan them back into his own computer to attach them to an email.

In my previous job I would have said the guy I sat next to was computer literate, considering he was a design engineer and spent all day using CAD programs and spreadsheets. He always complained about his PC freezing so one day, while he was off, I ran a basic disk clean-up on his computer which found more than 3GB of temporary files to be deleted. He was amazed how much better his computer was running when he came back.

"Temporary files"

I got almost got myself into some trouble at college by downloading a copy of Resident Evil 2 over a period of weeks. Because it was going to take so long, I kept the files on my shared network drive, which every login had (it showed up as drive J: or something). I'm quite happily downloading away in class one day while getting on with class work, when suddenly I get a big Novell Netware 'FATAL ERROR' message, and a lovely old-school Windows 95 blue screen. Within a few seconds, everyone else in class gets the same thing, and it becomes obvious that it's affecting the whole campus, including the admin staff and (shock horror) the principal himself.

So, I'm sweating bullets waiting for the hammer to fall, thinking I've somehow executed a virus in the warez I was downloading, but it turned out that the problem was that I'd filled up the last of the space on the network drive, and Novell Netware had thrown a fit. I did get the blame for about ten minutes after the head tech noticed that my profile on the network drive took up about 75mb of space (as opposed to the 1 or 2mb that most people had saved). I got away with it for two reasons: for one, the head tech realised he'd fucked up by configuring the network drive so that a single user could fill the whole drive if they wanted, rather than allocating everyone a fixed space. For another, it turned out that my 75mb was a tiny fraction of the space taken up by the "temporary files" that had been downloaded to the drive by a senior member of staff  

[D.A.F.C]

Remembered another beauty. IT dept thought that there were too many emails so were going to delete everything over a year old. Queue everyone forwarding hundreds of emails to themselves and doubling the data.

[Cerberus]

2 hours ago, D.A.F.C said:

Remembered another beauty. IT dept thought that there were too many emails so were going to delete everything over a year old. Queue everyone forwarding hundreds of emails to themselves and doubling the data.

Do you work for Hillary Clinton?

[D.A.F.C]

1 hour ago, Cerberus said:

Do you work for Hillary Clinton?

Close, Bill.

[mizfit]

My work won't allow external email.

Always a joy asking someone if they would accept a fax afterwards.

[drs]

Working in IT, we were once recruiting for a new Assistant Chief Executive and part of the process was they had to read some information and then produce an appropriately formatted response (Word Report, Spreadsheet of figures, Presentation) so muggins here had to set up new user accounts etc for them all to use.

I then proceeded to ask if the people coming in had any special requirements - was I going to have to default one new profile to larger font and icons etc and was eventually told by HR that one of them would require a left handed mouse.

Simple - I set up their profile to have the mouse buttons default the other way round.

Job done, I get on with accessing all those websites I've banned the rest of the organisation from accessing.

Come the time of the assessment I find an HR person hunting me down - the computer isn't working!! The assessment for this candidate is in chaos, turns out when they twat had asked for a left handed mouse, they meant a mouse placed to the left of the keyboard. My response was to calmly reset the mouse and leave before telling HR that the person was a fucking moron and could have moved it themselves when they arrived.

They didn't become our Assistant Chief Executive.

 

Another ACE we had one day brought in her PC from home as it was having problems - had a look at it and found that it had a virus on it, most likely from all of the porn sites that were in the history. 

[Cardinal Richelieu]

16 minutes ago, drs said:

Working in IT, we were once recruiting for a new Assistant Chief Executive and part of the process was they had to read some information and then produce an appropriately formatted response (Word Report, Spreadsheet of figures, Presentation) so muggins here had to set up new user accounts etc for them all to use.

I then proceeded to ask if the people coming in had any special requirements - was I going to have to default one new profile to larger font and icons etc and was eventually told by HR that one of them would require a left handed mouse.

Simple - I set up their profile to have the mouse buttons default the other way round.

Job done, I get on with accessing all those websites I've banned the rest of the organisation from accessing.

Come the time of the assessment I find an HR person hunting me down - the computer isn't working!! The assessment for this candidate is in chaos, turns out when they twat had asked for a left handed mouse, they meant a mouse placed to the left of the keyboard. My response was to calmly reset the mouse and leave before telling HR that the person was a fucking moron and could have moved it themselves when they arrived.

They didn't become our Assistant Chief Executive.

 

Another ACE we had one day brought in her PC from home as it was having problems - had a look at it and found that it had a virus on it, most likely from all of the porn sites that were in the history. 

I'm left-handed, but anyone who chooses to have that done is OFTW.

[Swarley]

I'm left-handed, OFTW.

FTFY

[BFTD]

6 hours ago, drs said:

Another ACE we had one day brought in her PC from home as it was having problems - had a look at it and found that it had a virus on it, most likely from all of the porn sites that were in the history. 

Least she didn't ask you to take a w**k bullet for her.

[Ya Bezzer!]

Last night I was typing into a spreadsheet and instead of hitting shift P for a capital P, I hit Ctrl P and printed out 1,078 pages.

Oops.

[HMFC Mitchy]

14 minutes ago, Ya Bezzer! said:

Last night I was typing into a spreadsheet and instead of hitting shift P for a capital P, I hit Ctrl P and printed out 1,078 pages.

Oops.

Turn the printer aff you world ruiner.

[BFTD]

23 minutes ago, HMFC Mitchy said:

Turn the printer aff you world ruiner.

Give him a break. The printer's probably at least ten yards away from his desk or, as we refer to it, a Mozza marathon.

[GordonD]

1 hour ago, Ya Bezzer! said:

Last night I was typing into a spreadsheet and instead of hitting shift P for a capital P, I hit Ctrl P and printed out 1,078 pages.

Oops.

It wouldn't have been so bad if he hadn't kept reloading paper.

[DA Baracus]

Surely you'd still have to click on 'Print' if you pressed CTRL + P as all that would do would be to bring up the print preview and printing options?

[BFTD]

5 minutes ago, DA Baracus said:

Surely you'd still have to click on 'Print' if you pressed CTRL + P as all that would do would be to bring up the print preview and printing options?

He probably works for a bank, and is still using DOS. That dot matrix must have taken one hell of a pounding.

[Cerberus]

2 hours ago, Ya Bezzer! said:

Last night I was typing into a spreadsheet and instead of hitting shift P for a capital P, I hit Ctrl P and printed out 1,078 pages.

Oops.

[Allan Jacobsen]