"As he made his way over, he casually picked up the electronic stapler…"
And thus the legend of the BOFH was born to the eternal delight of all us lowly peons.
A joy to read.
“Give it to me pleeeese!” she begs, staring longingly into my eyes. “I’m desperate and will do anything.” It’s 5:30am and we are the only people in the office. I stutter that I’m not at liberty to satisfy her demands right there and then. It’s too early for me. Could she wait a while? She takes a step towards me and begins …
At a previous orkplace[1] I had a sign marked "your incompetence does not constitute my emergency".
It lasted a short while before I was asked to take it down - the main target (yes - the one who always seemed unable to plan his time and projects and was always asking for urgent stuff at 5pm on a Friday even though he'd known about the requirements for 3 weeks) complained that I had "an unhelpful attitude".
I left that place not long afterwards.
[1] A large US company that, some say, inspired a lot of the Dilbert cartoons.
Not by any chance one that was bought several times over?
That is rather common slogan there. As is urgent tasks landing 4-5pm on friday. Usually from US as it is only midday for them. Oh and of course because of lack of any kind of planning.
Given Dilbert strips seem to accurately follow happenings in the company, it was common joke that Scott Adams had to work in the company or have close ties to someone who did.
AC just because..
Since Scott Adams quite openly begs for his readers to send anecdotes from their office to serve as fodder for his strips - it's not entirely surprising that he seems to have spies everywhere.
That's because he does, in fact, have spies everywhere. In direct proportion to the level of his own readership among the employee base.
Having been is such a position, but with users who were not IT pros ( and I am at best semi-pro) I quickly developed a degree of applied paranoia. Don't let anyone do anything with originals, do it myself, take every precaution I possibly can to make sure I do no harm, and back up my backups onto a backup of my backup location, then back that up somewhere else.
And then check everything I've done before I do anything active.
And don't delete the backups of the backups of the backups until I test the backups of the backups.
I have long been accused by colleagues and friends of being "too negative" when it comes to changing anything - especially in IT. Then they expect me to pull a rabbit out of a hat when they haven't taken my recommended precautions.
Have lost count of the number of times that the obvious Plan "B" wasn't good enough - and ended up having to use Plan "C" or "D" - or more.
It's like the mythical Cassandra - fated to warn people of impending dangers but forced to suffer the effects when they come to pass. The Ancient Greeks obviously had their own equivalent of being IT support.
It's not a sham, it's a real image. I picked it because its underlying references to a publishing office, a man and a woman talking to each other, being in the past, and of course because it's Friday. It's not supposed to be an illustration of the actual events related in my story, which BTW isn't a true one anyway.
I can understand that for small files, but if you are moving uncompressed photos or video files around I don't think even 5TB would last very long.
Now what you could do is have a storage array with differential de-duplication on it, but that's current enterprise tech anyway.
@Kubla Cant
I do use Linux, since 1999.
No distro has a default FS that does that by default.
The default FS doesn't even let you see file creation dates easily (and only recently did EXT even store them). Yes, VMS was good and NTFS wouldn't have been too bad if they hadn't handed the NT OS over to the students and Interns that wrote Win95, It went downhill after NT3.51.
"Customer Delight Implementation Executive"? Got to love it. I found that the big all-knowing data grave has a page on customer delight, but with phrases like "During contacts with touch points in the company, more than just customer service can be delivered. The person at the front line can surprise by showing a sincere personal interest in the customer, offer small attentions that might please or find a solution specific to particular needs.", I think Dabbsie put the page there for us to find.
Paris, 'cause I hear her touch points for particular needs are quite famous.
"I didn't know which files she wanted to restore. Neither did she, as the story recounts."
Did she really now?
“They’re last Friday’s files! I don’t want last Friday’s! I want yesterday morning’s files! Now I don’t even last night’s! How do I get them back?”
Looks to me as if she knew exactly what files she needed, but the problem here is that you didn't even bother to ask.
Obviously she did not know what she wanted, what she was doing, or what she was looking for, or she would have restored just those files.
Isn't it interesting how IMPORTANT stuff is to users when they have to actually pay attention to what the EFF they're doing, even more interesting to see how they can't be arsed with the details once they hit the grind and RESTORE ALL TEH THINGS because that will probably be the best solution to retrieve the document where they changed every instance of "You're stoopid" to "You are stupid" but forgot to click the floppy icon....
the smart ones embrace the macs - for those who need them.
at a prior employ, there was a windows admin who despised them - with hate-induced masturbatory fantasies about wanting to destroy all apple related kit... sodding little psychopath that he was...
thankfully though the IT managers were smarter than him and knew what generated money (the shop being a print / proofing place for a newspaper...)
It's called job security, computers that just work leave you with nothing to do and management wondering what the hell you are doing all day.
Ironically I failed miserably at establishing job security by standardising, idiot-proofing and automating everything, which was my job.
Now I do nice home renovations for people who are actually happy with my work, and generally assume they do not understand what is going on so they leave it to me. Another plus is I never get any calls about the oven drivers being out of date, thermostats not playing fullscreen or the laminate flooring not being colour accurate....
I know we'll get there soon enough, I already run into the odd drooling IoT aficionado wanting me to hook up their nest, but at least now I can fake ignorance convincingly.
I still also do IT work, but nothing that has to do with users fortunately...
"It's called job security, computers that just work leave you with nothing to do and management wondering what the hell you are doing all day.
Ironically I failed miserably at establishing job security by standardising, idiot-proofing and automating everything, which was my job."
You seem to have been very unlucky. Most companies simply go out and recruit a better class of idiot.
Something like that anyway.
"job: 36890786: logged from user XXXX
Hi my computer has crashed. Help!!"
Pays to visit.
"Hi. Problem?"
"Yes it just stopped working and my Power Point Presentation has been lost."
"Oh. OK. Let's just have a look in here. Hmm sort by date."
"Wow! what are all those ~weird files?"
"Err. Those are the ones that are using up 94% of your hard drive."
"OK. Let's just rename the last one to .ppt and have a looksie."
"Oh great thanks. I would have hated to have lost all that work."
"No Problems. What do you want to do with the other ones?"
"Uhm?"
"Looks like two years worth of crashes."
"All my work!!!?"
"Yup. Do you remember what it might have been."
"Uhm.... No."
del *.*