IT List
Just to change things up, I thought I’d start showing off some of the non-military lists I have been sent. So here’s the first entry, of what will probably be many, of the IT List.
42 Things That I Am No Longer Allowed To Do in I.T.
(Submitted by MC900FtJedi)
- Not allowed to randomly rickroll users upon login to the application.
- Not allowed to comment that Visual Studio 2005 is a “bloated piece of shite” within earshot of the Microsoft consultant.
- Rooms at adult-oriented hotels cannot be charged to my corporate card.
- Not allowed to discharge a fire extinguisher in the Halon-protected server room.
- Lolspeak is not appropriate for error messages.
- Lolcode is not a corporate standard.
- Not allowed to use Star Wars references when naming new applications/modules; it makes Legal nervous.
- That goes double for South Park.
- If something makes me giggle for longer than 15 seconds, I am to assume that doing it will get me an invite to the HR Director’s office.
- Not allowed to continue to explain to users what an ID10T error is.
- Or PEBKAC, for that matter.
- “Mental Health Day” is not a valid reason when requesting time off.
- Not allowed to say “Domino’s Pizza” when answering the phone.
- My cubicle is not holy ground.
- Not allowed to charge the down payment on my SUV to my corporate card.
- Not allowed to tell the new developers that it is a department standard to capitalize all vowels in source code.
- Not allowed to put up “Happy Birthday” fliers for non-existent employees.
- Not allowed to change my manager’s startup sound to “Balls! Balls! Balls! Balls! Balls of steel!”.
- Must not play battleship with a fellow developer on the text pager during the departmental meeting.
- “Yak Shaving Day” is not a recognized company holiday.
- “If it was in your ass you’d know,” is never an acceptable answer.
- Not allowed to execute a DoS attack on the network admin’s PC.
- My department VP does not appreciate it when his administrative assistant receives flowers on national Boss’ Day.
- My dog did not eat the source code.
- Not allowed to place a 2 Meg animated GIF on the start page of the application.
- “Did you see the rack on her?” is never appropriate.
- Especially during Bring-Your-Your-Daughter-To-Work-Day.
- Maxing out my corporate card’s $10,000 limit every month is not mandatory.
- A bloodhound is not a packet sniffer.
- Not allowed to hide all but the decaf coffee.
- Not allowed to name applications/modules/procedures in such a way that their acronyms would be sexually suggestive (Data In, Logical Data Out).
- Not allowed to create Help Desk tickets for office supplies.
- “That’s how I roll,” is not an acceptable answer as to why I was two hours late.
- I am not the king of all I see.
- Under no circumstances am I to ever touch the UNIX machine on the 7th floor.
- Not allowed to use the DR (disaster recovery) machine as a public Starcraft server.
- I do not have mafia ties.
- No one is interested in hearing the details of my prostrate exam.
- Friday is Hawaiian Shirt Day, not Hawaiian Dress Day.
- Calling someone an “f***ing idiot” is acceptable after I hang up the phone, not when I think my phone is on mute. Which it wasn’t.
- Not allowed to have a three-martini lunch. Especially since when I say “three-martini lunch” I really mean “five margarita pitchers binge”.
- Must not come into the office at 3 am and pass-out under my desk after a Tuesday night “three-martini lunch”.
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June 23rd, 2008 at 11:05 am
That is hilarious. Absolutely hilarious.
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June 23rd, 2008 at 1:36 pm
Oh. My. God. Not only to I actually get most of this (no offense to everyone who gets military acronyms) but it’s freaking hilarious!
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June 23rd, 2008 at 2:02 pm
We use PICNIC instead of PEBKAC, had to look that one up.
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June 23rd, 2008 at 3:42 pm
oh my fucking god if this is what I.T is going to be like for me then i am going to have some damn good fun
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June 23rd, 2008 at 4:33 pm
I love the last one, my question is who found him and how much of a mess did he make?
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MC900FtJedi reply on June 23rd, 2008 10:32 pm:
That one happened to a developer buddy of mine a couple of years ago in Chicago, not me.
Our office building was about halfway between the bars and his apartment. Instead of taking a cab home, he decided that it would be a good idea to walk. Alone. He later claimed that he didn’t remember going into the office.
About an hour after he was supposed to have started work, his supervisor tried to get a hold of him by dialing all of the numbers he had given.
He was discovered when someone in a neighboring cube heard the ringtone of his personal cell going of under his desk.
He was sent home and racked it up as a sick day.
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June 23rd, 2008 at 7:25 pm
I’ve actually used “Mental Health Day” as a reason for a day off. And mgmt here accepted it. I’ve also called in and just told the person who answered that I “just didn’t feel like coming in today” and had that one accepted to. I must be “lucky.”
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June 23rd, 2008 at 9:12 pm
22. Not allowed to execute a DoS attack on the network admin’s PC
how about a DDoS =oP
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June 23rd, 2008 at 9:13 pm
Not allowed too tell the new admin that rm -rf * will make pretty pretty colors on the unix box.
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June 23rd, 2008 at 11:08 pm
I want to know the story behind the muted call!
Captcha: McFate ever? Some kind of new dish at McDonald’s?
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MC900FtJedi reply on June 24th, 2008 2:28 am:
That one was in Chicago, too. I wasn’t the perpetrator but was party to the event.
My supervisor and I were on a call with a couple of our internal customers; everyone was on speaker. If memory serves, the issue was that they couldn’t get a secure FTP connection to work properly with one of our servers and had been like that for a few days. My super and I were doing our best to help get them up and running. The tone throughout the call was casual and there were even a few chuckles from time to time.
About 30 minutes in, one of the guys on ther other end asked us to hold on while he checked something. It’s been my experience that when one steps away from the phone during a call, one places their phone on mute.
I assume that’s what the one guy thought he did. The next thing my supervisor and I heard was: “Those f***ing idiots don’t know what the hell they’re doing.”
“Uh…we can hear you,” my supervisor replied.
Silence.
Followed by a stumbling apology.
A couple of hours later my super casually mentions the call to our manager whom casually mentioned the call to the manager of the individual that called us effing idiots.
The next morning we had a wordy, three paragraph apology from the perp waiting for us in our respective inboxes.
A few days later I heard what the cause of the issue was. It seems that they were using a different PGP key other than the one we had provided for them.
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June 24th, 2008 at 1:21 am
A couple of similar ones I/aquaintances have recieved:
– having a random number that very infrequently redirects a visitor to a shock site: bad.
– aliasing ls to “rm -rvf *” when someone leaves themselves logged in is not a good way of teaching account security
– shouldnt use a powered ethernet hub as a video signal booster using “odd” combinations of connectors
– no longer allowed to make “etherkiller” (recieve pins on a standard ethernet cable connected to the phase wires on a mains plug) cables and leave them lying around for others to potentially use
– the magic collision cable is to be destroyed. (cut open an ethernet cable, short the transfer and recieve wires together on the end that goes to the hub, use a soldering iron to re-heat seal the cable sheething – creates a permanant collision condition)
– changing homepages of those who leave their computers unlocked to something that plays loud and innappropriate music and cranking up their speakers, is, once again, not a good way to teach account security
– nor is taking a screenshot of their desktop with a bunch of additional rudely named icons and setting it as their background.
– or password protecting all their documents and leaving a “ransom note”
– no longer allowed to do anything intended to teach account security
– for downtime to be considered planned, it really should be planned IN ADVANCE, and adequate notice given, rather than after the fact sending a down time alert (by email) stating that “the network was down for maintenance from 10-1 this morning, hopefully you all saved and logged out prior to that or you lost work”
– “something that will run crysis” is a phrase that should not be used in specing out a machine to be used solely for remote administration of servers
– and why is it that some of the sysadmin machines were purchased with gamer quality graphics cards?
– and surround sound audio?
– racks of networking gear on opposite sides of the room are not to be linked by a heavy serial cable strung across the room
– and tying some spare Cat5 around an overhead light and using it to support the cable doesnt fix the problem either
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Jon reply on July 14th, 2008 8:26 am:
Let’s see… I am guilty of making an etherkiller… in more than one variety. The first was a run of the mill molex connector for a harddrive connected to mains, but the second I got fancy and connected a high voltage transformer normally used as an ignition point for a furnace to a system. 30k volts does some interesting things to hardware.
In another instance, I once changed the startup sound on my bosses’ windows system to the theme from the Six Million Dollar Man remotely. He never turned his sound on, so for six months he wondered why his system took so long to login. One day he actually left his sound turned on and finally figured out why it always took so long… my office mate and I were laughing for a long time on that one.
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Matt reply on July 15th, 2008 12:57 am:
Wow! Are you an Air Force IT guy? I swear that kind of stuff happens ALL the time around here. We get server outages, and then when it comes back up there will be 4 admin messages saying the server is going down/is down/will be back up in ‘x’ time… Not to mention all that other stuff…
Fun with Captcha: 30 bearing? What distance?
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TGOBG reply on July 15th, 2008 1:06 am:
I like the ones i get with the message ” your mailbox is over the size limit” then it seems like you receive it about every 15 minutes. this is really wonderful when you are traveling and all the overlimit messages block the important stuff. I am away from my network for weeks at a time, and even though i can log remotely into my email, it doesnt let me delete the crap. (Even though it says it did) so i wind up with 300 over limit messages and no actual emails.
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June 24th, 2008 at 2:32 am
Hey.
I should have posted this reply a little earlier. Better late than never, no?
Thanks to everyone that likes my version of Skippy’s list. It’s great to know that I had a part in causing someone to smile (in a good way, not the evil, devious way).
And also a big, HUGE thank you to Skippy. Thanks, man.
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June 24th, 2008 at 2:37 am
Some years back, I worked for a small company in the UK animation sector. One day, our MD – famous for his sunny day emails “It’s pub garden whether, get out of here and have a life” – instructed us to install Unreal Tournament on ‘every machine that would run it.’ I joked to a friend that most systems were benchmarked for NT while ours was benchmarked for UT.
Ahh, happy days. I don’t imagine the RSL I work for now would go for that, somehow.
T.
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June 24th, 2008 at 3:21 am
I’m an I.T. student a quarter away from graduation, and this is getting c&p’d and emailed to a bunch of my friends, with Jedi’s permission.
Oh, and I’d like to know the story behind the rickroll and Data In, Logical Data Out ones, if at all possible. Those sound like epic hilarity ensued.
Captcha: Oceanus Accepted – Oceanus. It’s everywhere YOU want to be!
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MC900FtJedi reply on June 24th, 2008 3:58 am:
Go for it, Analee. Though it might be best to let your friends know where it’s appearing (I’m betting that Skippy wouldn’t mind a little extra traffic. :) ).
As far as the stories behind the list…I’ll have to contact Skippy and see if he would be up for posting them as adding them here in as a reply will tend to take up a lot of space for some of them (see the “muted call” reply above).
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Analee reply on June 24th, 2008 6:14 am:
Oh, they know where it’s appearing. This got a read-out of highlights towards the end of class, and a bunch of ’em said they’d check it out for themselves later. We’re tenancious little buggers, we are, especially when it’s something that brings a rousing LOL to the class.
Wow…a rickroll story that’s LONG? That’s a new one! Most of ’em are pretty straightforward. Oh, that muted call one…that got one of the biggest laughs. I pass on thanks from my Hardware Technology class for the laughs, especially since the majority of us were still upset about George Carlin at the time this was discovered.
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MC900FtJedi reply on June 24th, 2008 9:26 pm:
Very cool. To reiterate what I’ve already said, I’m happy to have been the cause of a few chuckles.
As for the rickroll story, it’s not really all that long. However, some of the stories on this list would be too long for a reply.
June 26th, 2008 at 11:12 pm
Oh, the glorious days of I.T. I laughed at all of these. A few more:
— Not allowed to use “rm -rf *” to clean up the over-full users directory
— Even though it works
— Not allowed to direct nightly backups to /dev/null
— Not allowed to use sudo to take over managers’ accounts
— Even if said manager(s) was/were too stupid to (a) change their initial password or (b) not leave their passwords on a post-it note on their desk in plain sight
— Not allowed to erase manager’s 10MB mailbox file
— Even if it is crashing his PC
— Even if I really did back it up just in case he ever wanted that e-mail again
— Not allowed to include daily Starbucks run on expense reports
— “F**k Microsoft” is never appropriate in status reports
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June 29th, 2008 at 6:28 pm
I would like to know why the UNIX machine if off limits.
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