Weird stories from your job

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freitasm

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#268622 29-Mar-2020 11:36

The year was 1984 (or 85, can't remember exactly). I was at university and found a job as a data entry intern for a company who had just recently bought their first CP/M-based microcomputer - with two 8" floppy drives and an Epson dot matrix printer. Yay!

They had hired a consultancy to deploy an MBASIC-based financial package. We all shared the same room while they were there doing "programming stuff" while I waited around.

One day they were having some problems positioning the dot matrix printer head to get some columns exactly on the right position for printing numbers. I heard their discussion and told them "Hey, if you use the [function] as a value of this then it will position correctly."

They did just that, and it worked. I was feeling good.

The next morning I was called into the owner's office and told the I was not needed there anymore.

So, my lesson as a young university student before my first "official" IT job was: people don't like when you point out what they are doing wrong.

I got a job as a developer for a company using Burroughs (later Unisys) mainframes, before joining Unisys as a developer (working there almost 17 years, including a job transfer to New Zealand).

Any other stories of dumb stuff like this to share?

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Technofreak

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#2449324 29-Mar-2020 11:40

Whereas if they actually had some smarts the outfit doing the work would have hired you.

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madduck

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#2449431 29-Mar-2020 13:05

My favourite story is from around 1996 or so. I was working for a small consultancy doing phone support for enterprise Sun Microsystems customers. We were 4 in the team, sitting around a big round table with a plant in the middle. One day, one of the ladies working with me brought in a red, rotating flash light, hooked up to four buttons, and from now on, whenever we had one of those incredibly stupid customers on the other side of the line (and we had lots of incredibly stupid customers), we'd hit our switch, the light would go on for a few seconds, and whoever could would come over and listen in on the speaker phone. We played pranks, and tried to one-up each other. Kinda made working on Solaris fun.

The other story I have is from college, around 1998. I was working as an IT support engineer, and it was around Easter, i.e. finals time was approaching, and the printers were getting increasingly hammered with draft printouts of final papers. The college newspaper had just published the list of 100 academic buzzwords, and we spent an entire weekend crafting printer firmware upgrades that would replace these words with a white box in printout. Boy did we get into trouble, but it was absolutely worth it.

Rikkitic

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#2449473 29-Mar-2020 13:58

In the good old days of MSDOS I worked as a freelance commercial writer. I was also a computer hobbyist. At the time there were some very clever software jokes making the rounds. Two I especially remember were called 'Drip.com' and 'Danish.com'. These were memory-resident programmes that played with the display but did nothing harmful. Both depended on messing with the screen buffer.

Drip would copy random letters on the screen, blank them, display them a line lower, rinse and repeat. In this way it looked like letters were 'dripping' down the screen. Danish would overwrite certain letters with foreign ones, creating a psuedo-Scandinavian text that was hilarious but still understandable.

I gave the little programmes to a colleague who took them to a client and snuck them onto the office computer. As the display started doing strange things, people gathered from other offices to gaze in wonder and offer helpful suggestions. The company IT expert was called, who suggested the computer might just be getting 'tired'. All in all a wonderfully non-productive afternoon. Fortunately, the client had a sense of humour.

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jarledb

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#2449572 29-Mar-2020 16:17

In the end of the 90s I was working for the internet consultancy unit of a large international company.

One of our larger projects was making a GPS tracking system for locomotives for the national railway. The reason for the project was that the national railway needed to get a better handle of how far each locomotive had travelled and optimise the service scheduling. Up until then they had a completely manual system.

To get the job the sales department pushed the developers to make an estimate that was about 50% of the time that we actually thought it would take to make it. The reasoning was that it was a big notable project and it would be good PR for the company.

Of course, just making an estimate 50% of the time needed does not mean that you end up using 50% less time. So the project went over, and management were not pleased with the developers.

As the project went live the national railway found that they were using less of the tracks than they were paying another state company for, so they ended up saving the amount the project had cost in total per year in reduced track costs. So the national railway told this international company that they could invoice for all work that had been done.

The people getting the praise when that happened?

The very sales department that had pushed for the under-estimation of the project.

They got a nice pat on the back, but the developers never got any praise.

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mugs2000

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#2449626 29-Mar-2020 17:47

This didn’t happen to me, but I think it is worth telling the story of a friend from the now defunct G+.

She worked at a workshop where the boss’s son also worked who had a bad habit of fiddling with equipment in the workshop.

So she got her brother to make up a box with a red button, a red light and a display screen. There was also a sign stuck to the side saying “Do not press this button”

You can guess what happened when she brought the box to work. When dumbo inevitably pressed the button, the flashing light started and the screen displayed “Release button to detonate”.

There were yells of “What do I do? What do I do?” echoing around the room.

bagheera

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#2449649 29-Mar-2020 18:08

back in the mid 90's, with novell servers, where you can set password policy down to the user level - someone beep off the senior IT person, so he set his password to expire after 1 day, 100-day history and 30 character min length, about 1 month later our boss came out asking why someone complaining about changing his password every day.

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sqishy

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#2449656 29-Mar-2020 18:23

I worked in the 90's for a company called GPT (Plessey) that built SCADA systems on a PDP with RSX-11 ops systems. These had a main server that ran 200+ applications and Green Screen Terminals via RS-232.

Being young and fresh I challenged a top guy there that I had written some code to crack password which was pretty much impossible back then. He sort of told me I was delusional.

He came into work the next day logged in and at lunch time I told him his password. Little did he know that I spliced into his RS-232 cable and put a terminal on the other side of his desk logging everything he typed.

openmedia

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#2449958 30-Mar-2020 11:32

I gave a talk on some "War Stories" at linux.conf.au 2020 back in January - Video is available on youtube - You can skip forward to around the 10 minute mark for the main part of the talk.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PUuTUxnqX0g

Names have been avoided to protect the guilty, a couple of incidents were combined for the sake of time and story telling, but sometimes you have to help organisations deal with the weirdest of issues. The number of people who came to chat afterwards with similar stories, or offers of a cold one for the pain I'd been thru, was amazing.

Friends don't let friends install a new dry wall in a working machine room.

Generally known online as OpenMedia, now working for Red Hat APAC as a Technology Evangelist and Portfolio Architect. Still playing with MythTV and digital media on the side.

freitasm

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#2449961 30-Mar-2020 11:37

Whoa... Not only stories, but with video!

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Handsomedan

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#2450018 30-Mar-2020 12:46

I worked for a Trade Exchange for a while and one day one of my colleagues had a client on the phone who ran a gentlemen's club...

Long story short, he was on speakerphone and stated very proudly, "Mate we need some new mattresses - can you get us new mattresses? They're taking a pounding!"...

At which point the speaker was turned off, we all cracked up and apparently the conversation got worse!

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Handsome Dan needs to stop adding three dots to every sentence...

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Fred99

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#2479149 8-May-2020 11:01

For a while a very long time ago I worked in the office for one of the larger NZ freight companies. I think the job title was "rating clerk". IIRC there were six of us.

It was the most soulless boring work I've ever experienced. Mainly container movements to/from the port and storage yards. Eventually a consignment note for each part of the movement would end up in my in tray. These listed the container number, needed to be matched up and kept together in hundreds of manilla folders in my "work in progress" stack, then costed when the container had reached it's destination - so for example port to yard, yard to customer, pick up empty and return to yard. Sounds simple but there were added problems - for example some customers had no container lift on site, so you'd have to add extra charge for side-lifting truck or to get a lift to their site. There were penalties to be added if the container wasn't unloaded quickly. The customers all had different rates/discounts. The most exciting thing that ever happened was occasionally an unhappy customer would call up demanding to know in an instant where their container was - for which there was probably an answer in the pile (as you sift through hundreds of folders looking for "OCLU 3245"). While they're hanging on the other end of the phone, at least you had an excuse to talk to a human being. After my first couple of days, my fellow clerks volunteered the information that the guy I'd replaced had a heart attack - he'd slumped dead on the desk where I had my stacks of paper. "The stress got to him" they said. I think he died of boredom.

Big shout out to computer geeks who helped eradicate most jobs like this. It made the world a better place.

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BlueShift

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#2479165 8-May-2020 11:13

About 15 years ago I was working on helpdesk. My manager called me into his office and showed me an email to him from the head of IT demanding I be dragged over the coals and sent directly to HR for disciplinary procedures.

Turns out they had done a wee audit across all the PCs in the business and found a DVD ripping package on my PC. In those days there were (in theory) no legal loopholes and DVD ripping was a definite no-no.

Fair cop, I had installed the software, I had ripped a DVD. At the request of the HR department. After I had explicitly and in writing reminded them that ripping DVDs was a breach of copyright etc.

I'm still working there, not in Helpdesk. We've had four heads of IT and three entire changes of HR since then...

freitasm

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#2479172 8-May-2020 11:29

BlueShift:

In those days there were (in theory) no legal loopholes and DVD ripping was a definite no-no.

The weird part is that ripping DVDs - unless it's your own creation - it's still not legal... Unlike music CDs.

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Rikkitic

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#2479177 8-May-2020 11:38

freitasm:

The weird part is that ripping DVDs - unless it's your own creation - it's still not legal... Unlike music CDs.

Maybe the MPA is just better at lobbying, or maybe no-one cares anymore.

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