In a shameless attempt to revive this old, dusty place, I want to know what your crowning moment of WTFery at the workplace you've experienced. I'll start
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at my last workplace, my now-husband was told to replace a power supply remotely by our dept director.
this was moments after being asked what a switch was by that same dept director.
at that same workplace, my boss decided he didn't like having women on his team, and made a point to punish the three of us with the wrong genitalia. 1 - one of us he refused to let work on Mac calls - she was hired specifically to take those calls, and was forced to take Windows calls instead. she had little experience in Windows. 2 - another of us came in as a programmer. she was forced to take level 1 inbound calls. she was never permitted to work on her specialty. 3 - i was forced to deal with all of the Mac people after a short 4 months working for an Apple contractor.
*nods* Boss 3.0 (aka buttplug) did essentially the same with the two ladies on our team. One left for greener pastures, the other one is nigh-unfirable and exceedingly well connected* - he didn't dare mess with her, but was condescending nonetheless.
* Community member, AND most of senior management (including the board and tribal council) like her.
i just don't understand why some managers enjoy taking their stresses out on the female members of their teams. we're just as capable as the boys. trying to tell us we can't play is ridiculous.
i did get to enjoy knowing my boss at that former workplace pissed off SO MANY higher-ups that they completely bypassed the grievance system set up by the institution and just terminated the entire position to get rid of him quickly. just pissed i couldn't give him my 2 weeks notice...of course, if i HAD been able to give him that, i probably would have told all of my coworkers and all of the other managers first, and let him know the last day of my 2 weeks.
he was an asshat...and he ended up selling carpet because no one else would hire him in the same position after he'd been fired from a number of jobs in a row. he's now working in a lower position than i am currently. karma's a bitch.
I noticed the IT admin at my school where I work has one password and username for everything.
Username: xxxxschool password: 123456
For the free wifi (publicly posted btw), for the passwords on our computers, and amusingly and much to my delight.. I found out yesterday that's the same information for the router.
Here's one I shared here on the day it happened, so many years ago...
I was a Tech Monkey, er, Support fellow for a US Cable TV company, supporting Cable Internet and basically telling people to reboot their modem and pay their bill.
This one lady couldn't figure out why her service was not working (don't remember the exact reason for it, but odds are nonpayment), and started screaming at me and how I and the company were a bunch of racists and blah-blah-blah. I had already had more than enough before that call started, so attempted my one shot at disarming the situation...
"Miss, you're a voice on a phone and so am I, I do not know your race, and there is no way you could know mine."
"Well, you're obviously white! You sound too intelligent to be black!"
QE files a bug: Add a second virtual disk to a VM, it comes up saying it can't be found.
This should not happen, of course. After much back and forth, the true sequence of events is:
Them: In the Finder, dive inside the VM bundle, which is a bundle for a reason. - basically, you have just aimed your gun at your foot Throw "Virtual Disk.vmdk" in the trash instead of using the "remove device" UI Open the VM. It complains that it can't find "Virtual Disk.vmdk". Hit Cancel on the dialog. - now you're saying "why yes, I do want to shoot myself in the foot!" Add a new disk through the UI. It, of course, sees that there's no file with the default name, so it creates "Virtual Disk.vmdk". You now have two virtual disks devices, both thinking they're going to use the same file. Power on the VM. One of the two devices gets that file, the other one complains that it can't be found.
Me: Close bug as "user error". Complain to manager that QE should not be filing bugs that get closed as "user error"
You know, I missed the opportunity to interoffice mail the bundle of sawed-off pool noodles to the new developers as an officewarming gift. You know, the new hires who I think are going to be sitting within walloping distance of QE?
It's the remaining QE that'll need the pool noodles - they have eventually figured out what the product does. And some of them are actually CS engineers, but were they asked to join the replacements? Ha.
Yeah: the untoppable WTF moment - replace an entire team with a bunch of new hires. Complete loss of institutional memory, anyone?
My (STEM-focussed) university has a range of IT systems that are very, very picky about whether you log in as USERNAME or username.
The instructions are always bafflingly vague.
This would be frustrating but manageable if there were only two options, and if one failed you could try the other.
Unfortunately (a) there's actually a third type of prefix/form of the username that might be required, (b) at least two forms of suffix, and (c) in one particularly impressive case whether you log in as USERNAME or username affects which functionality you can access.
Ah, Kerberos. Yes, Kerberos and the strange way that MS implements it inconsistently across their product line. (remembers not-so-fondly the headache in getting Sharepoint to pull BI reports from a MS SQL server using the end user's token)
We end up having to call MS *every time* we have to dick with that mess, and even then they get it wrong.
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this was moments after being asked what a switch was by that same dept director.
at that same workplace, my boss decided he didn't like having women on his team, and made a point to punish the three of us with the wrong genitalia.
1 - one of us he refused to let work on Mac calls - she was hired specifically to take those calls, and was forced to take Windows calls instead. she had little experience in Windows.
2 - another of us came in as a programmer. she was forced to take level 1 inbound calls. she was never permitted to work on her specialty.
3 - i was forced to deal with all of the Mac people after a short 4 months working for an Apple contractor.
it was a bad time.
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* Community member, AND most of senior management (including the board and tribal council) like her.
Reply
i did get to enjoy knowing my boss at that former workplace pissed off SO MANY higher-ups that they completely bypassed the grievance system set up by the institution and just terminated the entire position to get rid of him quickly. just pissed i couldn't give him my 2 weeks notice...of course, if i HAD been able to give him that, i probably would have told all of my coworkers and all of the other managers first, and let him know the last day of my 2 weeks.
he was an asshat...and he ended up selling carpet because no one else would hire him in the same position after he'd been fired from a number of jobs in a row. he's now working in a lower position than i am currently. karma's a bitch.
Reply
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Username: xxxxschool
password: 123456
For the free wifi (publicly posted btw), for the passwords on our computers, and amusingly and much to my delight.. I found out yesterday that's the same information for the router.
Oh dear..
Reply
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I was a Tech Monkey, er, Support fellow for a US Cable TV company, supporting Cable Internet and basically telling people to reboot their modem and pay their bill.
This one lady couldn't figure out why her service was not working (don't remember the exact reason for it, but odds are nonpayment), and started screaming at me and how I and the company were a bunch of racists and blah-blah-blah. I had already had more than enough before that call started, so attempted my one shot at disarming the situation...
"Miss, you're a voice on a phone and so am I, I do not know your race, and there is no way you could know mine."
"Well, you're obviously white! You sound too intelligent to be black!"
My brain went TILT after that one.
Reply
This should not happen, of course. After much back and forth, the true sequence of events is:
Them:
In the Finder, dive inside the VM bundle, which is a bundle for a reason.
- basically, you have just aimed your gun at your foot
Throw "Virtual Disk.vmdk" in the trash instead of using the "remove device" UI
Open the VM. It complains that it can't find "Virtual Disk.vmdk". Hit Cancel on the dialog.
- now you're saying "why yes, I do want to shoot myself in the foot!"
Add a new disk through the UI. It, of course, sees that there's no file with the default name, so it creates "Virtual Disk.vmdk".
You now have two virtual disks devices, both thinking they're going to use the same file.
Power on the VM. One of the two devices gets that file, the other one complains that it can't be found.
Me:
Close bug as "user error". Complain to manager that QE should not be filing bugs that get closed as "user error"
Reply
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Yeah: the untoppable WTF moment - replace an entire team with a bunch of new hires. Complete loss of institutional memory, anyone?
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The instructions are always bafflingly vague.
This would be frustrating but manageable if there were only two options, and if one failed you could try the other.
Unfortunately (a) there's actually a third type of prefix/form of the username that might be required, (b) at least two forms of suffix, and (c) in one particularly impressive case whether you log in as USERNAME or username affects which functionality you can access.
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(And the occasional need to prefix your username with DOMAIN\…)
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We end up having to call MS *every time* we have to dick with that mess, and even then they get it wrong.
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