Well at least, that way, when they finally found the problem (or didn't until it happened again), they couldn't blame him any more.

"No good deed ever goes unpunished"

Has a client or colleague blamed you for a problem you didn’t cause?

Oh yes. There are ignorant people in all industries. And that is one of the big reasons to stay with a manager (or group), that is intelligent and has technical understanding. In BigCorp even official root cause analysis was finding the first and easiest 'victim' for demerit and firing. Some frustrating fights over the obvious, and *never* a 'sorry', when the real cause was eventually accepted.

I once got banned from a site because their insistence on buying clone toner cartridges ruined a bunch of fusers and I refused to clean out the printers for free and replace the fusers under warranty (it was absolutely obvious what caused the problems)

Tightwads (with a large presence in the IT contracting market)

I save an engineer in the same situation once. He was upgrading some instrument controller Macs to the wonders of OSX. One of the computer's hard discs decided that was the time to die (maybe the amount of IO didn't help). I managed to dig a compatible disc out of the "I'm sure this'll be useful one day" cupboard and he installed the OS afresh.

I then had to convince our scientists that it was just unfortunate timing on his part and not anything he did wrong.

I've had servers die because of unfortunate disk failures (second disk failed shortly after the first and the client hadn't noticed or bothered to report the first), it was always fun explaining they needed to restore from backup then finding their ultra speedy backup had only catalogued a tape and their last, valid, backup was from a month ago

Things I have learned to do:

SW/OS change on server or labPC: Shutdown. Remove power. Leave to cool for as long as possible, at least a tea break. Power on. Check that HW and old SW/OS is still fine. Then do your changes and finish with an OS restart.

Programming: Before making even a trivial change, see that the application builds as is, so you can tell if someone elses change broke the build.

> Programming: Before making even a trivial change, see that the application builds as is

So much this*

> so you can tell if someone elses change broke the build

Even - or especially - if that person would have yourself! These days, I'm only coding for my own needs, but before leaping in to bash away at the recently spotted bug in my notes-taking program, I made sure that the working copy was updated from VCS (and had no local mods) then fired off a build from the top of that copy. 'Cos who knows what state I'd left it in when it was last fiddled with, months ago: I know I'd added a neat feature, the commit message reminds me of this, but was I distracted and left something part done in that working copy? Only one way to be safe...

* and you can have the all-important tea break whilst waiting for the build to complete

It sounds like they should have PAT tested the power supplies better

The needn't have got in a paddy about it.

I'll give you a pat on the head for that

Speaking of Patricks, is this the same Patrick as [1]last week or has the Regomiser got stuck?

[1] https://www.theregister.com/2026/01/05/who_me/

So it's all YOUR FAULT is it. You're banned from El Reg

Superb, have a breakfast pint

You went in there last week therefore it is your fault.

Standard line from a lot of people.

However if you think it was you own up people will treat you better we all make mistakes.

Had a few of those customers...

"Customer's sites keep falling over the day after your team installed the new frontend system, so it must be your fault." (Yeah, and two days after the backend software house installed the new database and set a reboot for Saturday evening in the process.)

"Customer says their doesn't work; you were the last engineer on site so it must be your fault..."

I've even had "Customer's network is down. You were in reception at the time, so it must be your fault..."

One of the service help desk came round to my desk, and said an important customers was blaming me on a major problem they had.

They had told their management, "we did xyz as expert abc said, and it caused this problem".

I looked into it.

The advice I had given was

If blah blah blah blah then do xyz. They ignored the if statement and did it anyway.

I had words with the salesperson who worked the account, who did some digging.

I offered a good will(free) call with the customer to discuss the problem and solutions.

The technical team had screwed up, and wanted to blame someone else, so they were definitely not keen on a call.

Short attention span. By the time you get to the end of what you're saying the first part has already left the building.

Decades ago I worked for an ISP, and one of our customers reported their connection was occasionally dropping overnight and screwing up their off-site backup. Everything on our side looked fine, outside of there being times of 90% utilization, but they were squeaky enough the boss scheduled me to go over and have a peek at their hardware and look at the backup software.

But the morning of the appointment I get a call from the guy I'm supposed to meet, saying he will be too busy to walk me around. Cool, whatever, next week? Oh, and maybe we can save some time if you email me the logs before then?

The next day get called up on the carpet by my bosses' boss, who asks me to tell him 'my side' of what happened at my site visit. "Uh.. There wasn't one. They called to reschedule."

To say he looked relieved would have been an understatement. See, he'd just gotten off the phone with some executive at the squeaky customer, who claimed I was the cause of an outage that was costing them a shed-load of money.

But since I hadn't been there he pushed back hard, and in the end it shook out that the accusation was a CYA attempt. Their file server, which ran the backup software, had a pair of disks fail. And since he thought I had been there to touch the machine, he thought he could blame it on something I did, and not the fact he'd told his guys that they didn't need to keep RAID spares sitting around because "What are the chances we have two drives fail? Like zero.".

(Oh, and the backup failures? They had a very short timeout and a small number of retries set, figuring there'd be nothing else using the office network at 2am. They were wrong, they had at least two numb-nuts downloading movies and fifty machines grabbing email over POP3 every five minutes.)

... until it's the UPS.

I used to work in a local council. I asked why they don't use more open source - e.g. not spending money on a full Photoshop licence just so people could resize images. Their answer was "but if it all goes wrong, who do we sue"?

I was once working slightly late and my colleagues had already gone to the pub. I walked past the server room (glass-fronted, it was from the dot com boom), and could hear the wail of all the UPSs, so I went to investigate. It turned out that an awful lot of the equipment in the server room was running off a (now melted) 13A mains socket - how it had coped until then I don't know. Obviously I didn't get any thanks when I eventually arrived at the pub having hastily rewired the servers to spread the load.

IF a 13amp socket had melted, there was clearly a problem with the fuse in the plug!

Nah, with the right overcurrent you can melt the back of the plug, especially if it has one of those plastic fuse holders, way before the fuse actually pops.

Tried to remote onto a server. Failed. Turned out a laptop user in the office unplugged it to plug in their charger... (it was a small office server).

They powered it back on for me, but the dirty shutdown (and the on/off process having been going on for weeks as the user unplugged the server every time they were in the office) had the server come up once more, but unable to read the disks. The RAID controller had failed (I seem to recall).

Cue booking engineer to attend to fix AND perform the restore once fixed.

Turned out the backup device never came back on once the server was initially turned of by the laptop user in the first place - so the server had never been backed up since the day they first charged their laptop from that outlet.

The office (and company) made a formal complaint against me for wrecking their system.

Oh how we all laughed - but it still required me to undergo the formal process - despite everyone taking part - HR included - knowing it was a crock...

A good reason for installing video camera(s) in your machine room and keeping several days' recording.

Surprising how many people have access that ought not — bloody cleaners with skeleton keys for one.

Keeps people honest and points the finger of suspicion more equitably.

A simple setup on an isolated network with a cheap Chinese cam (ethernet only) connected to a [*ix] box running VLC is cheap enough.