It's lucky "Kev" fixed that or else he'd have been screwed...

There's no escape from VPs who think they're important...

There is always an escape. We are employees (or contractors) not slaves.

Self-important bosses deserve to be abandoned by talented people everywhere

A screw down to correct the VP's screw-up, one might say. There is a pleasing kind of symmetry there.

I'll get me coat

At least it wasn't enough to leave him depressed

A key process…

Departments that send out the new folks to be chewed up by the bullets instead of risking it themselves. Lucky this one survived.

I still disagree with not telling difficult users they fucked up. If they are difficult I like to know its been pointed out that they fucked up.

A few years ago HR reported "emails are going missing" oh really? So we checked, well the other engineer did. She checked the users mailbox, then checked exchange online reports. Found the report that showed said mails had been in said user mailbox and then showed that said user "hard deleted" them. HR manger during the investigation was wondering round, would visit now and then waiting an answer claiming his staff would never delete when it was first suggested it may of been the cause.

We had clear prove this particular fuckwhit did. I was all for telling him, showing him his staff member was actively deleting the missing emails, but our manager said no. "we know she's a fuckwhit, thats enough" so she got away with it. She had even said to the other engineer "Most of the time I don't read them, I just delete".

Well if you just delete them, why are you complaining they're not there ?

And why, oh why, do companies knowingly employ incompetent people ? I mean, if you're pretending you're good and it works, good for you, but if your reputation with upper manglement is that you're a fuckwit, you should be getting a pink slip next Monday.

This is not government administration, it's private money. Private money is supposed to be efficient.

I guess that's not a hard rule.

"I mean, if you're pretending you're good and it works, good for you, but if your reputation with upper manglement is that you're a fuckwit, you should be getting a pink slip next Monday."

If you're working for the person that hired you, firing you is an admission that they got it wrong. Manglement will only admit an error if they can't first pass blame onto someone else!

Good story, but I'm not sure the VP deserves the blame here. She was using the IT equipment provided in the proper way, sliding the keyboard away on the sliding keyboard tray is hardly outside normal behaviour - it's not like she was using it to prop open a door or as a foot pedal or whatever. If anything, it's the fault of whoever installed the keyboard and desk. Good job from the intern in figuring out the issue, though.

I remember trying to diagnose a user who complained that random words appeared on screen whenever they leant back in their office chair, to the frank disbelief of everyone who heard about it. Having been dispatched to witness the issue, I could confirm it reliably happened. Much head-scratching later, it transpired that the user in question used dictation software (Dragon Dictate, back in the day!) and their chair emitted a loud enough squeak on reclining that it was picked up by the mic and dutifully transcribed by the dictation software.

Because the VP has functional eyeballs (i assume).

She should've seen the key getting pressed in and maybe make the connection herself.

True, it's a bit of a fail with the installation, but do you really expect techies installing desks to check for more than just keyboard functionality and network connection?

I can also imagine how unpleasant this person must be when you have to work in her office, or when she has to wait for you to finish installing it.

The article states that the keyboard was slid underneath the desk when she stood up, so it would not have been visible unless she got her very important head down to eye level with the gap.

Honestly, I'd say this is just a racing incident, to use the wrong parlance - the VIP's crime is being a horrible person so that tips us against her to a degree.

Globally I agree.

She was still a bitch, though.

No need to lie when this happens, you just need to be creative!

"Moving the keyboard caused a transient electrical signal to move through the network, which the mainframe interpreted as an "escape" command. This caused the email to be deleted whenever this occured. The keyboard has been adjusted to prevent this from occuring in the future."

I'd have shown them exactly what the issue was and referred them to facilities (or whoever provided the office furniture) and say they'd need to request a custom desk as their 'standard' one couldn't handle her 'Professional' keyboard.

No the same, but I uate that a lot of modern keyboards have a power button added. I have a couple where extra functions (That I never use) are just above the function keys, and are where are many years of muscle memory I grab when moving said keyboard around.

Even the keyboards software has no way to stop them from doing things, so a few bits of paper are deployed to stop them being pressed

That sounds horrible... good thing i've never come across one of those.

I've seen ones with sleep function keys but that's just something else.

I'll put those on the naughty list next to power strips with power switches.

My newest work laptop has the power button right where "delete" is on the previous laptop.

Last week, mid conference call, I found a rogue value in a spreadsheet and hit what muscle memory insisted was the delete key. Cue me hurriedly apologising to the rest of the people on the call as my laptop started to shut down!

In my previous job supporting the email system for one of the UK government departments there was a person classed as a 'VIP' who thought themselves much, much more important than everyone else and was absolutely paranoid about their emails and was convinced their mailbox needed to be backed up separately. Despite the email system being hosted on a forest of Exchange 2003 servers in stretched clusters connected to EMC DMX3000 sans and backed up every night, they insisted that wasn't enough and eventually, after making a tremendous fuss, an automated export of her mailbox was set up for every evening and a step added to the morning checks to confirm that it had completed successfully. I disagreed with us having to do this but was overruled as the directive had come 'from the client' so we had to do it, and the export was done nightly for a good few years.

Eventually, we got a note that this person had left the organisation, so after a quick couple of emails to get confirmation I took great pleasure in disabling the nightly mailbox export, deleting the PST file from the server and updating the morning checks to remove the confirmation step for the export.

In case you are wondering, you probably won't be surprised to learn the mailbox export was never needed.

but had one coworker panic when his keyboard started freaking out. problem was rapidly diagnosed as an open reference manual then had been moved and was resting on some keys with just enough weight to cause mischief

henceforth known as "shift key virus"

Every ergonomic keyboard I've seen raises in the middle. Never seen one where the top left was raised higher than the rest of the keyboard.

The 90s was a very long time ago - I can imagine someone thought it'd work and sold it.

That said, a lot of mainframe software puts cancel on function keys (the one I'm using right now often cancels on F3, for whatever reason), which would be more likely raised on modern ergonomics, and the details in the story lost over the years.

Another possibility that comes to mind is that maybe the desk opening into which the keyboard slid might not have been a straight horizontal line. If it were curved downward near the edges, an effect I could imagine some posh and/or antique desks having, that could explain it hitting the key there.