Superuser mostly helped IT, until a BSOD saw him invent a farcical fix
- Reference: 1703230205
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2023/12/22/on_call/
- Source link:
Which is why we'll keep it going through the holiday season … including with this tale submitted by a reader we'll Regomize as "Tim" who told us of his adventures a few years ago working for a private academic institution in western Japan.
"Originally, I was hired for my teaching skills and good looks," Tim told On Call. But as the institution is on the smaller side – and he had previous tech support experience – he also became the network administrator, the help desk, and frontline support "when anything with a plug plays up."
[1]
A year into the gig, Tim was joined by a new and rather young teacher he identified as "Yoshi."
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"He was one of those know-it-all types that are unfortunately all too common in schools," Tim told On Call. "This extended to computers as he considered himself a tech genius because he could hack a simple Excel macro together."
Yoshi liked to show off his tech skills, and often came up with fixes that lightened Tim's workload.
[4]
"I felt he couldn't cause too much trouble so left him to glow in his own limelight," Tim recalled.
Then came the day Tim was called to help a user whose PC displayed the dreaded Blue Screen of Death.
Next to said PC was Yoshi, looking a little sheepish. Or maybe even guilty.
[5]You don't get what you don't pay for, but nobody is paid enough to be abused
[6]Bank's datacenter died after travelling back in time to 1970
[7]Bank boss hated IT, loved the beach, was clueless about ports and politeness
[8]User read the manual, followed instructions, still couldn't make 'Excel' work
The user had mistakenly erased about six months of work, asked Yoshi for help, and received advice that "all his deleted files would magically reappear if he reversed the time/date on the PC back to before he erased them and rebooted."
Tim had never heard of this method of instant and infallible disaster recovery.
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He therefore "spurted a load of totally incomprehensible (to my Japanese co-workers) English expletives" – many of which concerned Yoshi.
Who offered precisely zero information about how the PC had entered its state of disrepair, although Tim felt sure it hadn't happened spontaneously.
"After a few minutes I had the PC back up running again, but was only able recover about half of the erased files," Tim lamented. "As for Yoshi, he carried on as if nothing had happened, but left us a year later."
Tim's not sure where Yoshi went next, but fancies he may have gone to work on a time machine.
Have you let power users handle some support chores and then regretted it? If so, [10]click here to send On Call and email and we may use your story on a future Friday. ®
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[5] https://www.theregister.com/2023/12/15/on_call/
[6] https://www.theregister.com/2023/12/08/on_call/
[7] https://www.theregister.com/2023/12/01/on_call/
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Sounds like one user learned the hard way that back-ups are essential. I recall quite a few cases where I used various Norton tools to recover 95% or more of a student's thesis because they failed to back up properly. Never heard of Yoshi's magic time setting trick, I must say.
I remember in uni (early 90s) helping a fellow student recover is work from the Temp folder in the public use computer after he somehow deleted it from his private network space.
Although thankful for my help, he was horrified his entire work was available to all and sundry, if so inclined.
Our data keeps going missing - we want a hostage
I was on a support of a customer where they reported that the system kept losing data (money transfers). They were very upset and demanded some come and fix it - bearing in mind if it was a bug, we could not fix it if we were on their site - they just wanted a hostage so they could tell senior management that the problem was being worked on.
We got the data logs, and I could see that every midnight a userid was issuing the purge command.
When we told them it suddenly went very quiet.
A week later we had a phone call with them and they apologised and said that someone in the test team had put in automation for that command in for the test systems, and it had accidentally been copied to production.
"Several people have had parts of their anatomy removed and hung on the wall for all to see"
Re: Our data keeps going missing - we want a hostage
Good gracious, who sets up an automation that contains the word "delete" or "purge" without triple checking everything and pressing enter with the sweatiest palms the world has ever seen?
Especially because he should've checked the test system and would've seen nothing was being purged. That's a huge red flag.
Re: Our data keeps going missing - we want a hostage
> Good gracious, who sets up an automation that contains the word "delete" or "purge" without triple checking everything and pressing enter with the sweatiest palms the world has ever seen?
Oh you poor sweet summer child. Unfortunately, LOTS of people. "it's just a purge job, nothing to worry about"
> Especially because he should've checked the test system and would've seen nothing was being purged. That's a huge red flag.
Nope, he just shrugs his shoulders and says the purge job isn't working, and walks off. "I'll fix it next week"
BTDTGTTS. Hell, I have half a closet of those t-shirts.
Re: Our data keeps going missing - we want a hostage
Especially because he should've checked the test system and would've seen nothing was being purged.
From TFA; the purge job was copied from the test environment. So presumably it was working as intended in test.
I, of course, have never copied anything from my test environment into prod. Erm, except for that one time when I ended up changing a name to "test" across everything. Oops, at least it was a quick fix.
Management material
Fuck it up, make it someone else's problem, take the glory and leave before you are really found out.
Yishi has managlement potential
Icon: If only this was a joke