Ah so the very quiet black ones as opposed to the targets? Say no more.... nudge nudge wink wink a nod is as good as a wink to a blind man eh?

/icon becasue Friday and those particular navy types can down a few... a few more than their target based brethren anyway!

Targets? You should be happy that it did not fire the cannons at your nearest harbour pub! When you meddle with "Boat" software, no one knows where the big bullets will hail down from and to.

I'm very happy we don't update our "Boats" on Friday afternoon just before pub-time. That can only have nasty consequences, regardless the stability of the software.

That's very HMS Astute of you...

During the great Manchester Telco fire.

I was first in the office and discovered Manchester had been isolated from the rest of the world and we had no phones at all

No chance of getting hold of the DR team and our fail over site was affected as well.

I had a basic beta version of Sametime for Lotus running as a test. This was our only real time Comms available so I took over and started chatting with Edinburgh control and began moving link lines to our other site. Only one close colleague at the other site had Sametime.

He started briefing teams and we had everything under control.

Two hours later (09:30) DR rep finally showed up. By that point everything was messy but under control.

DR rips into me regarding going out of my authority.

I'm now stressed and severely caffeine deprived.

Ok... Says I. Your f+#@*£ng problem now. Locked the PC and went for a smoke and coffee.

Chatting outside with the Comms manager for a famous lift company who had the floor below us

Back inside we drop a phone extension lead out of the window and patch my desk phone into their Virgin system. I now have the only working phone in the office.

DR crawl up realising I am the only person with any Comms.

Err...can you get back to managing the Comms? We can't contact anyone.

Ask my boss. (Who I have on Sametime)

But we can't contact him he's at xxx site..

And...

Apology followed immediately, followed by a polite promise not to second guess me again.

Very pleasant memory

When I was working as a contractor I was working with another contractor* who had a habit of ending what had been a normal conversation with something along the lines of "sure, but the oranges aren't ripe enough today"*.

I never did understand what he was trying to convey...

* not literally, but the equivalent magnitude of "off topic".

I think more annoying is ending each sentence with "jioo naw wa rah meen?"

Takes quite a talent to make a sailor blush.

In my early programming days (late 80s, early 90s, even before the first [1]BOFH episode ever ), I was developing a UI for an image processing system, which made life much more bearable for the PhD students and doctors trying to do their research. For many, a mouse was just something you spotted in the lab, rather than an input device for a computer, so I ensured there was an extensive help menu system and many (in my view) clear instructions on the screen. There was a robust error handling system in place to ensure input errors from users were handled, and clear error messages were displayed.

Despite these efforts, some users tended to get things wrong very frequently, and then asked me what they should do. Almost invariably, I replied with: "Please read the instructions on the screen". They would proceed to do so, and then sheepishly perform the instruction, after which the system worked neatly (as a rule). This got so annoying at times that I toyed with the idea of entering a "blood_pressure" or "rudeness_index" variable in the system that rose whenever a user made an error, and slowly decreased in time as the user gave syntactically correct input. This would be linked to an extensive table of error messages, which would progressively become more rude as the blood_pressure variable increased. A bit along the lines of the [2]BOFH excuse generator , but then for insults.

Sadly (or perhaps fortunately) I never got round to implement it, but a man can dream.

[1] https://bofh.bjash.com/bofh/genesis1.html

[2] https://bofh.d00t.org/

One of the devs added a load of "messages" when debugging and forgot to remove one. Customer called in "I've been trying to do XYZ, but wasn't sure how. I've just got a message that says 'Nine out of ten intelligent people would have worked this out by now"". Luckily, he thought it was amusing...

Another time a support guy had to drive 4 hours each way because "I'm following the instructions on the screen, but it's not working". The fix, implemented in front of the customer, was to use a Sharpie to write "L" and "R" on the mouse buttons.

"he loudly asked the boss if he was still having an affair with a colleague – in front of the entire office and the boss's wife"

Okay, how is it that this guy wasn't fired the next day ?

Depends - was it true?

Had a situation in the past where something similar was happening, everyone knew, the pair involved knew everyone knew, and the carryon was taking place in work hours & frequently getting in the way of actual work as those involved would disappear mid job & leave everyone else waiting. Plus the expectation that people would just join in with the lie towards a partner they knew & liked.

Eventually it went nuclear because people got pissed off with the selfishness and it was the only way to fix it.

Newbie at going home time - thinking he's unearthed such a situation: "Have you noticed how those two always leave together?"

Everyone else: "Well they are married."

It depends on whether the boss survived long enough to be around next day.

We long suspected that our CEO, who 'ran' several of the group's UK companies from our site was having a 'meeting-of-more-than-minds' with the Finance Director, who was based on a different site. The CEO had bought a flat in our area to avoid hotel expenses or a long commute..... So he said. His office was adjacent to another and he/they mistakenly thought the no-longer-used connecting door was soundproof. They were frequently engaged together in whatever CEOs and FD's do, before disappearing off-site for some confidential meeting or conceivably (actually inconceivably) to do business.

It all came to a very sticky end. The CEO was summarily dismissed for 'misuse of company funds' (involving the conversion of an off-the-books vehicle to a 'leisure-wagon'....). How this was discovered was never made clear but we know the FD really wanted that CEO position. She didn't get the job again after the new CEO was dismissed after a 'random' drugs test. (We had never had drug testing before!).

She later accused the CEO of another company in the group of 'misconduct' but again failed to slip into that position.

That FD is no longer a problem, at least to us ---->

The first place I was an IT supporter, there was a sysadmin who was a nice bloke until you got on the wrong side of him. The companies PCs where strictly controlled (back in late 90,s ). Users who annoyed him too much found that their desktops background would suddenly be a flashing pink/ yellow colour with a text telling them how many days they had to put up with that, and why? It never happened to me, but the BOFH did give me a taste of the windows BSOD screen saver after lunchtimes on several occasions.

Did the displacement increase?

Sounds like my old boss. He used to swear... A lot... Only the once directly at me (he was also an ex town crier so most of the office floor heard him) but often on group calls would occasionally be picked up on other live mics muttering after muting himself.

On the flip side, he trusted his Devs and backed me up rather than throw me under the bus in my first work production f-up.

Still the best person I've ever had the honour of working under.

(Megaphone icon because he didn't need one)

I've never seen a coworker banned from client sites for being rude, though I did have one that wasn't allowed on conference calls because he had the awful habit of forgetting to mute himself and then panting into the receiver like he was having a wank. In person he was fine.

Calling out the boss for an affair with a colleague is arguably not an inappropriate insult.

Assuming colleague was beneath the boss (pun intended) then there's a power imbalance in the relationship, which is not a good thing in itself

But with the boss being married, calling out the boss for cheating on his wife is more an act of courage than an inappropriate insult if you take the (reasonable to many people) view that someone cheating on their partner is a bad thing.

Probably not ideal for customers to be exposed to withering blasts of honesty, but within a company its a shame so many people are afraid to say what they really think about things (for fear of losing their jobs) leading to all sorts of bad practices becoming embedded in company actions.

.. Though have to say it's absolutely stupid to make last minute untested changes.

Can telling the truth really be all that rude?

Used to have a sysadmin who was very good indeed at his job but was well known for picking his nose and flicking it, or picking the wax out his ears, or farting loudly etc all in meetings with significant people. He was very clever and not at all unpleasant otherwise to work with and one suspects it was an effective strategy to stay way from the high up ones.

Myself was/is known for being, if not rude then, very blunt. I was often wheeled to the front of meetings Hannable Lector style when some presenter of a service or product required some demolition.

Some of my happiest memories are of ruining product presentations with a well timed question.

I didn't (don't) really care if it upset the salesperson, after multiple decades of being lied to by them at pretty much every encounter I no longer regarded them as people. Not in that context anyway.

This guy has to be the gold standard for rude IT support: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=02a723LsoFA&t=2s&ab_channel=Takaouto