Otakuloki’s been nominating a few people for this title, but as the week draws to a close i’m putting forward the name of Jerry A. Taylor, City Manager for the city of Tuttle, Oklahoma.
As reported by The Register, Tuttle threatened to call the FBI because he believed that a company by the name of Cent OS had hacked into the city’s websites.
Problem was, this wasn’t what actually happened. The image that Taylor was seeing when he tried to access the Tuttle websites is actually a standard page that appears when Cent OS’s software is installed on a web server.
But despite the very patient people at Cent OS explaining that the problem was with the server, and that his service provider or IT person needed to fix it, Taylor insisted that it was some kind of hacking conspiracy and threatened to call the Feds. Most amusingly, although he refused to listen to their explanations of what was wrong, and displayed an apparently wilful ignorance and unwillingness to listen to reason, he describes himself thus:
In the end, the Cent OS people went beyond the call of duty and actually found out who the city’s server provider was, and the problem was finally solved. And even after all that, the ignorant fucker still blamed the people who wrote the operating system:
You can see the full email correspondence here. It’s a marvel of sublime idiocy on one side, and pained politeness and reason on the other.
For chrissakes…what is up with people that work for city governments that make them get such big heads?
A couple weeks ago we had a guy call from the one city who’s web site we host. Some bonehead in his department sent a single email with 900 recipients (completely lambasting our TOS mind you) and totally fuxored their local network - messed up his winsock or something, I dunno, everything worked totally fine from 3 other machines on 3 other networks - and dude called and screamed at us telling us the reason he couldn’t send was because our server was messed up and we had to reboot it (at like 3 pm mind you) and he would not believe that the problem was totally on his end.
We told him to turn off the network firewall and any AV software and please try sending again. About 7 times. He said no, reboot your server. We showed him MS articles about the specific errors, that said “THE PROBLEM IS WITH YOUR LOCAL NETWORK”, we went out of our way to test from different networks, we told him to call a network guy (he refused). He was a total ass the whole time.
Then he announced he was dropping us as his host. We were happy to see him go.
A week later, after we blasted his city’s crap from our server, he called us as if nothing had happened and asked us the FTP login info for citynamereccenterwebsite.com - a site we’ve never heard of and never hosted. We told him we’d never heard of it. Don’t call us again.
No one ever apologized. I’m sure he had to get a network guy in there to fix the problem even after they left us. But you know, he’s with the CITY GOVERNMENT. Wooooohhh!
I’ve been to Tuttle, Oklahoma. The term “City Manager” may sound like some bigtime politician, but this is a small town (population approximately 5000). Typically, the “City Manager” of such a place is somebody who sells used cars for a living. However, this guy doesn’t sound smart enough to sell used cars.
I thought the funniest part of the correspondence was this sentence by the city manager, “No one outside this building has complained about this problem.” I took that to mean that no one outside city hall even bothered to look at that website during that time.
Since my nominees were all from a while back, feel free to assign this bozo the honor for this week. He certainly worked hard enough for it, and I’ve not seen anyone, this week, who even comes close to matching the combination of lack of clue and arrogance that Mr. Taylor has displayed.
I would hate for Mr. Taylor to feel cheated of his just rewards for his actions. He might sic the FBI on me.
