Full disclosure: unlike most of my polls, this one is not utterly pointless. I need some good stories for a training class I have to conduct this Friday for work. So share with me your tales of misfortunes brought on by careless surfing, foolish opening of attachments, inattention to regular backups, and so forth. Stories in which disaster was on the horizon but dodged through good practices would also be appreciated.
Thanks!
Just two (short) examples of misplaced money-management and incompetence:
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The server room (more or less a large cupboard) got stuffed with so many computers that the air conditioning could barely keep up. Because upgrading the airco system was deemed too expensive, the IT guys were relying on a skimpy portable room airco and a lot of large big plastic tubes to help keep things cool enough. First time the office manager pulled the plug on the smaller airco when leaving (probably thinking something like “we don’t need to be cool when nobody’s in the office”) we lost about 20 hard drives and a couple of CPUs. The only reason he could get to the airco in the first place was that the server cupboard couldn’t be locked anymore, because of all the “provisionary” tubing.
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Having our new (and only, and completely incompetent) IT support guy not replace failed drives on the main RAID array (which was the official place to put all important files) and not tell anybody about it either. When the last redundant drive failed, he basically sat on his ass for 3 hours because “those replacement drives are really expensive and I have to get permission to buy some” (that’s 3 $300 drives, meanwhile leaving a 40 people office with nothing to work with - YOU MORON). And then confess there hadn’t been a backup made for 3 months. Fun times. :smack:
Here’s a tip: If your support guys claim to have regular backups, ask them regularly to restore some file you’ve deleted a couple of days ago. It’s the only way.
I tell my students to back up their work often (Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop, Dreamweaver, etc.) but do they listen?
We had a short electrical black out one day and about 20 students lost the work they had been doing for the past 3 hours - except for the one student who, when I had said 3 minutes prior “save your work!” actually did so.
My horror story - new to the game, I had created a huge database for a law firm that had about 25 people working on it. I was doing an update and - don’t ask me how - I accidentally deleted the entire database; over three months of work! I was about ready to change my name and run away to Bolivia when I remembered I had backed it up an hour earlier on a different drive. Everyone had gone for the day and I simply pulled up the (one hour older) database, sent an email to everyone saying, “There was a glitch in the database - any work done that last hour of yesterday should be verified to see if it was entered correctly.”
Amazingly, not one single person had entered anything that last hour! (It was a Friday and you know how that is…)
After that less-than-amusing moment, I set up many automatic back-ups, did manual back ups, and often would back up the system any time I heard a phone ring. I think when I left there, I pretty much had 10 back ups per day for at least two weeks prior. I even made hard copies and took them home on CD’s, just in case the law firm burned down or something.
One from the defence industry:
It’s 2000. Matey boy is sitting in an airport in the Middle East waiting for his flight. So he decides to do some work. So he fires up his laptop. The concourse behind him falls ominously silent. His desktop background has ‘ELECTRONIC WARFARE DIVISION’ in big letters on it…
The moral of the story is that you should err on the side of discretion.
Here’s a personal one from about 3 years ago:
Them: “Make sure everyone leaves their computers on this weekend; we’re going to upgrade their email.”
Me: “Umm… you do realise that there’s only a 256K connection between you and us, right? Have you tested it and what’s your backout strategy?”
Them: “Okay, we’ll send you a CD”
Some time later…
Me: “Gents, tried the CD and it doesn’t work. I get these errors… I’m going to need your help figuring out why.”
Some time later…
Them: “Here’s a new CD. It’s working now. Roll it out”
Me: “Let’s just try it on a select few test users first. Just to make sure. We can’t afford to have our customers lose their mail”
Naturally it failed.
Some time later…
Me: “Okay, chaps, thanks to your help it’s fully working now, and I’ve written and tested some nifty scripts to automate everything as much as possible, including backing up the old system. I’m going to need 2 extra people for one day and two half days so we can do it properly. The first half day will be an introduction to the site and the people, Health & Safety etc, and a practice upgrade. We’ll do the rollout itself on the second day, and do a walkaround on the third to pick up any issues.”
Them: “Okay, you’ve been proven right at every stage so far, let’s do it your way.”
There were no issues at all - with the upgrade - on the third day. Everything went smoothly.
Proper Preparation Prevents Piss Poor Performance.
Great site, and well organized by topic.
The Shark Tank is another good one.
The IT guy formats the hard drive without making backups of any of the data collection templates. I spend 40 hours retyping in the templates. This is after the company crisis that insured they were making valid backups of all data. Except they weren’t.
The original server failure before they hired the IT guy required up to a month for the company wide data entry and an insurance payout for entry labor. The backups were corrupted going back 3 months. The server had a corrupted FAT and a large file user decided to shut down the server and the server never restarted. Never mind that most peoples files had been alright before the user shut down the server. Had we been warned I would have copied over my latest files that I’d spent two weeks reformatting to the new format. I never did redo to the new format and restored my personal backups I had kept on my hard drive because I didn’t trust the system. Most departments had to enter data for a month.
Possibly this isn’t what you’re looking for, but anyway …
I used to teach PC troubleshooting classes. During lunch on the final day, the instructors would go around and foul up the PCs in every way imaginable. Cables from one PC would be plugged into another. Monitor settings would be changed. Hard drive cables would be unplugged, and so on. The trainees would then be challenged to restore the PCs to working order. This test always proved to be very popular with the trainees and generated lots of enthusiasm.
I always liked that story. I use that phrase and people don’t seem to know what it refers too. Since I don’t know how to create the spoiler box I won’t say.
I’m not sure this is what you’re looking for, but…
A few years ago, an administrative assistant invented an award that was determined by the votes of students. To facilitate and encourage voting, the admin asst e-mailed to students a spreadsheet containing the names and titles of the people students could vote for.
One year, the admin asst requested the list from HR and sent the spreadsheet to students. Sheet 1 contained names and titles. Sheet 2, which the admin asst didn’t check, contained SSN and DOB for each person on Sheet 1.
Providing identity protection for everyone on the spreadsheet was pretty costly.
When I was about 12 or so, I was still learning how computers work. I did a lot of experimenting in Windows, going through the system tools and figuring out what each one did. One day I hit the format button for the C: drive…
My desktop ground to a halt with the blue screen of death. I got it back up an bought an external drive. Before I backed up anything my laptop crashed. Cost me $300 to get the laptop recovered which was $200 more than the external hard drive. I’m subscribing to off site storage when I can afford it.
What happened? I’d test it myself, but you implied it was bad…
A laptop had occasional “black screen” crashes. Reading up online, I discovered there was a BIOS update that could potentially fix such crashes. I started to install the update and guess what happened in the middle of the update? That’s right, a crash. Laptop is now a paperweight.
Sometimes, you should just leave well enough alone.
Actually, my memory is a bit hazy, but I believe I got a dialog box saying I had to quit Windows and run the format command from the DOS prompt.
Learn by doing, my father used to say. So I did. My father was not pleased that I lost all of his documents.
I tell my family I will fix their infected machines for free, but they must bring it to my house and sit with me while I do it, and I ridicule them.
They usually only go through that exercise just once, and then they learn to update their AV.
When I was about 13, my dad got me a new video card for my birthday (and I mean a video card - not a fancy 3D accelerator, I’m not sure they even existed at the time). Turns out it wasn’t actually compatible with my computer for some reason or another, but I’ll be damned if we weren’t determined to make it work. So, while I was fooling around with the drivers (ahh, Windows 3.1 and DOS 5, those were the good old days), he was fooling around with the hardware. Inside of the computer. While the computer was on. With a screwdriver.
See where this is going?
Suddenly, there’s a cracking noise and the screen goes blank and I hear some cussing from my dad. Yeah, he shorted out one of the jumpers or something. Fried the motherboard.
Moral of the story: Don’t open the case unless the damn computer is off. -OR- A little bit of computer knowledge can be a badddd thing.
On the bright side, I did end up getting a new motherboard and CPU out of it.
I learned a hard lesson about 10 years ago.
I was partners in a small graphic design company. We had about 10 workstations and some retail stuff up front (we mixed in service bureau work.) One weekend there was an electrical storm and a substation nearby got zapped. The surge fried 6 internal modems and our credit-card swipe unit. A fax machine too, iirc. Anyway, the lesson learned was to put EVERYTHING on surge protectors. The modems weren’t too bad but I think the cc machine cost $300 to replace.
We have a lot of field agents who work from home. They all get a laptop and an external hard drive, and are taught how to do backups. I had one agent whose laptop hard drive had died, so we put in a new one. Then he had problems restoring his data from the external hard drive.
Turns out he had originally been backing up his data by creating a new folder on the external hard drive with the current day’s date as the name, then copy/pasting his documents folder into it. This way he was keeping multiple backups just in case one had a corrupted file or something. Good idea.
He had been with the company for a while, and had a lot of large files, so he eventually filled up the external drive. So he started deleting the oldest backups to make room for newer backups.
His method of copy/pasting was to right-click and drag the folder from his C: drive to his external drive, then choose “Copy” from the pop-up menu. One day he accidentally clicked “Create Shortcut”. He was about to delete the shortcuts and try again, when he noticed that the file sizes of the shortcuts were much smaller than when he actually copied the files over. He tested the files by opening a few, which of course worked since the original file was still there for the shortcut to link to. Not fully realizing how exactly shortcuts work, he thought he had discovered an amazing new way to back up his files that took up much less space, so he could keep even more back ups on the external drive. This apparently happened more than a year before the laptop hard drive died.
The laptop hard drive was too fried for us to recover any data off of it. The only usable data on the external drive was more than a year old. He wanted us to send it to one of those places specialize in data recovery, but the higher ups wouldn’t approve the cost. The agent was not happy.