I’m going through our servers and clearing out accounts that have been inactive for more than two months. This involves deleting NT accounts, VPN IDs, and mailboxes on our Exchange server.
So I roll through a list of terminated people, complete with date of termination. For those who were canned in August or later, I exmerge their crap to a pst file and throw it in a backup directory. Before August? Just delete the mailbox. Of course you have to check for any angry emails about being fired first, but after that: delete.
As I was finishing up I get a call from someone who can’t get to her email. Whoops. Turns out she had been let go in April, and brought back 2 weeks ago. That means I deleted two weeks of her email without a backup. Whoops again.
Anyway, IANAEG (Exchange guru), so I don’t know the details, but it’ll apparently take an insane amount of work to restore the mailbox from a system backup. Whoops one last time.
So I emailed her basically asking her to live without the email and make our lives all a little easier. She’s in HR though, and they cherish their old emails more than life itself, so I’m not holding my breath.
one of my friends was working on a customers machine and needed a bootable floppy disk. He turns to thier cube mates computer and types in format c: /s. c: instead of a:. totally wiped the guys machine.
I also had someone call one of my coworkers today asking if his machine (that was purchased last year) could be upgraded since it was only a Pentium 133. He wanted to be upgraded to at least 450. We looked at the invoice for his computer which read something like:
Dell 667; 133 FSB; 128 mb RAM; (and so on).
Ever try to explain the FSB and clock multipliers to a luser? Pretty fun
I had a luser one time call me because the mother board I had sold him was no good. I drove out to his business, and looked at the memory he had put in it. There were deep scratches on the 30 pin sims(this was around 1994), and some of the chips on the sims were torn off the pads. I showed him, and he proceeded to show me the electricians pliers he used to yank the sims out of the old board.
About two years back I inherited an NT workstation that had been ignored since its creation. Since the thing was soooooooo slow, I contacted our admin about some maintenance tools, especially defrag. He put me on copy which I dutyfully ran. For 4 hours.
Only after it completes did we realize that this defragger knew nothing of NTFS. It DID understand FAT and FAT32. Little help in this case.
Change the C:\Program Files directory to C:\Progra~1 and see what happens. Repeat the process for ALL subdirectories on the system.
I feel your pain…way back when we first went NT, one of the CO guys who fancied himself a guru bought himself a copy of Norton Utilities 8.0 to run on his workstation. And what the heck, he decided to do a couple of his friends as well.
I was working at Computerland of Glendale, probably around 1982, I was the tech support manager. One day I get a phone call from a frantic customer, he says that one of our salesmen has been maintaining his IBM PC and now it’s broken again, but he’s out sick and can’t come for an onsite visit, so can I please come? I agree to come after work, for a $50/hr fee (this was the early 80s, remember).
I am astonished when I arrive at the Beverly Hills address, it is a huge mansion, this guy is some sort of multigazillionaire from some middle eastern country. He is running some extremely funky custom written software, it connects with servers in Europe for some unknown type of transaction. I discover the problem fairly quickly, all it needs is a quick modify of the .bat file, something like files=50. I am puzzled why the salesman couldn’t figure this out, it was such an obvious fix.
The customer is ecstatic at my permanent repair. He asks me to stay overnight and party at his place, while his woman friend has her hands all over me. It is fairly clear that I’m being invited to stay overnight for a little orgy. I decline, I’m only interested in the money. I get paid $150 and get the hell out of there.
The next day, Mr. Salesman arrives at work, he looks like death warmed over. He immediately pounces on me, screaming, “I HEARD what you did, how DARE you fix one of MY customers! You killed the goose that laid the golden egg, I was milking them for $200 visits twice a week, and screwing his girlfriend every time I visited!”
Now the punchline: the customer was arrested by the FBI about a year later. He was a gun runner.
