I’m sure the IT guys will read and snigger.
The whole setup of this story sounds like an urban legend. But I suppose it could happen. If it did, that was one dumb ass right there.
It may be an urban legend, but stupidity is often true.
One of my more memorable days, back when I was in IT, we worked for a local, high-end ISP that had been purchased by a company that was buying up ISP’s to end up going public.
So there we are, all the staff sitting around a conference table, it is the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, the year, 1999. All the Y2K stuff was in high gear. We were hosting websites that had hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of custom programming in them. We are having a discussion about back up software. The back up software we had, was no where near enough to back up all of the data on the servers. It was a known issue when we were purchased. So there we all sat, trying to explain to the CEO of the company why it was important for us to have back up software/hardware. And he was arguing with us that it was not necessary. It was about $3k worth of stuff we needed to secure everything, not even talking about freeing up an employee to go through all OUR stuff to make sure we wouldn’t have any hiccups.
He denied us.
My husband and I went out and bought a shitload of CD’s. We brought in a CD burner from home. Our back up plan was to burn the websites to disks and hand them over to the customers if we had a failure.
Dec 26, the CEO finally caved and sent us a tape back up and a package of tapes. We spent the next 6 days backing stuff up and burning CD’s when we ran out of tapes.
Fortunately, our systems didn’t suffer and the few problems we had, we were able to fix.
But yeah, there are some powerful stupid out there.
It may sound like an urban legend, but I’ve met someone who could have done that.
I’ve mentioned my father’s grad school roommate, Levi, on the boards before. Levi was ahem frugal. And frugal in ways that most people just would not consider.
He also owned controlling interest in a Dental office/facility building near where I grew up. There were several other practices in the building besides his own, but he did own the building. And he liked to think he was looking out for the interests of his tenants.
One of his tenants was an orthodontist who had a very well-established and very large tropical freshwater aquarium.
One year, he was doing a late walk through of the building before it was closed up for the Christmas and New Year’s holidays. Being that he was the owner, he did have keys to all the suites in the building. It was apparantly his habit to go through the offices and turn off lights that had been left on.
He also checked thermostat settings in the orthodontist’s office. As I heard the story from several sources (Levi’s long-suffering wife, a friend of both my mother and father; the staff of the orthodontists’ practice; and the orthodontist himself) Levi saw that the orthodontist had chosen to keep the heat on at, I think, 68 F for the vacation. As a point of information, the building was set up so that each suite did have it’s own seperate power hook up - ergo the only person who’d be ‘punished’ for leaving the heat on would have been the orthodontist. Now, Levi, being the helpful soul he is, he saw no point to heating what would be an empty office, so he dropped the thermostat down to about 55 F.
When the Orthodontist’s staff returned after the holiday, the tropical aquarium (some 250 gallons, IIRC) was starting to stink from the completely devastated fish floating belly up in the soup of decay.
Levi was a very good dentist. But I could very easily see him writing the email in the OP’s link.
ETA: It’s not even stupidity, per se, nor even ignorance, it’s often simply tunnel vision. In this Levi story, I’m sure that if you had asked Levi whether temperature variations could kill a tropical aquarium, he’d have said, “Of course.” But he was so focused on a single factor that drew his attention he couldn’t see the whole picture.
I’ll grant it can look like stupidity, at first blush, and may well be as damaging.
It probably happened.
I work in TN State Government, & we see this sh^t all the time.
Political Appointees & career Admins who know their own job (sometimes), & nothing else. So, they assume that –
RANK + SENIORITY = UNIVERSAL GENIUS
:smack: :smack: :smack: :smack: :smack:
:mad: :mad: :mad: :mad: :mad:
The problem is especially bad in Purchasing.