33 of the Wildest Things Seen by IT Workers

‘The computer was, in fact, turned off’
33 of the Wildest Things Seen by IT Workers

Computers are complicated things, and there’s plenty of ways to mess them up. But if you really want to do complete, untold and deeply confusing damage to a computer’s architecture, it almost always requires that you don’t totally know what you’re doing. Sure, a hacker can get into your system and make a real nightmare of things, but that’s nothing compared to the Gordian knot of malware and weird toolbars that a well-meaning elderly parent can install.

The electronic EMTs that are IT workers were called to an AskReddit thread to contribute the wildest world-wide-web enabled messes they’ve ever had to clean up. If you’ve got the stomach for absolute computational carnage, read on to hear about thoroughly strange e-emergencies from the world of IT. 

After all, no cybersecurity in the world can overcome the curious clicks of the tech-unsavvy.

t0getheralone . 1y ago Drive to an office for emergency oncall service charging the client $400+ dollars an hour to plug the power back into a switch which their cleaning staff had knocked loose.
gac64k56 1y ago Got called to investigate unplug a laptop that had viruses detected on it. When I arrived, this laptop was in the open with the login information taped to the desk. This laptop was given local admin privileges by someone before my time for some application. This was in an office area that was always unlocked and 10 steps from the entrance of the building. No one was in the office as they went home early, including management. On a laptop filled with everyone's information (SSN, names, addresses, and more), Limewire, games, pornography, and more. The two who
ouchmypeeburns 1y ago Walked all the way across campus in the Florida heat just to tell a PhD professor that the reason their monitor kept turning off every few seconds was because the computer was in fact turned off. Then got yelled at for her classroom not being ready for her when she came in. Also was told to make sure these projectors aren't in the building by the end of day. Don't care where they go, just that they aren't here tomorrow by my boss. It was more expensive to buy new bulbs for them than to just buy
HuuffingLavender 1y ago My husband does not work in IT but he should. Не worked on a facilities team at an expensive private school, and one day got a ticket to remove/trash a 75 inch TV. Не approached the head of the IT department asking why he needed to trash it when he had just installed it brand new. The head of IT told him it won't stop shutting off. My husband loaded it into the work van and dropped it at our house instead. Later he came home, plugged it in... and turned off the 10 min automatic power
laddsta . 1y ago Take literal magnets off of the laptop so that it would work again.
Who am i 0468 1y ago Explain to the Chief Technology Officer that having the prod server and its backup server sat next to each other, may well save cost on not having two data centers, but when that data center (also known as the stationary cupboard...) goes, it's not such a money saving idea...
Henry_Every 1y ago Emergency flight from CA to GA because they were getting alarms on their new system, flew out at like 4am, got onsite at 9am, told to come back at 9pm. got a hotel, slept, came back onsite 9pm. Customer stated that someone used a cable from the PDU to log into system but plugged it in wrong when done. But they were no longer getting alerts. I looked at it, it was correctly cabled, apparently someone had noticed and put it back correctly. Left site and flew back home. 23 hour day just to LOOK at a
MrBenzedrine . 1y ago Lady from the office downstairs borrowed my bosses keyboard whilst waiting for a replacement. When hers arrived she washed the borrowed one in the kitchen sink and left it on the draining board to dry out.
YetiCincinnati . 1y ago Other workers screen shot her windows screen, made it her background then moved her task bar off screen. She kept clicking start but nothing would happen.
dragonrage12343 . 1y ago Someone recently called my helpdesk requesting that we clear the roads so she could get to work. The sky is falling and waters in the way Meaning It's raining really hard and the streets are flooded As the IT helpdesk, of course there's nothing we can do about that.
. 1y ago Got paged one night because of a data outage. Turns out one of our on-call response folks went into the server room, locked themselves in, and unplugged several machines. This caused several data outages, which caused a page and thus someone driving in to resolve it. This was a major military mission critical system and this guy thought the best way to get someone's attention was to break a bunch of stuff.
edmanet 1y ago | had to remotely install a spyware program on a VP/CFO's laptop because loss prevention was trying to gather information on him. The software recorded keystrokes, program usage, web history AND videos of what he was doing on the laptop. Не resigned the next day after they found that he had a girlfriend in one of the company's manufacturing plants in China. The guy lost a million dollar job for that. Probably lost his wife and home too.
crazykid01 1y ago Had to spec out a state of the art, no limit small computer for the CEO. I give two options, one best in market skull logo on the front. The other not as good and no skull logo. I submit to my boss and he says CEO will probably never go for the skull one as it's unprofessional. I look up a plate to cover and add that in. Like a $10k computer alone, 5k monitor. CEO went for skull icon one without plate cause it was best in market and skull looked cool. My boss wasn't
evolve77 1y ago I walked into the office one morning to my CEO asking me to follow him to his office. Не pulled out a stack of paper, almost a full ream, of printed porn from our network printer and asked me to find out who sent it. Back then, most of our office staff had their own desk printers. I assumed that this person had worked late and meant to print out these pics on his local printer. Our CEO only used the network printer near his office and gets to work well before everyone else.
Mother_Idea_3182 . 1y ago | discovered that a co-worker liked to watch porn. Not any porn. Porn in which the actress is a clone of his wife. It's not deepfakes or anything like that. This happened before such technology was invented. The guy liked his wife so much that he watched porn of his wife's doppelgänger while working. We did nothing about it because the guy was virtually unfireable for some reason.
CtForrestEye . 1y ago I had repaired a printer at the big insurance company. On the bill I wrote mouse removal - NC. The client questioned my comment - printers don't have mice! I responded they're not supposed to. The furry little guy is in the plastic bag next to the printer.. Eeewww.
sandman4you_9inches 1y ago I did IT in the mid 90s. I had a small vacuum cleaner I used to clean out dusty cases. One day one of the people I supported came into my office and asked if he could borrow it to clean out his home PC. I said sure and gave it to him. Не then continued to stand there working up the courage to ask me something else. Noticing his dilemma I asked if there was anything else I could help him with. Не, with a completely serious face, asked if the vacuum cleaner was going to
gaudyside © 1y ago Not crazy but amusing: a beer delivery driver had signed an invoice in his app on behalf of the customer and drew boobs. The signatures show up on the official invoices sent to the customer's accounts payable department. We were contacted to remove the signature from the database.
trast . 1y ago Not me but a colleague had to sing a lullaby to a user because she said she needed to be calmed down. (had to might be the wrong word, but he did do it).
wolfej4 © 1y ago Edited 1y ago We had an after-hours call to the hospital we work at because our new unit secretary in the ER couldn't find the remote to the TV they have that show where patients are located. It's also an application that's loaded onto every computer in the nurse station. She was fired a few days ago after trying to throw us under the bus for her fuck up.
Sylar299 1y ago I just flicked a defective screen back to life not 2 minutes ago. Like a small laptop screen that just would'nt turn on even after taking it out and putting it back in. Then I get uppity and flick it and boom... Actual craziest was a fired employee who was wildly underperforming coming to give back her laptop. I booted it up and she had a contract and payslips from the other company she was working for with our stuff. She was dumb as a rock and HR tore through her case...
Temba-his_arms_wide . 1y ago E Edited 1y ago I work with a lot of engineers, like literal rocket scientists. The number of really intelligent people who don't know what simple things like can you minimize that window or let me see your desktop are is simply mind blowing. I am thankful everyday that Teams added the ability to take control of someone's cursor. I feel like the more advanced a person's specialized knowledge becomes, the more rapidly their general knowledge declines. Some kind of weird inverse correlation.
WYGD_Brother1987 . 1y ago IT problems are human errors and it's usually because something is powered off. 200 dollars to drive 5 miles just to hit the power button is more common than you think,
soobviouslyfake 1y ago Late to the party but an older man (early 70's) dropped off a usb drive with some files for us that he wanted processed. It was his porn drive, by accident - obviously not what he meant to leave with us. Не had word documents (Imao) with porn (full nudity, but pretty tame stuff - it reminded me of playboy from the 80's). The best part were the captions he wrote underneath, like little stories that went with each photo. Oh, you're a naughty one, aren't you? Would you like to stick your rod in me? It was kind of endearing.
1y ago I used to do IT work for a scrap company. These scrap companies are notorious for losing power because they're always in terrible parts of town with infrastructure that's falling apart. They rented a backup generator but it only put out a certain amount of power, and I had to do this Apollo 13 mission to get as much of the network as I could up, but if we plugged in too many things, the generator's breaker would flip and we'd have to restart. The building itself also wasn't fully powered so I was doing this while
loztriforce 1y ago I was a solo IT department for many years. Had to run manual backups on sales people laptops. I run into a huge folder, check if it needs to be backed up. Turns out it was a shit ton of pics/videos of the married sales guy and the young receptionist getting it on at a company event (the company used to get us all hotel rooms). I sat the guy down and said I found some shit that shouldn't be on company property. Не turned white as a ghost. I said it's all good if he deletes
spytez 1y ago I ran the pay to use wireless internet used at around 800 hotels. We had to implement a website tracking tool. Over 25% of internet usage was porn. Depending on the time of day (night time) that amount would jump up to over 50%. And some people would spend just hours looking at porn and going to dozens of websites. We're talking people spending 5+ hours just watching porn.
Brett707 1y ago Edited 1y ago We received an alert that a Remote Desktop Server was using 100% of its RAM and CPU usage was at 90%. This is not normal and very troubling. We start checking on the server and one of the end users that was logged into it was streaming 5 different French Maid porn videos at the same time. This RDS was only accessible within the office. So the dude was at work watching the hell out of some porn.
Got called out to a site because the owners workstation was running really slow. I sat down and started looking at the system and he had 100% of his bandwidth being used. I started poking around and the dude was running Limewire (in 2016) downloading and uploading music at all times. Some nephew set it up for him and turned off the AV. his system was just riddled with viruses.
1y ago Not wild, but ridiculous: I drove 40 minutes away to look at a client's computer, who said the PC was not responsive. When I arrived, he said Look and pressed a key on the number pad. Nothing happened. I pressed Num Lock a drove 40 minutes back. A week later, the same customer said his computer was miscalculating formula amounts, so I drove there again. Не says, Look...I type in that I want a pint, and it prints out a formula for sixteen ounces. After giving him an elementary math lesson, I drove 40 minutes back again
kazarbreak 1y ago Very early in my career, back when I was still working an entry level job, I had called in sick with stomach flu. I was throwing up every hour to hour and a half, had been all day. I got called by my boss and told it was an emergency, that her computer wasn't working, and she had something she needed done in an hour so I needed to come in and fix it, sick or not. So, in between bouts of puking, | drove across town and plugged the power cord for her monitor back in.
vgaph 1y ago About 25 years ago, working a a large multinational company, one of the Italian engineers brought in laptop he had been issued less than a week ago. Were he not an actual person he would have been an offensive Italian stereotype. My laptop, she no work. Не actually said that. Anyway we take a took at this machine. It had, for the time, an incredibly large 10 GB HD, every kilobyte of which was full of low-rez 90s internet porn. Unless he was downloading it at work or transferred it from another machine I have no idea
1y ago Back when I first started ages ago, a woman called in and said my mouse isn't working! I asked her if it was wired or wireless. I don't know! Why would I know that? What do you mean? Is it wired or not? Is there a wire on it? I said I don't know! This isn't my job to know it's yours! So I asked her if she picked it up and walked away, how far would she get. I was the one that got in trouble.

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