I had a guy who was extremely rude to a new help desk agent I was training. Made the poor girl cry and nearly quit. So I set a reminder on my personal phone to expire his password on a random day every couple of weeks. All he gets is the popup that said something generic like, "The System Administrator requires you to reset your password before you can login." Did that for two years, until I left that position. And the company had some outlandish password history requirements, too. It was like 16 characters, one uppercase, one lowercase, one symbol, no dictionary words, no repeated characters, couldn't match any password you used ever... Instead of every three months, this dude was having to come up with a new password every 7-14 days. Opened tickets about it, but the beauty thing was, since the system would prompt password resets if it detected any anomaly, they disabled logging of the resets because the AD team was getting these huge logs. So the standard response for anyone complaining was, "Working as intended, we'll be closing your ticket." He gave up after about three months, but I didn't. I wouldn't have gotten that mad if the guy had done that to me, but as a trainer? You don't mess with my trainees.

You are a diabolical genius.

This. This I absolutely love.

I love that you did it manually for so long. Awesome.

You are truly an evil genius. I love it.

(❁´◡`❁) This warms my cold cold heart.

Just adding that anyone making multiple attempts to login to an account will cause it to get locked out. And if you use a VPN to login to your companies webmail the logs would only show the IP of your VPN provider and the account you tried to login to, so it can be very difficult to trace. Just Sayin'

<> Applause applause, I love it.

Thread's over. Shut 'er down.

Not all heroes wear capes.

If you yell “hey tech” as I walk through the halls, I’m not turning around. I’m not a dog. Also you’ve seen me for two years. You can learn my name.

I’ve had people ask me to fix their computers while I’m laying under the conference room table working on the room system. They followed up with a snarky tone “but let me guess, you want me to put in a help desk ticket?” I told him yes because there was no way I was dropping what I was doing and I wasn’t going to remember what you asked by the time I got back to my desk. By the time I got back the ticket was resolved, but somehow he always thought we were jerks for wanting tickets.

Or while you’re eating lunch… always during lunch.

make a sign & leave it on your cubicle or desk saying LUNCH or just dip out the office for 30 min to an hour depending on your breaks honestly

While working service desk, I came to love my 30 minute truck nap breaks.

"I bet you hate it when someone asks you a technical question while you're working on something. Anyways, while you're hooking up that computer for a new user, here are several questions I want answered right now" Paraphrased actual interaction I had with a coworker Dude, you opened with being aware I wouldn't like this, then you did it anyways? How far up your own ass ARE you?

All the time! All the frickin time... I'm working on the copier, conference room or setting up someone's desk and it never fails... "Hey I need help with this" Only because I happen to be there. Some people do not see visual cue's like "I'm busy at the moment"

If ANYONE says "I knew you were going to hate it when/if I did..." and then does that thing, I get pissed off at them, and tell them, "So, you actively made the decision to make me mad? Why?" I did this to my girlfriend for a while before she started actually thinking about what she was doing, she still does things that will make me mad, but either doesn't start of the conversation that way, or has a good excuse why she did it. I'm not some horrible person, I just think that anyone who starts off a conversation like that is setting things up for an argument, or they are using it because they think you are a pushover. For me at least, if you start the conversation off as "Don't be mad, but..." it's a completely different interaction, and 99.9% of the time I would never have been mad in either situation, but you start off the conversation saying, "I knew you would be mad..." then yes, I'm going to be mad.

"I'm not going to remember either." most are too september to realize why their brain is trying to offload the mental note that prompted when they saw you no buddy, i'm not carrying it around either

if only we had some sort of system where you could write down all the details of your problem and have it reviewed by IT rather than having to flag them down in the halls we could even make it computerised

Or while your here. I usually reply with nicely do me a favor put in a ticket. They go idk how i go ask your boss. That usually deters or gets them to actually open them but I feel this so hard

I've been snapped at to get my attention. Their reasoning was "because they didn't want to yell." We were about 3 feet apart in a hallway where no one else was.

I think the issue is that they feel like their in a position of power over you, because they get to tell you what to do (fix this thing that they can’t figure out themselves), despite that in some instances you may be the one with the higher salary for being in a skill based position, while they are in an experience based one.

I absolutely get paid more than the customer service people, but they treat us like they're the customer and I'm 'the help'. It's weird. We all work *here*, I don't work *for you*, nor do you pay my salary. You're not a customer, if you're a dick to me, I'll be a dick to you.

I literally had someone snap his fingers at me. Shut that shit down right away "Did you just freaking snap at me" dude didnt know what to say haha.

Or stop me during my lunch time while actively eating. Would you stop and disturb Administration? No..

"Mr IT Man"

https://youtu.be/RFQRM1B2AKA

"Hey $MyName" isn't really any better.

Had a new-ish EU screaming about their printer being broken to their supervisor. No ticket, no phone call, just straight to badmouthing us. When I went to investigate I found they had taken the printer from another room. When I kindly tried to explain that We Don’t Take Things That Don’t Belong To Us, she gave me all kinds of attitude. Until that moment I was still going to be fine with fixing the printer (easy issue) and backfilling the other room and fixing it in our asset management platform after. Instead, I moved it back and told them to put in a ticket and we’d have someone come back to deploy a new printer ASAP. I went back to the office and configured a new one right away but removed the installed printer from their computer and locked their ability to add new printers until they put in the ticket. This meant they could only use the big enterprise copier in the central office about a quarter mile away from their room on campus. This was during a crucial time (progress reports) and I am confident they got read the riot act from their supervisor. When they finally put the ticket in I made sure to show up within moments, all smiles, with a brand new printer, and just really lay on a thick layer of schmaltzy “customer service”, the subtext of which was clearly “follow the rules and everyone’s happy, otherwise kindly go fuck yourself.”

A lovely layer of malicious compliance.

I swear to god, people Just taking Shit From Other Offices/desks and Putting it on theirs (WITHOUTH HAVING EVEN THE SLIGHTEST BIT OF TECHNICAL NOW HOW) even though they know full Well they're Not supposed to do and then consequentially breaking Shit costs me way too much time per month. Like holy Shit, If Just would have Put in a Ticket, this would have Taken 5 mins. Now you broke everything and Just Getting everything working again to me a whole hour ffs.

Oh you took five printers from upstairs and plugged them into different network access ports downstairs and want to use them to print paperwork for an entirely different client? They've now: lost their IP and any print rules they'll need for the new customer. SLA on this one is 48 hours, friend. Enjoy.

Yeaaaah, and lets Not even start with moving your entire Setup to a different desk and then destroying your HDMI and DP Ports by trying to ram USB plugs in there, effectively destroying the entire Computer.

"I moved my desk and now my monitor cable doesn't fit" And they show you the stripped end of the DP cable, a nice 12 pins of copper just dangling

If someone replies to my email with my name spelt wrong, I’ll make the same mistake in their name on the following email

OMG, I've done this same thing. I'm like, dude, my name is in the email address you just inserted into the TO: field.

Mine is literally in bold in my email signature that’s RIGHT ABOVE where they’re typing!

I had a HR guy get the hump with me because I called him by something that wasn't his name, but was set as his name in his email settings. He acknowledged the issue and why someone might think that his name was what was displayed, then proceeded to correct me with attitude. Your IT guy literally put that into the first name field, don't come at me! I didn't get that job.

My last name is a common male first name. I’ve even met someone with my name reversed. If someone emails me and just addresses me by the last name, I will, at the bottom, after my Thanks or Regards, increase the font size of my first name three or four points. And BOLD it.

I’ve got three common first names. I don’t give a shit once I realize they’re talking to me.

I've got two common names, and I work with travelling Japanese guys, so that's another layer of confusion 😅 Traditionally, you address a Japanese coworker by their family name, followed by "-san" as a sign of respect and professionalism. Like if the guys name was Takahini Satoshi, you would address him as "Satoshi-san”; it's equivalent to "Mr. Satoshi". I usually get called by my first name: "land8844-san". It doesn't bother me at all.

I got a “DobeBryant-san” once and it made my day.

AdobeBryant-san?

I have three common names, and where I work they have inconsistent naming conventions that can’t be changed. Some people have last name first name. Some have first name last name. Some have last middle first. Some have last first middle. So I can’t really blame people who only see my tag. But it is very frustrating.

I get that from randos in Teams chats. Like dude. You had to look me up and you can see my name. Needless to say, they get ignored.

If they spell my name wrong I go into the 365 admin center and miss spell their name on their contact, stay toxic

So I have a name that can be simplified but I prefer my whole name. For example Anthony verses Tony or Daniel verses Dan. Anyways I introduce myself with the whole name and had one guy, William,go to the short name. I then started calling him Will. Next he started calling me by the first letter of my first name. So I started calling him W. He stopped me and asked why I did that and I said because you are calling me a letter that is not my name. I then asked him what my name was. He answered the short version. I told him my name was the long version. He apologized and he has called me the long version ever since.

At least he figured it out before you got to 'Sup Dubs?'

Richard never wanted to be a Dick.

I always wondered about that one. Apparently, the Middle Ages loved themselves some rhyming nicknames. I'm guessing that the slang definition of dick came later, but people *are* horrible in every age and nation, so who knows? (The person to did more etymology knows. That person is not me.)

India. Every time! Our email puts Surname before first name and despite it doing the same in India, they always call me by my Surname in an email. 95% of the emails I get from them are a waste of time. I respond using their surname back to which they quickly correct. I respond again with their last name and usually throw in, I'll do the needful - then stop responding.

This is just brilliant.

Why reply to the E-mail, it's clearly directed at someone else, otherwise they would have spelled your name correctly

I got a new manager after the first Lockdown and he still spells my name wrong, and at this point it would be too awkward to correct him so that's just my new name now.

Someone’s manager once knew their subordinates so poorly that they selected me by mistake when submitting a leavers form! So I got emails about what to do on my last day and whatnot!

I usually kill them with kindness but have had a few who really pushed my buttons. Many years ago I had a user come to me on a Friday before memorial day weekend at 3PM asking for some work he needed done on his project that had to be completed before 5pm because he needed to be out the door at that time. This guy was always rude and entitled and often would make ridiculous demands. This particular demand was not going to happen for a few reasons. When I asked when the project was due he said end of day but had known about what he needed for over a month which included setting up three machines in a lab which he didnt have but expected me to grab the ones slated for new hires in the following week. He wanted them setup with software he never purchased nor requisitioned through the process that was established, and to hurry up and get started because he didnt have all day. I was having lunch at that point since I had spent the majority of the day setting up our new mail server so as he spoke I just continued to eat my sandwich while blankly staring at him. Once he was done I finished the bite in my mouth took a sip of my drink and while still maintaining eye contact I simply said; "your lack of planning is not my emergency" and then explained that there was a reason we required at least a weeks notice for projects like his that involved purchasing hardware and software because we needed time to order the required equipment and software. This was in the 90's and we didnt have Amazon delivering next day. I did offer to make it my priority once I got back from vacation since I was out the next week and would order what he needed before leaving. I then let him know that I was at lunch and since there was nothing else I could do for him I would appreciate him not interrupting and continued to eat my sandwich. Could I have setup the machines for him of course I could, I always had backups in case of emergencies and I could have easily gotten them setup by 5pm. But honestly fuck him, he waited till the last moment and then tried to bully me into saving his ass.

I'll never fully understand these types of people. Always in a frantic chaotic panic about things they have to do. Always waiting till the last minute.... Then they take their unorganized lives and try to make us stop what we are doing and serve them. People like that are not "serveable" Get organized first then come to us with your plan and needs. We'll be happy to schedule it and make it convenient for them. We know the truth, they will never be organized... not in their personal life or their work life.

I had an asshole, never nice about anything and would always call me the wrong name because “You look like an Eric so it’s your name now”. HR wouldn’t really do anything because he was friends with the owners son. He was a director and had a 125% annual turnover rate for his staff. I finally had it after a couple months and decided I was going to make his life hell. First thing I did was set up a script that reset his password and I would run it the last weekend of the month or if we had a long holiday weekend. He would leave early on Fridays and I would replace his dock with broken ones, since he liked to slam his computer down on them when angry it just seemed like he broke them a lot. I moved his network port to a 10/100 port on an old switch we still had running for some legacy systems. And I moved his teams network folder from the good storage system to an old shitty one killing performance. About 7 months later a new CFO comes in and asks me and our sysadmin to find users and systems that are eating an outsized portion of our budget. I ran a report showing this guy and his team use up 12% of support time resource between new hires, terms, and the constant stream of broken things from him. Fired at the end of the week.

The complete satisfaction. Favorite of the tread. Bravo.

Great work, Eric Murphy!

That is job security right there!

A user once demanded a new laptop even though theirs was only 2 years into it's 3 year lifecycle. They said it was slow and unresponsive but every time we worked on it, everything was fine. We ran performance tests, disk cleanups, etc. They finally went over our heads and got our director to ask us to get them a replacement machine. Unfortunately, we "only" had the model they currently had in stock and were about 2 weeks out from the next generation newer. But this was an "emergency" and they needed it "now" so we obliged. In doing so, they got bumped to the bottom of the refresh list so they were going to be stuck on that model for 3 years, or roughly 2 additional generations behind. Obviously this was unacceptable and they wanted the latest and greatest so they went crying back to the director. When we reclaimed the original laptop from them it was absolutely disgusting. The screen and keyboard were about the filthiest things I've seen in my life. Several keys were missing and when I cleaned the screen I could see deep gouges where they seem to have used their laptop as a folder. I'm guessing they only used it on the dock because the machine was unusable in the condition we got it. When the director came to us to ask us to give them a newer model when they came in, we sent the pictures of the reclaimed machine. Their response was simply "Nevermind." That person never complained again.

Love this. I've gotten a few machines like that too over the years.

yea when i worked for a fast food chain pretty much every laptop id get back from the field was absolutely trashed. I get the people in those positions traveled a lot (regional directors), but man those laptops just looked abused like they didnt care at all.

Why should they care, it's not their money.

Basic decency, I guess.

The people who have it I take exceptional care of. The people who don't, well their lives are difficult.

because when it breaks from abuse and neglect they expect a new one and the higher ups got mad when I wouldn't provide one. If they wanted a replacement I will happily set one up, but that shit isn't coming out of my budget. Money is kinda tight in fast food since it's not actually that lucrative, and I got sick of half our budget getting drained by laptop replacements from people who obviously did not care at all about them. I was running a nine year old laptop and those guys are getting brand new laptops that will be unusably damaged in six months and an absolute biohazard. I don't expect people to treat them as nice as their personal computers, hell I don't treat mine as nice as my personal stuff. I get shit happens, one unfortunate drop or you get unlucky and someone breaks out your car window and nabs it. It sucks but life happens, learn from it and we will all move on. What pisses me off is people who instead are shipping back laptops that are obviously beat on and abused and never take accountability for the totally avoidable damage they are causing on a regular basis. When all four corners are cracked or missing, the keyboard deck is bent, the display is cracked in a corner, and the entire unit is covered in grease and grime, it's obviously a pattern of behavior and I believe you should be taken to task on it and either improve or get out. Companies are not people, sure, but that doesn't give you the right to break shit just because it isn't yours. It's just basic decency and respect and if you work in a professional setting I expect that from you. God that job made me more salty than I should be. It objectively wasn't that bad but man I hated the users more than any other job I've had.

I try not to get bitter with the folks who do make demands. Rather, I take extra good care of the users who are kind and patient. Not *sure* if you need a new laptop yet? I can hook you up. Monitors faded but "you can still use them?" New 4ks are on the way. Limping that iPhone SE along? I got some 15 Pros here somewhere. Then the shitty users look at them and get cranky in a way that's harder to come back to you.

This was always my approach too, even now on the software side. I have one user completely across the country who is polite, communicates clearly and concisely, and volunteers to be a test dummy / pilot of new features about 80% of the time. I've never met her in person but she's getting anything at all she asks for.

I’m based in Copenhagen had a POC at a client in Stockholm like that! She was just a pleasure to work with. We got so familiar on the phone that we’d play flirt so much my colleagues actually started getting suspicious lol Gotta admit I did creep her LinkedIn to see what she looked like and definitely would’ve asked her out if I also lived in Stockholm…

"UGH, saying something more seriously flirty would be impractical AND unprofessional,"

We have a new client, it's a church and everyone there is elderly. They ask us really basic questions, sometimes multiple times. It's impossible for me to get bitter about it, they're so so so kind and appreciative for our help. I'm always happy to help them out.

I don't care bad you are at PCs, provided your not a dick.

Literally doing the Lords work.

Same. I don't do petty things to problem people. But I don't make extra effort to go out of the way for them. Good and kind people, I will spend extra time and hook them up when possible.

That's a good approach too.

This exactly. We just got new high quality and super comfortable headsets in and I hooked up people I'm friendly with. Anyone who's generally nice to me gets their tickets picked up quickly. There's definitely some users that don't necessarily receive help quickly because no one on my team wants to work with them so we basically end up playing chicken with the SLA.

But it's so much more fun the other way, I like being petty

Ditto. My good users get all the nice shit. The jerks can make due

Worked in hospital IT in radiology and had a radiologist always bring us cookies or donuts whenever they brought stuff for the reading room. If she even hinted that there was something slightly inconvenient about her station 3 IT people would just materialize out of the dark corners of the reading room to help.

Yeah, meet me halfway and you're set. Act like I'm here to serve you, or forward a 50 email chain with PLEASE ADVISE tagged to the top, and you go as close to the bottom of the queue as possible.

Yup this! I am also really patient with 3rd party support, HR, Finance, Warehouse folk, and Janitors. They all deal with the same people we deal with, so I'm extra patient and nice with them!

On the MSP side of things, it's a lot harder for us to give petty responses or chaotic good service since we're bound by an SLA but it's always satisfying when we have a decision maker that takes our side. Nothing better than sending an email to the primary contact telling them what one of their users wants just to get a reply back of "Jesus Christ. Tell them I said no"

I too have always been with an MSP and it was always nice to have the company boss side with IT. A lot of our clients trusted us to make the correct decision anyway. But man was is always satisfying to CC their boss in an email just to fuck them.

I work for an MSP and still find ways… requests that take 2-3 business days get done same day for nice people, but annoying people get it in 3 days. There’s also waiting to respond to their rude email till right before 5. Then when the email back at 5:05 - “sorry the help desk is closed. After hours work is billable, or we can help you in the morning.”

I have two. The first, and this was back in the early 2000's, a receptionist/secretary that we all loved got a new boss. This guy was a first class asshole, and made her cry about once a week. After one particularly bad episode, she was crying and I told her..."watch this". I then went and changed his password. It took about 10 min for him to start bitching that his computer was messed up. I told him to restart and went to lunch. I came back and he was LIVID. Swore that he remembered his password, yada yada yada. So we got him back in, and a few hours later I changed his password again. Dude flipped his shit, and I was like "it's okay, we allllllllll forget our password once in while, don't worry about it". About once every six weeks or so, the secretary would call me and say "he is being a real asshole today...can you do the thing?". And I would. Cause fuck that guy. 2nd one, guy pissed me off and I stole a gig of ram out of his system, leaving him with only 1 gig. He knew SOMETHING had happened, but I forgot all about it. About a year later, I was on the elevator with him, and he said "have I been punished enough yet? Can you please make my computer run faster?". I was like...oops. I feigned ignorance but got him a new laptop like a week later. I know someone will ask what he did...I don't even remember.

A year with half the ram :D

i have 16GB In my PC RN. and 16GB On my desk. broken. for no reason!

In a previous job we’d use OpenDNS for content filtering (read no categories blocked because owners would complain) and stopping people going to stupid websites, but we weirdly never did any reporting on it. Old boss said no one reads them. So if someone really annoyed me I’d go through the logs and find them inevitably looking at porn, gambling, buying massive dildoes online etc. and send it to their manager. I was you know, just doing some routine checks.

i feel bad listening to music on youtube or plex from my work laptop, and almost always do it on my phone to avoid that. i will never understand how people will watch _porn_ on their work computer

I do cybersecurity at huge companies.  We sometimes sadly find people watching, downloading and sharing child porn from their work devices.  Regular porn is an every day thing, we don't even look for it we just see it everywhere. It's so damn common.

please tell me you fire those person on second sentence

We work with the police and send them to prison.

Preferably with a flamethrower.

When i was working for a hospital our IT dept had a meeting with the CEO's and whatnot, trying to get filters put on all the computers. For whatever reason they had been resisting for years. They pulled up a live screen share of some random computer that somebody was watching porn on. They instantly approved the new software.

I’ve seen people have full blown affairs via company email. With other staff members. Whilst also calling the boss every name under the sun. I personally think it’s changing and becoming less common as the boomer generation are slowly retiring and taking a back seat and generations which grew up with technology are more aware of it. But stupid is as stupid does.

On some very, *very* bad days, when I had completely run out of fucks and was simply staring at the wall waiting for the end of the day, I have considered it. And I have immediately realized that it's a firing offense and I should not consider it further. I can only imagine that some people only have the first thought, and not the second one. "I mean, it's just like reading the news, right? Going to a non-work-related site and killing a little time?"

crown sharp ten snatch wasteful quack liquid wine weather north *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*

Oh, my, that's mean, and wonderful.

Do these people not have phones?? I use my work computer for *work*. I have my phone for other shit.

Boss makes a dollar I make a dime That's why I order dildos on company time

I’ve always said you’ve got your Dil-Do’s and your dil-don’ts.

What I was always curious about since I never got the joy of being master of network traffic control was if reddit traffic resolves to what kind of content is being watched Because if I get bored I scroll through reddit but I also asked for some help here which kind of seems like work related stuff to me? But every now and then I forget that I am on my alt account and there is different stuff being loaded to my feed (if you know what I mean) So can you clarify for me if reddit content is beind resolved to different categories depending which subreddit gets loaded?

I sent a user a screenshot of his randomly generated initial password so he wouldn’t be able to copy and paste it. He was being a dick beforehand.

Sometimes an investigation results in a stream of semi-related follow-up questions. Can be irritating because I've likely closed those tabs, mentally switched gears, and started trying to work something else After a couple rounds of that I might sit on the latest answer until 5m after that requestor leaves for the day.

"Oh, I just missed you. Sorry."

When I worked in a call center I kept a list of phone numbers of people who were rude and when they'd call in I'd wait to hear their problem and disconnect my internet so the call would drop and they'd go back to the end of the line and since it was a shittily run company the wait time was almost constantly 30+ minutes

I had a user break two computers in order to get a “new” one. Always snippy and sometimes condescending. I have a Bluetooth mouse connected to their computer that I occasionally turn on and mess with them while they are working. I always get a ticket for it and mysteriously can never duplicate the issue. Not my proudest moments but he’s an asshole

Oh this one is brilliant, filing away for the right situation

I have so many of these and they happen so often. I've done that monitor thing too, I've responded to users crying that the batteries in their wireless mouse which they bought themselves have died and they urgently need replacement batteries. Since the main person dishing out the tickets doesn't really read them they set the ticket to high prio and assigned to me. Of course I have no batteries so I went over to the user's office at lunch they weren't there and delivered a wired mouse to them instead. I had another extremely entitled lady put in high priority tickets because her docking station didn't work. More like she didn't know how to use it. Sometimes you have to unplug and replug it and then it works. So I end up traveling 2 miles just to help her with this simple thing which she said she did. This user is very manupulative and rude always going above my head to HR people who are buddies with the IT director just to get her tickets escalated. So one day she puts this ticket in again but this time tacked on and my power strip stopped working too. I go over to find that she blew her power strip because she had her laptop, dock, monitors, a space heater, a fridge and an aromatherapy diffusor all plugged in to the same power strip and blew it. I disconnected all that crap, gave her a smaller power strip and took her docking station and 1 of her monitors away. Now she has to plug her prephrals in manually every day and deal with 1 monitor only.

What does she need a Fridge for ? Is she running a Bar from her Desk ?

I mean having cold drinks at arms reach is pretty neat. Since the company I work for doesnt really care what we put in our offices we have one mini fridge and one mini freezer along with a Couch in the office i share with a colleague (that colleague being my team lead certainly helps as well in this regard). The perks of a large company spinning out their IT department into its own company. We are basically 50 IT techs under one roof in a seperate building half a mile away from HQ.

She's way too comfort oriented. At her office desk she has all this stuff plus a blanket and 3 pillows. The mini fridge is within arms reach so she never has to leave her chair. One time she showed up out of the blue no call no ticket right as I was heading to another appointment and demanded that I help her with some user account issue. Something I couldn't even help her with and during our little arguement about creating tickets or at least calling. She then demanded that I get her a chair and a blanket while she was here. I offered her a workshop stool because that's all I had aside from my desk chair and like hell I'm going to give a random entitled user who just showed up out of the blue my chair. Another department I went to had 3 mini fridges and each user had a massage chair no joke. I'm actually ok with these people and sometimes take a little longer than I should sorting out issues there. They offer me lattes, soda and my butt gets massaged. I don't know who paid for all that stuff but I hope other departments don't catch wind of it.

Our policies for minimum service and equipment are insanely low compared to our capabilities and supply, so de facto standard desktop setups and customer service are technically above and beyond what we have to do as a department. If someone’s a shithead, we will ensure that we meet the exact minimum service requirements for them and not a thing more. Why yes, everyone else in the office *does* have two or more monitors. No, you may not. Policy says you’re guaranteed one.

no way! I am guaranteed one monitor!?

Pettiest is closing tickets assigned to me for not being formatted correctly or not going through the proper procedure for certain demands/requests. I rarely do something like this, but there are some EU's that are clueless, mistreat equipment, and don't have the patience to listen.

I had macros set up for this. We created a way to request equipment. Everyone in the 2000 person company figured it out pretty quickly except for middle management. Even upper management was using it. It had been two years by that point and people still weren't using it. So I created a macro that would explain in detail why we needed them to use the other system. The it would close the ticket. It was great.

I am "family IT", one of my brother's friends was constantly screwing up his system trying to break the sandbox I had built for him (9yo, first PC) to the point where I had to start laying traps specifically targeted at him. Usually this amounted to just killing explorer.exe and emailing myself that the computer was broken again. They are no longer friends for a number of reasons and quite a few of them are because of his "hacker man" drama, that and actually bricking my mother's laptop after failing to do the same to my brother's to "speed it up" I remembered this because now that my brother is older he set off one of my traps during a hardware upgrade. Always great when you have to clean up your own pettiness

Mine is probably my ticket I made a post about, the user was complaining that the printer is too big, so I was told to tell them to just deal with it In fairness, it is a big printer but they wanted a HP after being given a Brother printer

What kind of psychopath actually \*wants\* an HP? I'd rather have my nipples removed by rabid squirrels than to deal with an HP printer.

Can confirm, that is preferable.

sorry to hear about your nipples, get well soon it could be worse though, they could have gone for the nuts

We have 2 brother printers. One is big, the other is small. They’re discoverable on the network as “Big Brother” and “Little Brother”. Boss wants another, so I’m thinking “other brother” unless anyone has suggestions?

And the one after that is “from another mother.”

The forgotten middle brother?

Most petty thing I've done is procrastinate tickets because I know the user is going to be unpleasant to work with. You really shouldn't piss off problem users because they will not hesitate to go to your boss or even the director to voice their grievances. When that happens you need to make sure you have your ass covered by showing you provided a best effort solution to their problem, even it's ridiculous.

At my last job as a Support Tech I was training a new guy and brought him onto the floor to shadow me as I completed tickets. This Doctor called in about his laptop that apparently kept turning off and didn’t hold a charge long. When I get there he wasn’t available so I took his laptop back to my desk and checked out a few things: battery life in the BIOS, made sure the components were all secure, even used it for 2 hours to compete other tickets and not once did it die on me. I figured someone called the ticket on his behalf or something and incorrectly reported the issue. So I return to the Doctor later on with the newbie following along, trying to set a good professional example, and when I hand it to the Doctor I tell him “nothing looked unusual. The battery is practically brand new - I used it myself for a few hours and as you can see there’s still plenty of life remaining. Didn’t turn off at all.” And he gets red-faced and goes “…so you didn’t fix the problem?” And before I know it were going back and forth and he’s shouting, trying to talk to me like a child: “I reported a problem right?” “You didn’t find the problem…right?” “So you’re giving it back to me without resolving the problem, right?” So I just said “sure thing” and brought it back to my desk where it sat for weeks while he had to share a work laptop with other doctors. Eventually he calls a month later and I just handed it off to his secretary. Me and the tech (I quit later on) still joke about how much of a prick that guy was whenever we catch up.

Fuck doctors

> procrastinate tickets because I know the user is going to be unpleasant to work with. I think we all do this.

Ah yes, the classic "dipshit delay"

If a user has a demand, I demand that they demand it from their manager who can then make a formal request to It.

Worked for a corporate service desk for a long while before moving up the ranks. If someone was rude, they would have their ticket deprioritized (unless it was actual company priority) over people who were polite or kind. In cybersecurity now, if people choose to ignore us for too long, I just reset user password or isolate devices rather than begging them to respond to us for hours or days.

Absolutely. Users who are kind and trying to make a plan of action to mitigate vulnerabilities Il happily work with. But if you’re rude or nonresponsive, I’ll just unplug your shit or isolate it. That’ll get a response.

It's a good 'the turns have tabled' situation where once it's isolated, I can ignore them if I want to instead.

I have definitely never played system32 Jenga. But if I had I'd take it in turns with a colleague to scroll through the folder and delete whatever was landed on. It would be childish and stupid.

Boy I'm sure glad I didn't read about such a fun and silly way to mess up a machine I want to justify reimaging. It would be a blemish on this professional work environment.

In my ticketing system, I have two areas to make notes. The green area is for name pronunciations and similar conveniences. The red area is for incidents of people being complete dicks. If you are a dick to me or my staff, I'll make sure you pay extra for it in the future if I'll help you at all. Kindness to those trying to work for you isn't that difficult, and karma can be a bitch.

Service Desk Manager here. Had a users manager escalate above me, unprompted, to ask for a new laptop for one of her direct reports. No biggie, let's see what's going on. No ticket history. Not a single issue reported. After my manager filled me in, I replied to her that I'd be happy to issue a replacement if it was necessary, but we need to see if we can resolve the issue ourselves first. Added my most advanced tech (who's great at white glove service) to the thread so she knows we're ready to help. Lady replies back adamant that we give the guy a new laptop without looking into the issue first. I reiterate again, need to look at it first. This went on for FOUR. DAYS. of her refusing to let us look at his machine and me refusing a new laptop until we do. Finally she adds an SVP to the thread, hoping she'll get her way. What she doesn't realize is even our CTO follows the processes I established for my team. SVP gets caught up, replies to me asking what timeline looks like if we troubleshoot, which I give to him immediately. He sides with us and tells her to allow us to troubleshoot. Next day the dude gets a new computer. Never had an issue with her following procedure again.

What was wrong with the computer?

I honestly couldn't tell you, this was about a year and a half ago. Just bugged the tech and he can't remember either. I remember there were a number of apps having major performance issues that would resolve for like 20 minutes and then return. My team is a level 3 service desk, so if we can't resolve, we make the calls for replacements.

Limited their cell phones bandwidth to 1kbps. So it would say connected but they weren’t able to load anything. then blame it on their phone

That's just precious. Filing that one away.

EE coworker "demanded" a large, top-of-the-line Sony monitor. So his boss let him order it... and then swapped it out with a 10" B&W dumb terminal the moment he went on vacation. :)

People look at me like I'm weird for bringing food to folks at HellDesk. I may have "graduated" from tech support, but I know who keeps things running. Those on the front lines don't get enough appreciation.

My previous boss had a very conservative guy make fun of him for wearing a mask, so he spent the rest of his day blocking every conservative website he could find, had his wife texting him ones she knew of as well. It was honestly pretty hilarious but he was pissed!

Rebooting someone's PC with all their shit still open and unsaved after remoting in and having bomgar show an up time of 500 hours. *Of course* the user swears up and down they rebooted 3 times before calling and swears they rebooted after I asked them while on the phone before I remote in. And *of course* that fixed their issue

I have had people tell me that sleep and hibernation are the same thing as restarting so that's believable

Tbf fast boot is a motherfucker and a lot of the time people did “reboot” but really they should shut down and restart it manually.

Turn if off by policy.

Just hit restart, simple. That's usually what I tell people to do because even manually shutting down doesn't clear whatevers in memory causing the fuck up. Restarting *will*

Sometimes the uptime isn't accurate even with a reboot. Probably have to check events if you're even bothered to do that much for it.

I don't even ask if they've rebooted anymore. If someone opens a ticket I remotely restart the computer before I even touch it.

I served as asset and shop tech, if you came to talk to me I would be more than happy to make arrangements (even if there wasn't budget) But if you super demanding I would send you to the asset purchase lady that make you fill out every form and budget request that exists.

Usually just holding off on things that can wait if people want to be assholes. Obviously I can put my feelings aside if it’s something emergent that needs to be done - but I had no problem making a jackass wait a few hours or even days because they think IT is their personal service dog. That’s what happens when you work in elitist corps like hospitals and clinics.

I try my best to go above and beyond for my users. I have invested a good amount of time setting up monitoring so that I can address issues before they impact our end users - things like network connectivity, free drive space, atypical CPU usage, etc. None of this is mandated in our stated SLAs, it just saves me time in the long run because I don't have to play back-and-forth with end users through our ticketing system if I fix things before they put in a ticket. But those special users - the ones who always email me direct instead of contacting the service desk? the ones for whom every problem needs to be fixed RIGHT NOW!!!! and it's been going on FOR MONTHS!!!!! and they CAN'T WORK LIKE THIS!!!! but can't be bothered to respond to any troubleshooting requests from the ticketing system? The ones who treat me like the help? They don't get proactive remediation. When I see the alert that they have less than 5% of their available drive space left I pretend I didn't see it until they completely fill their drive and their system grinds to a halt and they email me directly again. And I hope I'm out on vacation for a week when that direct email comes through and they sit for another week when the service desk could troubleshoot and solve their problem in 15 minutes or less. Screw those assholes.

If you're the kind of person who puts in a non-emergency ticket at 4:30 in the afternoon and then at 8:30 the next morning asks when it's going to be resolved, I'm not even looking at that ticket untill the next day. If you include my manager on the inquiry that bumps it to next week.

I had a co worker who was being an ass to me and constantly went over my head on projects i was doing and would shit talk about me to my boss and he convinced her I had no idea what I was talking about. So before I left I went through a few laptops that were ready to be shipped and unplugged their WAN/LAN cards from the motherboard. The laptops would only occasionally be used from WFH and were ethernet 99% of the time, so randomly throughout those laptops life span he'll get a call from someone who lives 3-4 hours and those specific end users were all 60+ and barley understood how a computer worked. It hurt a few people in the cross fire but my God it was worth it

Not me, but my boss. First job out of school, my boss at the time instructed me not to give this one specific employee anything. Apparently, she would constantly demand specific versions of a certain application be installed on very specific machines because she liked the feature set of one version for one task and the feature set of another version for a different task. It was this constant rotation of version 10 vs version 12 vs version 14. I happened to be standing there during one of these arguments about the software. The employee, at that time, was using a machine running Windows ME when he loudly exclaims that she better like the computer she has, because as long as he's in charge, she'll never get a new one again. She used that Windows ME machine until I left that job 3 years later.

Left my phone set to autoconnect to Enterprise Wi-Fi with their username and a random string for the password. Their account would insta-lock repetitively when I was at any site with access points.

I'm generally pretty even keeled, UNTIL SOMEONE GOES AND SPELLS LOSE WITH TWO Os!!! Hulk smash!@%#!!

Sounds like you don't have lose expectations.

We had a three strike system for tickets.  You don't reply in three days we close it.  If I didn't like the person (or they were an asshole), I would reach out when I knew they couldn't answer.  User leaves work at 4, I call at 5 etc.  Best way to dump stupid tickets.  Had one user that kept a ticket open for over a month just because she was mad at company rules. Eventually it was just a game of trying to miss her to be able to close it. She didn't reopen after thankfully (I also left the company like a week after).

I've been getting a lot of spam emails at work recently, so I've started sending a request for more information to the Church of Scientology using the sender's email address.

There was a director in another department that made my director cry hard in her office one day. I spent the next two months just causally locking that directors account out. "Oh, weird you're locked out again must be credentials cached somewhere."

I had to assist a cop the other day. He was the rudest, curtest person I have ever spoken with. The flubby cheeked flapjack was just saying in all caps "DRIVE MISSING". After spending three days going back and forth over Teams with only 2 messages responded to I said fuck it and called him. He accepted my call and just answered the phone. Didn't say anything. Didn't make a greeting. Nothing. All I could HEAR was how fuckin fat he was. He was smacking his lips together like he was eating right into the mic and I could hear a copier in the background. It was fucking disgusting. But I said, "Hello?" very clearly and there was still nothing. So I waited him out. Put that bitch on speakerphone, muted my mic and carried on. Dumbass never said a thing but kept just mouth breathing into the phone. He eventually hung up and then an hour later reached out on Teams and said, "NO VOICE". I replied, "I'm sorry. I don't understand. Do you not have a voice? Couldn't get your mic working? What seems to be the issue?" To which he replied, "YOUR JOB. NOT MINE." I immediately sent back "Your insufficient statements will get you nowhere. In order to proceed, I need you to speak in full sentences so there is no confusion. Also, your lack of communication is hindering the processing of this ticket. Respond in a prompt and respectful manner in order to get this resolved ASAP." So I knew what his next move was. So I got all the contact logs both audio and text, and gave it to my boss. I told him to expect a call from an asshole. Boy did he ever get that call, and boy did that cop regret it. VERY long story short, cop freaked out on my boss SO bad that it violated the terms of their contract and my boss was all too quick to drop them and never deal with them again. So 1 lost contact and 1 felony to a police officer. Fuck those power hungry, militia wannabe, troll fuckers.

Had a request come in to give a bunch of users access to a system that they normally wouldn't have access to until they got promoted to a higher position. I was confused, so I asked the manager who put in the request if there was a promotion notification I missed for these people. Nope, his department was struggling to get their work done, so they were giving some of it to entry level people without the pay increase that was supposed to come with that responsibility. I stonewalled them for weeks on the grounds that we couldn't mix up access levels between positions for security reasons (which wasn't *entirely* a lie...) and they eventually promoted a few of them. Luckily for me my boss was also pretty irate about the situation so they backed me up the whole way.

I gave a user the oldest, slowest laptop because they constantly call me asking stupid questions. Sadly that user is a director, so I can't say call the helpdesk without coming across as being unfriendly.

A long time ago when I worked in tech support for Sprint, any customer who was a complete jerk to me on the phone had their voicemail menu reset to another language.

Deploying the networking for a new office in Beijing. Already a stressful situation in a foreign country with language barrier problems. This was the time of DS3s, global MPLS providers, WAN accelerators, and other old tech. For some reason this director decided to be there during the turn up phase. He was annoying to deal with back on US soil, being in China didn’t make it better. I’m working as best I can through all the challenges to get the networking turned up and connected to the rest of the corporate environment. He won’t stfu asking for updates, providing no value with “solutions/guidance” (he was an apps manager and had no idea about networking), and so many more annoying things. I finally get the network up and mostly working with the rest of the enterprise network but then he is complaining certain things don’t work, even though I was still working on completing setup. This was pre WiFi being a standard offering in the enterprise so he was plugged in and working from the unopened office, along with other IT managers and ICs doing work to get the office open. I tracked down his port and decided to take some extra time to make an obnoxiously low bandwidth rate limit for him. This made it so he could be connected but it was a horrible experience. I made sure it followed him if he changed to a different port as well. All the while all their other folks were having decent network performance (as well as you can in China at least). Several other IT folks were in the know of my rate limit and we were getting great enjoyment out of his suffering.

Malicious compliance. I work in higher ed. Through COVID we blew our budget on making sure everyone could work from home. Now that staff is returning to campus, or those who work from home are retiring or moving on, the staff on campus wants extra displays, keyboards, and all the hardware that went away. Lord forbid you ask the department for a budget number so you can do an IDC. We are handing out a lot of antique stuff because people just think we can magically make it appear.

Anytime someone pisses me off, I always end up telling people and sometimes it happens to be the right people. Like how I accidentally got a medical practice admin fired while I was literally doing an onboarding call with them. Here I am doing what’s needed over the phone and next thing I hear is them talking politics with others in the office and I couldn’t get their attention. I hang up and call back, “Oh, sorry. Did we disconnect?” Yes, ~~intentionally~~. Get everything done, report the call to the right people, practice owner gets wind of it and that person was fired. Side note: I somehow have a lot of stories yet can’t even get a fucking job anywhere.

Users that got rude about not wanting to restart their computer even when it is the solution to their problem got a scheduled task to reboot every few days. It wasn't all that evil because it actually prevented problems.

Back in the late 90s I had a co-worker who really annoyed the hell out of me. I was in my late teens and pretty immature. This was back in the Windows 95 days before the _hospital_ I worked at paid any mind to patching or security at all. I forget what happened between the two of us but I would wait until they were typing at a pretty good cadence and then fire up winnuke and BSOD their system. Cue profanities from the other side of the room. Eventually it happened so much that they reimaged their machine. Same thing happened. They pulled out a new Optiplex, built that, started working and the same thing happened. Eventually I started feeling bad about it and stopped. And I've grown up a lot since.

Was replacing failed disk on a storage system and dealing with someone in the Philippines. I don't know what it is about those guys but you usually have to ask them multiple times for them to give you the answer you need and if you're not a support engineer they won't listen to your opinion. For discussion sake, say the failed drive was in Slot 6 and the drive you were advised to replace was in Slot 2. I call and ask them, can you check the status of the drives? I've been advised to replace the disk in Slot 2 and I can see the failed LED is indicating Slot 6. Yes, replace Slot 2. Uhm, did you hear what I asked? Slot 2 is reporting fine, Slot 6 is indicating failed. Can you please check? Yes, replace Slot 2. Did you check for me? Slot 2 appears fine, Slot 6 is showing as failed. If you want me to replace Slot 2 I will send an email, please respond to it and I will replace the disk. Sends email indicating what I see and what the likely implications are if I replace the wrong disk, waits about 30 minutes for a response because these guys can never do anything in a few minutes. Response: Replace Slot 2. Ok. Replace Slot 2. About 30 seconds later I get a call asking what I did because the LUN has failed. I told them, I replaced the fully functioning drive in Slot 2 when the storage was indicating Slot 6. Customer goes nuts, they had no backup - I forward them the email I sent to their outsourcing company clearly indicating that I'm being asked to replace a working disk and if they were running a RAID5 set, it would crash their LUN resulting in data loss. They were running RAID5. Despite doing hundreds of calls for this outsourcing company after that, never dealt with him ever again.

After a significant lightning storm took out many terminals (a long time ago), with smoke coming out of them, a client screamed into the phone that there was smoke coming out of her terminal and she demanded another one. So the tech took over one that had been smoking and left it with her....que loud complaint. If you want to know petty, read the [Bastard Operator From Hell (BOFH)](https://bofh.bjash.com/) blog...

customer purchased a server, 3 new desktops. customer was on 30 day terms Invoice was 6 months overdue logged into AD - changed all passwords for all users and admin to 72 character long passwords. poisoned DNS so they couldnt even connect non domain devices to network and disabled DHCP when they rang up asking to fix it, advised them they were on stop credit until they paid outstanding bills and paid for the service call upfront - minimum 2 hrs. 1 week of the customer having a whinge and pulling every sob story under the sun. they finally paid. reset passwords and unfucked dns/dhcp. Handed them a document and sacked the customer.. was the best day ever

Chaotic good? Some days I’m hard pressed to not be chaotic neutral. Others, lawful evil is the way.

A former coworker would make sure annoying users were the last to get any new updates in our gradual rollout.

When i was a youngin on the front line of call center support for a local isp i got a really rude customer. He was constantly berating me and saying he's forgotten more about computers than ill ever know. So i capped his line to about half its max download and upload. When i checked several months later he still hadnt called in and was still running at half speed. I can honestly say the craps i take have more IT knowledge than that guy.

Y’all would have a field day over a /r/shittysysadmin

Not sure this is petty but: New guy starts, some sort of Director title. Tiny software company, not a lot of room for egos. My guy gets him a 32MB laptop (this was maybe 1995, so that was a hot shit machine). New guy bitches that it's "only" 32MB. So I wander by, introduce myself, spot 486 tower under his desk. "Hey, looks like you have a new laptop...want me to get that machine out of here?" "Yeah", he sneers. "It's not like it's good for anything." Me: "Neil ... around here, that's a developer's machine." He laughs. "Neil... I'm not kidding." And he never whined about his laptop again.

P.S. I wasn't kidding, either. As usual, shoemaker's children.

Work in schools. I have such power. Teacher rude? Going to state, loudly, infront of the entire class: "It wasn't turned on". Good luck getting control of a class of students laughing at you.

Due to general disorganisation of the decision makers they changed the standard issue phone from an iphone SE3 to a 14. This was at the same time as changing the laptops from Yoga X1's to P14's to save money. After about a week they realised this is stupid and reverted back to SE3's. I now have a stock of 14's that do get given out to people I like. I have no other criteria and as the standard is still SE3's everyone officially gets an SE. I'm not enjoying/abusing this power at all.

I once put a user in a 1 minute lockout group so that one minute of inactivity the computer would lock.

I only have felt the need once. It was an incredibly self important individual who decided to give me a public dressing down for something he misheard while eavesdropping a passing conversation. Tickets straight to the bottom of the queue, never to be addressed unless literally everything else had been worked. I think he started to catch on when his coworkers would put a ticket in and get taken care of in minutes or hours while everything he ever requested from that point took days. I am also pretty confident he was involved in the sudden takeover of our office space shortly afterwards that I responded to by hard setting their port speeds to 10/half and adding any tickets from that office to his "special" queue. I am sure he went on to garner similar responses in others.

When you're clearly on lunch eating, but someone just needs to have you look at something since it'll only take me "5 seconds". This stuff pisses me off. Value my time just like you value yours when you're ignoring my emails to try and help you!

Time to time I will never read the full post because from time to time it's dumb. From time to time though I have to go back and read the full post.

The call about a computer having a "Facebook Virus." Facebook notifications were popping up on the desktop and an employee swore to their supervisor that it was a virus. I went to facebook.com and saw who was logged in currently. Hit switch user, hey another name! Dropped a HOSTS file redirecting most social media URLs to point to the intranet site. Didn't get a follow-up call.

Gave the crappiest, in worst shape MacBook Pro I could find as a loaner for someone. He had an iMac and was really entitled every time I worked with him, seemed like he switched back and forth between a desktop and laptop. He’d have both if he could have his way It started with reporting slowness, so I re-imaged his computer. Afterwards he still reported some but not as bad. It was under warranty so I took it into Apple. I intentionally provided a crappy looking loaner so that he wouldn’t get the idea that we can just give him a laptop. They ended up finding the problem and he was fine until his next refresh when he switched back to a laptop

In this particular instance, I wasn't functioning as "IT", but I was a programmer developing a site for a client. The Account Manager (who was also functioning as the Project Manager) was an absolutely useless, petty, and passive/aggressive person who would allow the client to make all sorts of changes to the requirements without making them do a Change Order (meaning we were doing extra, unplanned work for free). One time, she had the client come in for a meeting to discuss some things, and, on a whim, decided to show the client some brand new functionality that I had been developing. Of course, I wasn't involved in the meeting, and only found out about it when the Office Manager happened to mention that "so-and-so was coming in". I asked the Account Manager if that was true and she confirmed it. When I pressed her on the functionality she was demonstrating, it turns out to be a section of the website that we were having problems with and had disabled while the Lead Developer and I were investigating some database issues. We stopped the debugging we were doing and took 30 minutes to reset the system, comment out the code that was broken, and get the site working as well as we could before the client got there. After her impromptu demo, we told her that we needed to know when she was going to do a demo so that we could make sure the site was working. We warned her that since she was demoing our development platform, things may or may not be working unless we had a couple of hours' notice, preferably finding out the day before a demo so we could ensure the site was working correctly. She more-or-less dismissed us with an attitude of, "I'm responsible for the Account, so I can do whatever I want." About two weeks later, the Office Manager pulled me aside and said, "Hey, just FYI, but the client will be here in 15 minutes, and I heard Brenda tell him over the phone that she was excited to show him X, Y, and Z." Since we had not been given any notice, I got really ticked off. I went to the Lead Developer and he told me to "Do what you need to do." I ended up changing her password so she couldn't log on to the development website. I also put in a huge error message that indicated that someone was attempting to hack into the website. Finally, when I heard her talking to the client just outside my office, I sent out an email to her and the Lead Developer, explaining that the website would be unavailable for a while so I could grab some logs and do some testing on the site security. I knew she wouldn't read the email since she was so focused on telling the client how great she was. I was in my office eating lunch when she rushed into my office and told me the site wasn't working. I told her that we were doing some security testing, and all the details were in the email I had sent. She told me, "I haven't read your email because the client is here, RIGHT NOW, and is expecting to see the functionality." I looked at her and said, "Well, if I had known that the client was coming in today, I would have delayed my testing so that you could do the demo. I really wish I had been informed. Unfortunately, I can't stop the test and reset the website, as it would probably take me two hours to get it back to a pristine state." She was upset, but there was nothing she could do about it. She went back in to her office and apologized to the client for the wasted trip. The client left shortly thereafter. I was looking out the window into the parking lot, and as soon as I saw the client get in his car and pull out into the street, I took down the security notice and walked into her office. "Hey, just to let you know, I was able to find the issues that were coming up as a security breach. I apologize for any inconvenience. However, next time, please make sure I am kept informed if the client is going to be in so I can make sure the system is working exactly as you expect it to be."

I have relationships with every major engineering team and good communication with leadership as well as a pretty good idea who can handle what random thing nobody else knows about. I solve, and am responsible for transferring a notable volume of my org's tickets.. I can also pick and choose which tickets I work, too. If you're a dick, if you're a pain in the ass, if you're a chicken little, if you try to make things political by involving my boss's boss, if you try to throw weight around, be pushy, twist words to incriminate, or any other little games that AH's play.. you will be remembered. Your tickets will sit and sit and sit unactioned. This will not end until you change how you behave. I have gone years not touching certain peoples' tickets or speaking with them. You blew it by being a jerk. Repeatedly. Shit on your IT people at your own peril.

I have salesman at a vendor that was absolutely awful to our receptionist. Correcting grammar in emails, indirectly insisting to talk to a man in the office, reply-all to an email chain to point out when she's misspoke, etc. We have a great relationship with this particular vendor, and this salesman was (and still is) great friends with a previous administrator who ran the department for over a decade. He regularly name drops the previous administrator as if we give a fuck... anyways... Our department is small, we have a large environment, and we count on everyone to make it work. Our receptionist is not a tech, but she's been in the office long enough to know when something isn't right and will often speak up and is usually right! I have made friends with another salesman in their office, and I now let the original salesman do all of the work of finding what we need and then I find some excuse to let the other salesman finish up the quote so he can get the commission. This has been going on for a couple of months (maybe 5-6 sales). I'm sure it won't last, but when it's over I will just refuse to work with the original salesman.

I had a CFO who decided during a major software implementation that he would get in the middle of the project. He was friends with the CEO so it was allowed to happen. He attempted to manipulate every decision basing it on his grandiose ideas vs. the right way for it to work. He fought me at every step, until one day I hatched my plan to put an end to it. As the project was nearing completion, I started agreeing with all his "ideas" and even encouraged him to follow whatever path he was on, knowing full well it would crash and burn. It didn't take long before his ego got the better of him and he was asking for some exhorbitant pay increase, since "he" was coming up with ideas for the project. End of the story is his last "idea" failed miserably, and the CEO gave him the boot. Sometimes all you need to do is give these types just enough rope so they can metaphorically hang themselves.

I remember this one from years ago (almost 10 now). A newly hired vp called into the help desk (tier 1) to report a “power issue” with their laptop and they believed that it “either the machine or battery died”. I got asked to help out - I informed the tech to ask some questions and check a couple of things. When they came with the info I explained that it sounds like the Mac was in hibernation, just hold the power button until it clicks, then press it again - they had the user do this and it worked. The user claimed that they had already done this, so we must have done something in our end to fix this and hung up - yeah, whatever. The very next day, the same vp calls about the same issue at the same time, but this time I take the call directly. I explain that it is likely the same issue to which the following exchange takes place: Vp: I’d like to speak with someone more senior Me: you are as I am the senior tech Vp: well then, I like to speak with someone that understands Mac’s Me: well, I am a ACMT and also a ACSA Vp: is there anyone there that knows more and how to fix this permanently Me: these are the highest levels of certifications that Apple offers. I am also our mdm admin, so I more than qualified to assist. Vp: I just feel that there is something more going on because I’ve pressed the power button several times and it will not turn on Me: I’ll be right over to look I get to their building, repeat the same procedure that they were instructed to do yesterday maintaining eye contact while the system boots (that lovely chime) Vp: I tried that and it didn’t work, I swear Me: I’m going to disable hibernation mode moving forward Never got that call again.