you a geek? post your best geek story...

[matthewt]

This one happened to me a couple of years ago. Keep in mind the guy that rang me was considered one of the gurus.

At the time I was looking after a very media sensitive computer system.

Expert: Hey Matt, I think your system might be down.
Me: You sure, people normally ring me first.
Expert: Pretty sure, I can't telnet into the server.
Me: Shit. I'll login from home and take a look. Did you get any error messages ?
Expert: Not really it just can find the server.
Me: Maybe the Name servers are playing up, have you tried to telnet to the IP address directly.
Expert: Nah, that won't work coz the firewall is down........

Short delay of 3 seconds......

Expert: Err, actually Matt I think I'll be able to sort it. Thanks anyway.

bawhahahahahahah F**king idiot!

[Sniper]

Haha, thats a good one matt. Ive heard of that before

[raster]

Customer had excessive internet usage, 2 Gig over their 600 Limit for several months.
New PC's and server, "must be something wrong with the computers."
After some research found usage was happening Thursday nights and weekend, had a look on one of the machines and found 8GB porn stored there.
Apparently 14 yearold was going to work with Dad at these times.

Firewalls can tell many stories.
Cost them something like $4000 Telecom charges.

"is that what that 80% usage message meant."

[pyrocam]

Customer had excessive internet usage, 2 Gig over their 600 Limit for several months.
New PC's and server, "must be something wrong with the computers."
After some research found usage was happening Thursday nights and weekend, had a look on one of the machines and found 8GB porn stored there.
Apparently 14 yearold was going to work with Dad at these times.

Firewalls can tell many stories.
Cost them something like $4000 Telecom charges.

"is that what that 80% usage message meant."

lol that 80% usage message.

[Pathos]

Ugh, during study week just before exams I get an insatiable disire to do some coding. In my first semester of University I spent the last two weeks before exams programming a map editor for a game I liked. I did like 14 hour days. God that F***s you up (physically and mentally). I realised in a fit of panic that I only had 3 days to study the 600 page text book on 151100 Introduction to Business and Management. ouch.

In those 3 days I studied harder than any man has ever studied before. Finished the 3 hour exam in 1.5 hours. I was so hyped the pen was on fire. lol, had a rather humourous conversion with a guy who though I had flunked it like him. Only got a B, bugger it, but I hadn't done well enough in the assignments anyway.

Last two semesters I've been able to quell the coding fever a bit better. but only a bit.

[Krayy]

Heres an oldie but a goodie:

When DOS ruled the world, we would sometimes open COMMAND.COM in a hex editor and change some commands around. Best one was changing PROMPT to PROMTP, and AUTOEXEC.BAT to AUTOEXEC.BAK, then editing the .BAK file to have the line "PROMTP=Wanker>"

[James Deuce]

And you sir have just provided all the helpdesk peaple out there with another story about how stupid the uninitiated are.

Some of these people aren't uninitiated. I've lost count of the number of so-called financial and accounts people who don't know that you can right click, don't know the control key shortcuts for Microsoft apps and OSes, and can't do a vlookup in Excel. These are the type of people that tell you that they've worked with computers for 20 years and therefore know more than you'll ever know about computers. Yet they can't successfully change their password without help from the stupid IT geek who they theoretically know more about computers than.

The vast majority of users have used PCs for years either in the workplace or at school or university. Their stubborn unwillingness to actually learn anything about the tool in front of them is what turns IT people into cynical commentators on human behaviour.

Anyway my favourite one was getting a call from a user at an Ad Agency who was complaining that the Internet was "down". I said I'd get right on it only to have shot straight back at me, " Don't you people back the Internet up? Can't you just restore it from tape or something?"

I responded sarcastically, in a way that was obviously transparent to the user, " Well, we would, but the overall content changes so often that we can't keep up."

That resulted in a letter to senior management at my company complaining about "lazy", "insolent", "incompetent" staff members who were too lazy to back the Internet up. Once they finished pissing themselves, I got a bottle of wine from the MD for the year's best entertainment so far, and a note to be a little less "droll" in future.

[pyrocam]

as per the other thread

hey guys.
can someone please 334522 me the 552325 so I can 224515 into a 55622 to fix the 232355 on 333677

[matthewt]

A system I ran had a user that ran all the overnight and automated jobs. Not a very inventive name but SAISFTP was it. Anyone with an IT background will know what the last 3 letters mean. Anyway, we had to given them a name on the application because the user would run all these jobs and some of them required an operator's name to be stamped on the bit of work. So not being very inventive I gave it the name "SAISFTP SAISFTP". A few years on and I heard some of the operators suggest that this person was a very busy pacific island girl that came in at night and did a lot of work.

[Waylander]

A system I ran had a user that ran all the overnight and automated jobs. Not a very inventive name but SAISFTP was it. Anyone with an IT background will know what the last 3 letters mean. Anyway, we had to given them a name on the application because the user would run all these jobs and some of them required an operator's name to be stamped on the bit of work. So not being very inventive I gave it the name "SAISFTP SAISFTP". A few years on and I heard some of the operators suggest that this person was a very busy pacific island girl that came in at night and did a lot of work.

Ok now you have to explain what SAISFTP means to those of us that don't get it.

[matthewt]

Ok now you have to explain what SAISFTP means to those of us that don't get it.

There's nothing to get. It's just a stupid acronym that people thought was a real name.

I mean have you ever meet anyone with a name remotely like Saisftp ??

SA=the application
IS=the department that ownes the application
FTP=File Transport Protocol (which is what it was originally used for)

[matthewt]

A friend I was training wanted to see what was in the crontab for a very important unix account so he typed:

crontab -r

Thinking the -r would mean read

(Waylander, -r means remove)

[Waylander]

There's nothing to get. It's just a stupid acronym that people thought was a real name.

I mean have you ever meet anyone with a name remotely like Saisftp ??

Yes. Her name was Sanshabnf, don't ask/

SA=the application
IS=the department that owes the application
FTP=File Transport Protocol (which is what it was originally used for)

Ok sorry for being a non-computer type person lol. I figured it was an acronym, was just curious what it meant.

[Ixion]

A friend I was training wanted to see what was in the crontab for a very important unix account so he typed:

crontab -r

Thinking the -r would mean read

(Waylander, -r means remove)

Unix is like that. No "are you sure ?" Just, "OK, boss". No recycle bin either !Once it's gone, it's gone for good . He was logged in as root , wasn't he.

[matthewt]

Unix is like that. No "are you sure ?" Just, "OK, boss". No recycle bin either !Once it's gone, it's gone for good . He was logged in as root , wasn't he.

Nope, not root. Funny, he was logged in as saisftp. So all the automated jobs stopped working all of a sudden.