Little details. #1

Matt came running to me. A printer wasn’t printing. He had tried “everything” but couldn’t get it to print. I pressed the “on-line” button.

I don’t quite know what to say. #3

When Steve left the office last night he left his computer running, still logged in and with the console unlocked. He has got extended privileges, the same as Matt. Lucky him nothing seems to have happened… other than the cleaners having accessed the web from his machine. At least Steve claims not to have looked up certain websites (you know, cars and such) that were still on the screen when I got in this morning. I really don’t quite know what to say.

Please do your work all over again.

Adrian is now sending messages to all of his users kindly asking them to re-enter everything they have written or edited in the past week. He puts the blame on “the computers”.

I don’t quite know what to say. #2

I’ve added some eye-candy to an application and sent Adrian the updated program files. He didn’t uninstall the old files, just copied some of the new files manually, so things didn’t work right away. No big deal, you might think. I thought so, too. But Adrian thought: heck, the database might be corrupt, so let’s try reverting to an older version of the database. (!?) He dropped the live tables, got a backup from last week (which doesn’t have a different structure, just old data) and… nothing worked. So he uninstalled the whole app and reinstalled it. (He should’ve done that in the first place.) Unsurprisingly the app worked. So Adrian was happy. And threw away the current version of the database and all the updates that were newer than the one he’d reverted to. I don’t quite know what to say.

I don’t quite know what to say. #1

Matt is wants to be a systems administrator. His user account has “extended privileges”. I just found his username and password written on a yellow post-it note under the keyboard in the server room. I don’t quite know what to say.

Some machines have cases for a reason.

230V 50Hz AC circuits being one of those reasons. Today Steve removed the back panel from the coffee machine. He placed a tiny yellow handwritten note (“Warning! Don’t touch the back panel!”) on one of the side panels and plugged the machine back in.

He should consider himself very lucky that nobody got hurt.