You are typing away, your keyboard going clickety-clack as your fingers fly across the different buttons. When you look down, you notice that your keyboard is a little bit dusty. Hmmm, that's not right. You guess it's time to deep clean it. How do you go about it? Well, probably not the way this employee did. One tech support worker took to r/talesfromtechsupport after they got an unusual call regarding a printer. Apparently, the printer wasn't working, but it had been just before. So IT saunte…

It's always a good idea to make sure you're not messing with the guy who has access to all of the company's information at his fingertips… Otherwise, things could go pretty poorly for you—if the dozens of stories online on the subject are anything to go off of. This went doubly when that guy was also the one who implemented an all-encompassing Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software that is vital to the organization's continued functioning and existence, which he alone knows how to service…

Workplace politics can be just as challenging and taxing as your actual job. Workplace politics can sometimes make your job harder than it needs to be. Just imagine how much easier life would be if we could speak our minds without fear and conquer every obstacle as it comes along. A cynical IT worker describes a client interaction he had in the story that follows. The Original Poster (OP) has been working in the IT industry for a while now. His experience enables him to distinguish between genu…

If you've ever worked a job that relies on timesheets, you know how this goes… Management (usually of the upper variety) wants to keep better track of how and where staff are spending their time, they pressure staff to charge out more hours to jobs, trying to keep them from posting “unproductive” uncharged hours. Suddenly, clients are getting charged more hours, and therefor paying more, for services implement The really interesting thing about management wanting to better track

Large companies function like machines. The managers and employees are in charge of keeping the machine operating as efficiently and profitably as possible. But occasionally, people become so engrossed in their work that they lose sight of what needs to get done right now and what can wait. In the story below, a devoted IT worker has had enough of his supervisors' ridiculous expectations. Since the Original Poster (OP) has been employed by the same company for quite some time, he is familiar wi…

People get laid off all the time. Especially when you're over 40. See, companies like to hire new kids, fresh out of college, ones who will conform easily to policies, and accept jobs for way less pay. Then, the companies realize their mistake, and they pay dearly for it. Because these new hires have no idea what they're doing. They can't code, build prototypes, and make the customer happy. This senior programmer was laid off after new management swooped in and hired a new kid. The programmer k…

There's this thing that happens every now and again in organizations where someone, usually high up on the food chain, decides that everything—every decision, order, expense, or report—needs to pass across their desk. They do so severely underestimating the gravitas of what they've just requested, with little comprehension of just how many things they're going to be handling, dependent on their pen stroke to proceed. Of course, maybe not right away, but at some point, things are going to begin…

If you're in a line of work that frequently deals with emergency break-fix scenarios where you're effectively permanently on call and might be expected (or required) to spring into action at a moment's notice at any time, having an expectation set that you'll never work overtime doesn't really work. Yet, that doesn't stop petty managers from setting petty rules for their frontline staff who are handling these types of situations. But, to be fair, it's not as if they really understand the indust…

Handling payment between two companies is never easy business. Each company has its own regulations and policies regarding their money, it is often hard to manage even the most simple payment. Much like the companies in this Reddit story. The person who wrote this story (OP) is an employee in a tech company that supplies and installs tech equipment to other small companies. Their policy states that until the payment for the equipment is fully paid, the ownership of it remains in the hands of th…

When I was in middle school our school had an unfortunate naming convention for our school usernames that consisted of the first five letters of your last name followed by the first four letters of your first name. Naturally, my username was thus “DicksBra” and you can imagine how much fun we, being a group of 11-year-old boys had with that. Any time my username was required it was gleefully announced or entered to the tune of stifled laughter

Why does IT always get blamed? Employees always expect them to read minds, to predict the future… But they're humans with a lot on their plate, and they don't bow to snobby managers from various departments who are trying to cover for their incompetent employees. One such employee approached OP (who was working in IT) after she failed to receive emails. OP immediately began troubleshooting and found the problem relatively quickly. The issue was a rule that she had set up, and OP pointed her to…

IT people really have it hard out there. It is a genuine surprise how they manage to keep a civil conversation with people while having to fix their constant silly tech problems they could have fixed themselves in less them two minutes. Honestly, the term ‘Technophobic' has lost all meaning when you hear what people need help with. No ma'am, you are not technophobic, you are simply too lazy to learn. And why would you learn if all you have to do to fix your tiny problem is to call the IT person…

One IT employee resolved a huge financial issue for their company that left unchecked, would have resulted in fines amounting to millions. You would think that the employee would get rewarded, but remember, this is corporate we're talking about… Nobody ever gets rewarded for being a good worker. If anything, it's quite the opposite. Continue being a good little bolt in the machine, and you'll get some pizza. Gee, thanks, boss. People often blabber on about how 'Nobody wants to work these days',…

Don't store important files in your email. There, I said it. The chances of something happening and them all getting deleted are slim, but never zero. This advice applies even more so if you are working in a company with a mail retention policy. These employees were furious when they learned from the IT guy that every email that was older than 2 years was gone, permanently deleted, and irretrievable. They had some important financial documents that they wanted to check out again, but alas, ther…

Finding work is harder than it looks. We don't even begin to consider all the little details that go into our future careers when we apply for a job. like, off the top of my mind, a mandatory background check? In the story below, OP runs the risk of losing his job because his background check does not match the information he provided on his resume or in his interviews. However because he was forced to sign a confidentiality agreement with his prior employers, OP failed to disclose some of the…

People working in technical support have seen a lot of funny cases over the years, and this case is definitely one to remember for the IT manager involved. OP was working for a large pub company based in the UK, in which their chief role was second-in-line support for retail applications. One client opened a ticket after an engineer had come and checked the facilities of their establishment, only to send out a faulty report, leading to the website displaying a facility that the establishment cl…