Giving full credit for something to the person who "finishes" it is generally a poor idea, as it completely discounts other contributors' efforts. You see this with things like sales where the person to “finalize” the deal gets credit for the sale against their figures, regardless of whether or not they were the one to work on it originally. Really, absolute policies might be easy and cut and clean, but they create nightmares down the line whenever there are situations that aren't as black and…

The proverb “A bird in the hand is better than two in the bush” postulates that you're better off with what you have or are able to get now rather than what you might be able to get in the future. Reson being that While working for an emergency telecommunications company, this worker fell into the all-too-common trap of taking on additional work with the promise that it would eventually lead to more pay. Spoiler alert: It didn't. With the proverbial carrot dangling just in front of them indefin…

Sometimes you can't just tell people things—they won't listen. It takes actually experiencing the negative result that you were warning them about for them to admit they were wrong. Predictably, this happens all the time with unreasonable egotistical bosses who are eager to prove themselves… This developer, working for a financial services company, developed various tools and scripts to compensate for the company's other shortcomings, sometimes inadequate customer solutions. This saw them worki…

This employee worked in the contracts department of a major software company, which they refer to as “MidSoft Inc” Continual foolish decisions that thought of nothing but the bottom line and cost-cutting measures, driven by the ravenous interests of private equity investors, reduced the company's senior development team from 12 to one soldier, “Sam.” While the ledger might have looked better for a time, the immeasurable loss of institutional knowledge and literal lifetimes of experience would g…

It's common knowledge that you'll often never be appreciated for your job when things are going well—or even great. Your boss and employer assume your high performance is just a given and merit to their management rather than a credit to your own talent and efforts. But, as soon as something goes wrong, they won't blame themselves, even though that will make the most sense based on their logic. No, they'll suddenly come around asking questions, trying to figure out what went wrong, and looking…

When it's your job to ensure important information is protected, and someone insists that you delete it, even if it's the client themself, you'd be right to pause for a moment and reassess the situation if something doesn't sound quite right. Clients tend to woefully overestimate their abilities in the matter they're contracting you to handle, so they may be asking you to do something they don't fully understand the implications of. This tech support specialist worked for a small organization,…

Higher education is interesting in the sense that it can mean wildly different things because—well, people are wildly different themselves. We perceive, retain, and apply information completely differently from one another. No two people are the same. While holding an advanced degree can mean you're intelligent, it doesn't necessarily mean that, and it's usually the people who insist that they're better and smarter than everyone else because of their degree who fall into that “not necessarily”…

To work in IT, you need an elephant's skin. This person recounted their struggles as an IT admin at a tiny MSP… and it wasn't pretty. A former colleague of theirs, known for poor judgment, left behind a ticking time bomb: a client's infrastructure in shambles. The server ran an obsolete operating system, backups were faulty, and crucial data was stored on the same drive as the vulnerable OS. The client, averse to upgrades, exemplified the "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" mentality, even when p…

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…

People are always trying to get discounts. Wait, let me rephrase… Entitled people are always trying to get discounts. People who are bored, miserable, and like to play the underdog. Look, I don't see anything wrong with a discount, but I do see something wrong with the way folk tend to go about it. Instead of asking nicely, or speaking in a polite tone, they'll yell their heads off, be rude and condescending, and generally make the person on the other end feel awful. That's what this customer d…

If a printer goes up in flames, you might want to order a new one, dude. These were the exact thoughts of u/mattthepianoman who posted his funny workplace story to r/talesfromtechsupport. See, a printer had smoke coming out of it, and it was his job as a tech employee to report the issue to an IT contractor. This IT contractor had a few brain cells missing, and instead of doing something about it, he first asked the original poster to take him step by step through the diagnostics. What do diagn…

Some employees really go that extra mile when it comes to getting free stuff from their jobs. You know that one person who digs their hands into the office fridge and takes 7 items home… daily. So this woman gave off exactly that type of energy. This story was told by OP, who was working in IT, and the woman in question was his coworker. She had called up IT in hopes she would get a new laptop, as hers was ‘old’. IT refused her request, and she wasn't thrilled. But OP would never have expected…

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…

Some people have more confidence than they should, and this leads to lousy management, which in turn, leads to messes that can't always be cleaned up. One IT employee relayed the tale of the time his company shut down a client's entire server after they denied him access to the very equipment he needed in order to install the hardware for them… If you think that this is a counteractive move on their part, you would be right. The boss of the company that needed IT services was not the brightest…

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…