Worst Job: Aww, You Coulda Toasted Marshmellows! (08/31/01)
Back in school, I worked on a well-funded research project in superconductivity. One day, I got an associate -- in the form of everybody's least favorite, homework-grading Ph.D. student who I will call J. J was no slouch. For one, he had an extensive personal library that, to my surprise, contained the solutions to just about every homework problem I had been attempting on my own. However, J lacked "hands-on" experience, and that is why he was giving it a go in my lab.
"Hands on" to J meant taking apart each and every piece of delicate machinery and identifying problem parts. He once showed up at a meeting holding up some widget and decried, "This is not right!" One professor asked, "Where did you get it?" When J told him it came from the new, $75-thousand particle size analyzer, he was quickly instructed to put it back.
Of course, J took this as an affront to his emerging handyman persona. To counter this, he launched a six-month campaign to build his own version of a 480-V power supply to replace one that "was not right."
Finally, one day, "chitty-chitty-bang-bang" was rolled out -- attractive finish and all -- and professionally mounted on the center island equipment stand. Fortunately, I happened to be present for the "first electrons" ceremony, which consisted of J making up a 480-V plug with his bare hands. For his sake, it was fortunate that I was there to plant a firm kick on his leg, or he would probably have stood there jittering like a jackhammer until he burst into flames.
by Bob Cat
Worst Job: And Maybe a Case of Schlitz Beer to Go? (08/31/01)
When the liquor distributor I worked for got an AS/400 to replace its System/36, I got it set up and learned it over a couple months, while still working on the 36. My boss went on vacation for a week and told me to do the migration while he was gone: "Get it done before I come back." Right. This 400 lacked a diskette magazine drive, so I had to change the backup to tape. The boss told me he'd buy tapes when he got back, though I'd asked him for them weeks before.
I worked 90 hours the week he was gone, making necessary changes, copying source and data ON DISKETTES since the boss was too cheap to buy the $1,000 migration data link, recompiling over the weekend, testing and so on. Monday morning we were up and running. Yea! Half a million dollars worth of inventory on the trucks, and the whole state blissfully unaware that the Chivas Regal they ordered had traveled 20 extra feet on a floppy disk. The boss says nothing. I had hoped for a "nice job," maybe.
There were only three or four serious things I had to fix and lots of little things, from Monday through Thursday. Among them, we still couldn't backup the 600 MB on 2 MB floppies. Although he was back, the boss still didn't get me any tapes.
Friday morning, I get a call at home: "The system won't start..." "Try this... try that..." No luck, no help. I told the sysop to call IBM and get an engineer on site, and to have the order department start writing down orders instead of keying them.
Five days into production and the AS/400 disk array had a dead disk. Striped data, no parity was the OOB setup. For those unaware, this means you lose EVERYTHING. One drive dies, they all lose.
I told the IBM CE to grab another drive from an expansion unit we had been sent (that we had not ordered), swap the boards, just in case it was NOT a head crash. Instead, he said he had to order a new drive from Trenton. By 9 p.m. he had it, had swapped the boards and pronounced the drive dead. He then said, "Hey, you've got the same drives in the other box. I could've used one of those!ı Even though he had wasted 10 hours, I didn't kill him. His brother was a friend of mine.
So, itıs 9 p.m. Friday night and I decide to rebuild the "new" AS/400 from scratch. I call my data entry folks to work the weekend to key from hardcopy all the lost data: only about 10,000 invoices, 100,000 lines and 1.2 MB. Three keyers could do that easy. Ha ha ha ha. At least I had the old system backup from the week before.
On Saturday at 9 a.m. they started keying. I'd been up for 24 hours by then. I set up the keying method, wrote error-checking stuff and let 'em at it. Hey, did I mention that the "boss" had left at 5 p.m. Friday, not to be seen until Monday morn? Brave soul.
Over the weekend I recoded everything I'd done in the 90 hours the week before, PLUS the important fixes and all the little things from ıthisı week -- from MEMORY. Why would anyone keep paper notes on dozens of trivial fixes when my code is richly commented (lost, of course)? I recompiled, remigrated data ON FLOPPY, entered the keyed data and ran the new checks.
Kudos to my DE girls, we zeroed out all diffs by Monday at 7 a.m. -- zero cents on a million dollars. Like nothing ever happened! I then had sysop run the billing and print invoices. It all worked!
I was happy; the trucks rolled. I went home at noon on Monday. I had worked 75 hours between 9 a.m. Friday and noon Monday, plus 25 hours from Tuesday through Thursday -- a total of 100 hours for the week. No one said thank you, or well done; nothing.
My last act was telling HR that I had 60 hours of overtime coming.
by Bob Cat
Worst Job: Bad Stocks. Bad Heart. Bad Job...Bye-bye. (08/31/01)
As an official of a credit union that was 60 days into a mainframe software conversion that was going badly, I offered to the CEO to resign my volunteer position and to turn things around. The IS manager at that time couldn't handle anything beyond double-click setup.exe, and I am an IS pro with cross-platform experience. This site had a half-million-dollar host, batch production scheduler, JCL and a real-time transaction-processing network for ATMs -- and the current manager was looking for a job.
He left; I took it on and turned it around. During the sixth month, my 29-year-old assistant suffered a heart attack. I covered a 14-hour operations schedule single-handedly, in part, by dialing in from home. After the guy recovered, my boss told me that the board had met in closed session and ordered that no one should have dial-up access because of the potential for hacking attempts. He had no problem with possible TELNET access to the host through his own dial-up Internet connection, though. I guess he thinks hackers sit around dialing for login prompts nowadays, and no one port scans dial-up Internet connections.
This same financial wizard asked me about investing a couple thousand dollars in a faxed-in stock pitch he received. I explained to him that a company with a five-cent stock price and seven million outstanding shares was only worth $350,000 and that I didn't recommend giving them any money. They projected a 2,500 percent annual return for each of the next five years, so this guy thought he might risk a couple thousand anyway. He got real perturbed when I pointed out that the market cap of that company would end up being several times larger than the United States revenue budget in five years and that that was an overly aggressive growth plan for any company, in my mind.
I didn't last very much longer after that. He offered me a termination letter, or I could sign a resignation letter he had prepared. It looked like a fifth grader had typed it, so I took the termination and walked out grinning about them relying on one guy with a bad heart who can't remember his own password.
by Mike Mullins
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Worst Job: They put the "Con" in Consulting (08/21/01)
I thought the pasture was greener on the other side. So I left my cushie 9-to-5 networking job and took my skills headlong into the consulting world.
I was surprised when the company I went to work for turned out to be a bunch of cronies who had formed a close-knit circle. I was the Novell Field Service Technician, and the company I worked for charged $125 per hour for my services. Little did I know at the time that the circle of friends got most of the money off my skills. (Kind of like an NFL team owner.)
Businesses were paying for my services, but the cronies were raking in all the dough. So it was back to the cushie 9-to-5 networking job for me.
by Consultant-NOT!
Worst Job: Then He Dropped and Gave'em 20 (08/21/01)
Some readers won't be able to relate, but I dropped the ball. In the Army in 1969, I had just joined a data-processing unit in Germany. I was the Lieutenant (the boss), but I thought I'd go in on the late shift to meet the staff. I offered to help, and they took me up on the offer.
We were sorting punched cards. To sort a social-security number, you had to pass the cards through a sorter nine times. Well, I did just fine up to the seventh column. Just as I had the deck (2,500 cards -- about a foot of them) in hand for the next pass, I banged my elbow on the sorter rack and the whole deck went flying. I did stay (very) late to fix the problem, but I never got invited back.
by anonymous
Worst Job: What, No Tartar Sauce? (08/21/01)
About two or three years ago, I worked for a company of 4,000 PCs. Our supervisor spent hours canvassing the Internet for the best deals on PCs. He bought two models here and three models there, resulting in helpdesk having to support dozens of kinds of PCs. You never knew what he would order.
Our favorite story was the time we got some rather musty smelling PCs. The supervisor indicated it was the best price he had ever gotten for so many PCs. Everything would be okay, he said. Just spray them with Lysol. I opened one and found the bones of a fish. It was obvious these machines had been in a flood.
by Ann in Akron
First Job: Under the Boardwalk...Down by the PC (08/21/01)
It was my first job after graduating with a double major in Computer Information Systems and Business Administration. After getting some on the job training doing systems support, I was given my first project. I was responsible for expanding our network of Lee Data terminals by 50. The bad part was all 50 terminals were old terminals that had been in storage for the last three years. When they arrived, it appeared as if they were in storage under the boardwalk at the Jersey shore. I spent 12-hour days cleaning the monitors and logic stations, but the worst part was the keyboards. On every keyboard, I had to remove each key, scrub the keys clean and then put the keyboard back together.
by anonymous
Worst Job: Good Thing She Didn't Sneeze (08/21/01)
My worst on the job experience was when I was a VSE operator working second shift.
I had called the police department because I had seen a person living in the dumpster of the neighboring building. Several hours later, I went to "lunch" at 9pm and returned well fed, relaxed and ready for the rest of the shift.
I parked my car in its usual place and walked around the building to enter through the back door, which was my normal habit. As I rounded the corner, I was face-to-face with a female police officer whom I spooked, and found my self looking down the barrel of her service pistol.
Needless to say, my drink and a magazine, which had previously been in my hand, were on the ground and my hands were in the air.
She of course wanted to know who I was, etc., and we laughed about it once both of us calmed down. It was probably the worst night I ever spent on second shift in my life.
by anonymous
Worst Job: Like They Needed More Hot Air (08/21/01)
The new CEO of a company was standing in the data center imparting his wisdom upon the IS staff. He was discussing how the recent implementation of an ERP system was all wrong. He pointed at some equipment and said, with confidence, that what we needed to do as a company was to get rid of that AS400 and put in a bunch of distributed Sun systems to run the business. He was pointing at the air-conditioning unit.
by anonymous
Worst Job: All These Stories Should End With a Wedding (08/21/01)
We originally migrated our 1,800 workstations and 30-plus Novell NetWare 3.12 servers to Novell Intranetware 4.0/4.11. We started with a poor initial design. But with major pruning and grafting, it became more workable over time. Then, after a year of troubles as NDS slowly became more mature, we migrated to NetWare 5.0 hoping it would stabilize and our outages would stop. Not long after the migration, however, the NDS problems came to a head with a total lockup of the database -- no one could login or print for over a week. We brought in a Novell Consulting team member, who tried to find the problem, but no fix came of it. I could smell the boiling tar in a kettle in the parking lot, and several formerly friendly customer service reps were seen carrying feather pillows in to work.
The answer came: Stop trying to fix our NDS database. It had deep internal problems from the extreme design changes undertaken, combined with NDS growing pains! So we printed out key! details, took all of the servers out of the Tree, deleted the Tree completely (years of work) and then created a new Tree as well as all workstations, servers, printers and other objects.
The new NDS worked like a champ, but it cost our network and the security teams a 26-hour-straight shift over a weekend to create it from scratch. Nothing since then has seemed like a problem by comparison. And, one member of our networking team ended up marrying a young lady from the customer service department!
by anonymous
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Worst Job: Bet The Overtime Didn't Suck, Though (08/21/01)
This should qualify as a "horror" story, since it was that kind of an experience for us. We had just installed our first X.25 circuit in our firm's headquarters, high up in a modern skyscraper. However, the line was constantly dropping or corrupting data. We spent months trouble-shooting the problem, isolating every piece of equipment in the network, swapping out circuit boards and cables, studying pinning and programming, etc., all to no avail.
Eventually, I realized that the problems were occurring only in windy conditions, during which our building sways. Refocusing our attention on the physical aspects of the problem, we looked for loose connections that could be affected by building movement. We didn't find any, but we did discover in the process that we could cause the problem by twisting the SmartJack to which the data line was connected. Further examination revealed that the metal frame of the SmartJack was attached to the wall with a drywall screw that, with very little movement, could make contact with a metal stud in the wall, grounding the frame of the SmartJack and bringing down the line. The solution to months of communications failures was to simply move the SmartJack about a quarter of an inch further from the stud.
by anonymous
Worst Job: Wonder If He Installed the SmartJack Above? (08/21/01)
Another caveat -- don't take your electricians for granted! We had a major electrical contractor do an expansion of our computer room. After the expansion, we experienced regular problems with two mainframes; they crashed on a regular basis. No amount of hardware or software diagnostics turned up any reason for the problems. As a last resort we called in an electrical engineer to monitor our electrical service.
After months of testing, we determined that the electrician installing the circuits to the mainframes took a shortcut, for whatever reason, and used a single neutral wire for both CPU circuits. In addition, when the isolation transformer that supplies the computer room circuits was installed, the electrician broke out the grounding conductor from the conduit containing the phase and neutral conductors and connected it to a ground bus on the building steel column, rather than running the grounding connector in the same conduit as the phase and neutral connectors to the transformer cabinet and attaching it to the grounding lug in the cabinet.
This error (and NEC violation!) caused impulse disturbances as high as 400 volts between line and neutral and between neutral and ground, causing all sorts of equipment malfunctions and component failures. The moral of the story is to always have a qualified person inspect new cabling before use, no matter who has installed it.
by anonymous
Worst Job: But at Least The Computers Were Moth-Free (08/21/01)
Before working in IT, I was a hobbyist who had resolved never to work with computers for a living. Iıd heard that people got burned out, and I didn't want to reach that point -- I liked computers and had for 15 years. So, after college I drove nails for 10 years.
My first IT job was when I moved to a new town with little construction. The job was managing an old minicomputer jammed into a disused closet with a window swamp cooler, two 80-MB washing machines, a tape drive and a 600 LPM printer. That printer decidedly had no place in a 'data centre.' The secretaries/operators chain smoked -- in the 'computer room' no less -- and wouldn't listen to me when I told them to cease and desist. The boss wouldn't buy air filters for the drives; he claimed to have recently washed them, so why buy new? I explained that those were strainers to keep out moths. The filters were internal, had a two-month life expectancy and were four years(!) old, but he shrugged it off.
Needless to say, head crashes were a very common occurrence as were tape errors and concomitant downtime. After two months on the job, the boss started docking my pay for the repairs because I was "failing to properly maintain the hardware." I began to understand why my predecessor had left in such a hurry.
In my life I have quit only one job without giving notice; that was 12 years ago, and I still shudder at the memory.
by Russ Bixby
First Job: Eeewwwww! (08/15/01)
My first job was working for my best friend's father's business -- pumping poop out of those plastic porta-potties. We delivered them all over the state, flushed them out and cleaned them periodically. Needless to say, VERY dirty work. But the pay was great, and we had a lot of fun driving all over, making the best of the situation.
Anyhow -- and I didn't actually see incident this firsthand -- my friend's brother was at a jobsite at the local copper mine. One worker in particular started calling him names, joking around, calling him "s**t-pumper!" and other things of that nature. He calmly finished his job and then walked to the top of the truck, all the while listening to this worker's charming comments, attempting to make fun of him. He loosened the venting valve at the top of the truck's container tank and then walked back down to grab the hose.
He opened the valve on the hose and aimed the stream of poopie straight at the worker! The pressure was so great, it knocked him flat on his butt and covered him in all sorts of foul stuff. My friend's brother then wrapped the hose up quickly, jumped in the truck and hauled butt away from the construction site. I don't think that worker ever made fun of that job again, and it gave me motivation to go to college and get a technical degree. And, I now have a great appreciation for sitting in an air-conditioned office instead of doing this stuff for a living.
Hope you enjoyed the story.
by Sam Torrez
Worst Job: Ethics? In the Workplace? Never. (08/15/01)
I had just completed my MCSE to compliment my BS in Management and Ethics, and my first job in the IT field was as a system administrator. I was hired by the local branch of a national company and had one "helper" reporting to me. We split the busy, 7X24 on-call beeper a week at a time.
The first month was spent filling out numerous requisition forms to buy software licenses; the company only had one copy of everything that went on about 150 workstations. All of these requests were turned down, but at least I had the requests to protect myself.
I had been there about six weeks when the branch manager asked me to make some changes to the billing database. I asked for the reasons behind the change, but never received a satisfactory answer. The changes, it turned out, would allow the company to charge customers more each month without their knowledge that something was up. I politely refused, reminding my boss that I had a degree in ethics.
Three days later my helper was reassigned to other duties. I now had all the call duties as well as everything relating to IT. I asked when her replacement would be hired and was told sometime after the first of the year, which was four months away! I started looking for my next job the same day.
by Randy Fish
Worst Job: A CEO's Best Friend is His Mother (08/15/01)
I arrived fifteen minutes before my start time at a small manufacturing company located in northern Wisconsin. I was excited to start my new network-engineering position.
My boss met me at the door and took me immediately to my cubicle while engaging in small talk. "Here it is," he stated in a hurried tone. "You'll have to move the boxes out of here, here's your computer... and it's broke, and you need to look at a network problem that I don't have time to look at."
My boss didn't even take time to introduce me to the rest of the staff, provide me a working PC, show me where the computer room was or even show me where the rest rooms were located!
Shortly thereafter I was approached by the CEO's mother (yes, mother), who read me the "riot act" on how much it costs the company in insurance for my "special shoes." I guess she has never seen an ordinary pair of $50 basketball shoes before.
I felt embraced in the warmth of team empowerment.
by Anonymous
Worst Job: Bob's Big, Bad Boss-Lady (08/15/01)
My last job was mostly helpdesk, but we were required to support the staff PCs and the client databases. We were also required to answer the receptionist's phone when it rang. Our department took 300 to 600 calls per month.
If the phone rang, the boss lady would bellow out of her office "answer the phone," without checking to see if anyone was free to do so. She would constantly come out of her office screaming at anyone in the department. It did not matter if clients were in the office or we were on the phone, she yelled at anytime and often.
She hated men and tormented every man, saying a woman could do it better. She also said she wanted all women in the tech department. To get rid of staff, she would cut you down abusively in front of the entire staff. She would tell you that your attitude and motivation was poor and that the entire staff had a low opinion of you; all things to destroy your self confidence, which in turn destroys your attitude and motivation, so she can belittle you more about the same things.
I finally had enough and found another job with a huge increase in pay. I gave the customary two-weeks notice and got fired the next day without the full two-week compensation.
I'm very glad I'm away from that abusive and unprofessional working environment, and I'm currently taking action against my former boss for denying my pay. The entire department is looking for better employment and, with my experience, they will give no notice -- just quit.
We had a contest as to who would leave first, and I won!
by Bob
Worst Job: Was the Cup at Least Filled? (08/09/01)
I was working with a couple of people, sharing the administration of a Novell network with the troubleshooting of PCs, when I was called down to look at a system that wasn't getting connected to the network. What I discovered was a trojan horse login executable that would capture a user name and password in a hidden text file and pipe it to the server for logging in. The creator of this trojan horse had experimented with network broadcasting, and his code wasn't up-to-par with this version.
Through auditing and observation we were able to bust the culprit -- a fellow employee. But when it came time to confront him, our managers would have no part of it. Instead, they made me do it. It was very uncomfortable looking in this guy's eyes as I explained why he was being terminated.
My team spent over 100 hours tracking down and proving the identity of the hacker. For this trouble -- in addition to the aforementioned confrontation with a person who had just moved into my neighborhood and who I would see everywhere I went -- I got a coffee cup.
by Anonymous
Worst Job: Trying to Remain Civil (08/09/01)
With a degree in Finance and a background in Accounting, most of my jobs migrated to the techie side. I finally decided to take some classes to augment my on-the-job experience, with hopes of changing careers. I began applying for entry level IS jobs and landed one in local government. I was hired into a department with one manager and one coworker. The network, although relatively small, was a mixture of mainframe and client/server stations. A lot of this was very new to me, and it would provide me with a great learning experience in many things.
Within two months of being hired, my only coworker took a better job (pay, benefits, environment). I was devastated! Things went from bad to worse. Within another two months, the manager accepted a better job as well. I spent the following four months practically alone trying to figure out the unique configurations of each desktop and server, answer all trouble calls, manage the network and stay sane. Eventually, I was able to get one other worker hired. If I could have had another job lined up, I would have been gone immediately.
by A Civil Servant
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Worst Job: Satan's Minion (08/08/01)
My employer, Company A, lost its vice president of IT because of a "failure
to promote her in a timely fashion." That left Employee X, who we'll call
Satan's Minion and who I never got along with very well in the first place,
in charge. He had a tendency to be a complete idiot.
After a couple weeks of working along fine, the fact that Employee X was
Satan's Little Helper began to show. We started to disagree about the
operation of the network and how it should be set up. Being in charge now,
Satan's Minion quickly overruled me.
Then, about two months after the departure of the saintly former VP of IT,
and much to the soon-to-be fear and dismay of the rest of the company, the
president hired Employee Mephistopheles. We'll just call him Satan. Well,
Satan came rolling in at CTO and immediately started issuing orders and
making claims.
Satan took no time to get to know anyone or anything. He immediately
isolated himself behind Satan's Minion and gave instructions to dispose of
the Novell servers and 3Com equipment. Windows NT, with its outstanding
domain structure, was to replace NDS. Cisco was to replace our aging, but
functional 3Com equipment. No cost evaluations, studies or plans. Just out
with the dowdy, old functional network and in with a half-baked sack of
bugs. The aging, but functional cc:Mail system used at 25 branches plus
corporate was replaced with a single Exchange server that everyone accessed
with POP3.
Amidst all this was the clamor of users, saying that they could no longer do
"this, that or the other thing," as well as the voice of our intrepid
adventurer -- that's me -- shouting loud and clear from the mountaintops:
"This is stupid. We are breaking our network."
Thus was our gallant knight -- that*s me again -- "downsized."
On his way out the door, literally, our hero -- still me -- paid a visit to
the president's office. He ended up in there for the better part of an hour
explaining the near future of the company's IT department. He prophesized
that the unqualified, incompetent, used-car salesman that the company hired
as CTO would not remain with the firm for more than a year, that being the
amount of time Satan could go before being required to actually say
something besides "Microsoft" and "Cisco." But in that time, Satan would
cause a complete upheaval in the network that would bring users to their
knees, begging for his head on a spike. Our knight foretold of the company*s
still not having a Web site within that time -- something Satan was
specifically hired to accomplish -- and of all the "old" IT people departing
in disgust.
Nine months later, the wise old profit -- still me -- discovered that all
his quatrains had come to pass and that not only had Satan left, but Satan's
Minion and his lesser demon went with him. The lesser demon being a network
supervisor whose proboscis collided with Satan's colon.
Within those nine months, only about six of the original 20-or-so people
were left. Within a year, there were only three, which at last check -- now
more than two years later -- is still the case. The company finally got a
Web site going a little more than a year later. An employment agency later
confirmed that not only was the original IT team gone, but the replacement
team brought in by Satan had also departed.
So much for an IT department that won the annual companywide, gold star,
Brownie button two years in a row. Thanks executive managers. Keep up the
good work.
And thus, to this day, our Soldier of Righteousness -- also me * says, "-0=
Company A, Satan and all his little minions."
by D'Amage
First Job: Life Lessons from a Lamb (08/08/01)
My first job started when I was 10 years old. I worked at my dad's summer store, Lamb's General Store, in an upscale beach community. The job was varied, including cashiering, stocking and so on, definitely multitasking. This job continued each summer through college, and I saved a great deal of money for college doing it. I also learned some valuable life lessons:
- People are basically the same, no matter what their background or circumstances.
- Do your best, no matter what you're doing.
- Try to maintain a cheerful outlook.
by Laurie Lamb
Worst Job: A Lesson Learned (07/31/01)
I was working as an IT instructor at a private school and was also the network administrator during nonclass hours for an extra $75 per week. However, the course wasn't approved until one day after I was hired, when I was told that the school had been offering that class for five years at its other two locations. My school didn't have the hardware, software or network to support the course for which it charged $10,000 in tuition.
While trying to create the course as I taught it, I was also supposed keep up the network, which was -- as I found out -- improperly wired by two students on a work term. As a result, there was constant congestion, and I was constantly hauled out of class by the principle and/or the owner so that they could "get their e-mail" or go on the network. This was minor; the room in which I was assigned to teach a networking course WASN'T NETWORKED. I had to run the cable through the ceiling myself, using the students for labor. And, upon orders from the owner, violate the fire code while doing the wiring job. To top it off, I was supposed to study for my own additional certifications to complete teaching the course while creating the course, while grading the students, while doing a full-time job as an administrator. Did I mention they were using Windows 95a on 75 Compaq 486-DX2 machines with 16 Mg of RAM and 10 Mb Ethernet cards? No? Of course it was from a floppy; the school had only one copy. All the software being used was unlicensed, so it took 30 minutes to do even small changes to one machine. Total hours per week doing this job amounted to 90 plus for less than $30,000 per year.
I quit when the owner bought plastic "workgroup" switches for the backbone of the network and wanted to move the computer labs to the other end of the building and down a floor -- during school hours!
By Shaun Driscoll
Worst Job: I'm a Lumberjack, and I'm (NOT) Okay... (07/31/01)
My worst boss at one point asked me to come along with him as he said he had a job for me. Being in the IS department, I assumed a client had a computer problem, and my boss was bringing me along to help fix it.
Imagine my surprise when he pulled into the local lumberyard and ordered a bunch of green treated lumber. He then pulled into the yard, made me load all the lumber into his SUV, drove home and made me unload it all. He supposedly had a bad back, so he couldn't help me. I guess he was using the wood to build a dog kennel.
The worst part was that this was on company time, and the company had a dress code of a suit and tie. Needless to say, after loading and unloading green treated lumber my suit was in less-than-perfect condition.
You ask, why didn't you tell him where to put his lumber? This was during the 1980s in a small, northern Minnesota town; there weren't too many job opportunities for a computer programmer just starting out. It was either work there, the only place in town that had programmers in my area of expertise, or try to find a job in the Twin Cities at a time when a glut of experienced programmers was on the market because of layoffs at Honeywell, Unisys and Control Data.
By Anonymous
Worst Job 1: Whaddya Mean There's Only 24 Hours In a Day? (07/31/01)
On a Friday evening last month our only Web-server crashed. Yes, we only have one: No redundancy and no backup. I inherited this problem when I got the job as System Administrator. I spent four hours getting it back up. It crashed on Saturday every 20 to 30 minutes. I worked 18 hours getting it stabilized. On Sunday I worked 15 hours monitoring and tweaking it. I spent a total of 37 hours on a weekend I was supposed to go out-of-town with my girlfriend.
The following Monday the boss decided that we should replace the old server. I spent an average of 15 hours a day from that day through Thursday setting it up and configuring it to replicate all the functionality and Web sites we are currently hosting. Basically, I worked 60 hours in four days, for a total of 97 hours over a seven-day period.
On Friday morning of the same week I got an e-mail from my boss. It had been sent not only to me, but to my co-workers, our ISP provider and several important contacts. The message said that the new server was not to be made "live," that the new server was not configured correctly, that my judgement was not to be trusted and that the Web guru was in charge of getting the new server up and running. I am still looking for a new job.
Worst Job 2: Clustered and Blustered
I am an A+, CCNA and MCSE working for an ISP, which I believe the boss thinks stands for Internet Super Power because he tries to be all things to all people. We are supposed to develop/host Web sites and provide Internet access. Yet the boss keeps taking on quotes for jobs that require setting up on-site Web servers, SQL database servers and Microsoft server clusters as well as installing PC software.
The last quote he had me work on was a four-server cluster: two Web servers running a front-end with two SQL servers sharing a database. I did a full cost analysis of the hardware and software, only to have my boss tell me that we can do it cheaper -- we only need three servers. We keep the same copy of SQL server on all the boxes, but we only use one. We set up clustering so that all the boxes will take HTTP calls, but only the first one will use SQL. That way, we only have to buy one SQL license, and if the box fails, one of the others will take over the SQL database. Needless to say, I'm waiting to see what happens if we get the bid.
All this knowledge and wisdom from a nontech person who less than a week ago couldn't understand the difference between a hard-disk cluster (RAID 5) and a server cluster (Microsoft Cluster Service).
By Rick Shaw
Worst Job: Certifiably Insane! (07/31/01)
I interviewed for a job I wasn't sure I wanted, so I referred it to a friend of mine. The bottom line was that he got the job because the interviewer "liked his personality" better. At any rate, after a few months, they also wanted to hire me. Of course, they offered me $5 thousand less than my friend, even though I have the same certification and am a certified instructor; he isn't. I refused, and ended up taking the job for $1 thousand less.
If that wasn't bad enough, we worked on a technical support helpdesk for field technicians who would call in to have us walk them through the most basic troubleshooting steps because they were too lazy to carry their manuals from the truck.
Our normal strength was about 10 people, but people were always pulled to travel out of town on special projects. So, quite often, there were only two or three people left. Naturally, we had to be available 24/7 on a weekly rotation.
The worst thing was that the sales staff would sell our services as being totally up-to-date and certified in EVERYTHING. Several times they brought in new contracts for maintenance or other work on equipment nobody had ever seen and, in many cases, had never even heard of. Even though we requested training or at least some documentation on the equipment, it was always refused. We were told to "just do it."
Needless to say, after a little more than a year of that, I told them where to shove it and left for another position.
By Anonymous
Worst Job: Coding That'll Blow You Away (07/31/01)
When I was 25 I started a job at what I thought was a very professional company. My boss used to read dirty magazines at his desk, even after I asked him not to. On a nice summer day he left in the middle of a large production problem -- a vendor was taking him golfing. He had caused the problem by putting something in production, not testing it correctly and not telling anyone.
One of my major assignments was to rewrite/cleanup a lot of code written by three other people -- two had already left the company, but one was still in the group. I repeatedly asked my boss to explain to the third guy that I was told to clean up his code as part of my job, but he wouldn't. For three months I had to endure this third guy screaming at me that I didn't have any right to touch this code, that I didn't know what I was doing and so on. Still my boss wouldn't step in. After the project was done, the boss admitted that he was afraid that this third guy wasn't right in the head. He was afraid that this guy might come in with a gun one day, and he didn't want to be the target! What a sweetie!
By Anonymous
Worst Job: Stop the World (Bank), I Wanna Get Off! (07/31/01)
I was hired on a contract to provide helpdesk services to the World Bank. I showed up for work and spent 45 minutes waiting in the lobby for someone to respond to security's request to have someone let me in. I finally got escorted in. When I got to the helpdesk area, it was total bedlam. People were running around hollering in various foreign languages. Someone ripped off a printout of trouble calls, handed it to me and said, "Here, fix these!" So off I wander down the hallway, wondering where everything is and how the company has things set up. During the brief time I was there, I never had a desk, e-mail or anything, and yet they expected me to know their network inside and out from day one.
One particular day I worked real hard to clear as many trouble calls as I could. After each one I cleared, I checked it off in the system as being completed by myself. The next morning the manager called me in and read me the riot act. She did a search on the system, and it showed her that I had done no work whatsoever the previous day. WTF? She had wanted me to first transfer the calls to my own queue and THEN check them off as being done. Since I only signed off on them while they were in the main queue, as far as she was concerned, I had done no work.
By Anonymous
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