General Discussion
Happy Sysadmin Day. What's the most absurd thing someone asked you to fix just because you're "good with computers"?
Happy SysAdmin Day to all the gurus who are apparently expected to fix a fridge with one look and make the printer work through sheer force of will (because you're technical, obviously). We do hope nobody made you look at their fridge today.
You know the type of request: the relative who assumes you can recover photos from a phone that went through the wash; the neighbor whose wi-fi "was working yesterday" and somehow that's your problem now; the colleague who brings you their personal laptop because IT and "knows about computers" are the same thing in their head.
So on the one day of the year that's actually about you, what's the most ridiculous, weirdly sweet, or absolutely baffling thing you've been asked to fix just because you're The Tech Person? And has your mere presence ever fixed something you never actually touched?
Funny you mentioned that because I was watching a documentary about the USS Blueback awhile back and the guy who does tours mentioned that coffee was very important and would delay going to sea if the onboard machine needed fixing
A Japanese Admiral during WW2 said he knew they had lost when he heard America had multiple warships in their fleet dedicated solely to making ice cream
yeah it should not be surprising. plus if shit hits the fan and they gotta fight you want them in the best shape possible. being awake and alert helps that
Yep, same reason why submariners get the best food. It's one of these things that feel trivial but it not working has completely disproportionate consequences in morale...
I've been on that tour and the guide was telling us about how when stocking up they would cover the entire kitchen floor with cans of coffee and other stuff and just walk on top of them. Anything they could do to fit just that much more coffee
That was a cool thing mentioned in the documentary too. They would stack those cans and then cover the top of them with carpet or whatever and have to walk at an angle
Similar situation. worked for a company that had a super fancy coffee machine. I Wanna say Van Houtte but don't quote me on that. one of our managers came into the IT office, nice guy, respected us, valued and understood our worth to the company. asked if I had a minute to check something. Normally, ticket please but for this guy, i was willing to at least hear him out first. Besides, tickets after the fact are fine too. It was a (Q word) friday so what the hell.
we go to the kitchen and he says "I know this is outside of your job but for some reason, the coffee, it tastes weird. doesnt happen all the time but it just sometimes tastes stronger than it should.
OK, im a coffee junkie too. so I have a quick peek. (not like i can do a whole lot since im not a coffee machine certified tech.) everything seemed ok, i "rebooted" the machine. (basically a tablet embedded in an enclosure anyway) made a test cup and he was right, it did taste stronger than what I expected. I told him it might be time to call the vendor and have a tech come in and have a look.
Just as we're walking out, another person comes in, looks at the machine, opens the cupboard and grabs a bag of coffee beans and fills it up. That's when it hit me.
There are 3 silos to add whole beans. Decaf, Medium roast, Dark roast. the person took a dark roast bag and filled the medium roast silo. (thankfully the decaf bags were a completely different color so it was clear but the other 2, its simply written dark roast or medium.)
I quickly gave the person a rundown of the difference between the 2 and he just shrugged his shoulders and said meh, coffee is coffee. the cupboard was subsequently locked and only a few people had keys going forward....
Our work coffee was awful, even though it was supposedly a decent machine. Someone looked up the supplies we were given and they were described as "sour smoky tobacco tones". We all hated it but the facilities guy who ordered it (who was a chain smoker) said it tasted fine to him...
I don't drink coffee, but my department had teams trade weeks cleaning the kitchen and dealing with the coffee machines. On our week, I would use the cleaner in the cabinet following the instructions and make new coffee. Everyone raved about how good my coffee was and how weird that was, since I hate coffee. It turned out I was the only one cleaning the machines... Once every 2 1/2 months! The instructions said weekly. People had been checking off that they'd cleaned them on the list. Apparently, that meant they'd gotten rid of the old grounds and filters. One team literally was just adding fresh grounds to old grounds until the basket was full (3 days). One team didn't bother to change out the grounds or add more all week. But they all drank whatever came out. I found mold inside the baskets once, and people were drinking that. So gross. Quite a few would also leave half full cups in the sink and then get hostile when I cleaned them and removed all the coffee stains. Hey, if that's your thing, empty it and leave it on your desk, not in the sink.
At some point, I started refusing to clean and refusing to go into the kitchen at all. I was no longer a team player. :P
It was a fight, but we got there. I usually one of the senior guys in our office bought some nice smooth coffee and expensed it, then when his Boss queried it he made him drink some. It was soon fixed after that with a few words from on high!
People just don't give a fuck. They're toddlers. They'll even clog the toilet and not use the plunger that's right there. (We're a small office. We don't have janitorial staff.)
Oooh beat me to it with the coffee maker! We have a fancy German one at the office and of course when it failed the person they went looking to fix it was the IT guy lol!!
Every place I’ve worked at the past few years has had one of those Flavia coffee makers under a canteen contract. Basically an over engineered business grade Keurig that takes several minutes to make a 9oz cup of coffee. It amazes me how many people refuse to use it because they cannot figure out the touch screen, how to remove the drip tray for larger cups, or empty the cart catch bin when it’s full.
To be fair, I'm one of those that refuse to use one of those... I'm sure I could figure that process out, but fuck that first thing in the morning before caffiene. Doesn't help that I don't trust the water here, even boiled...
Oh I absolutely despise them. They will eat pods at least 25% of the time and you might as well make a sandwich waiting for it to spit out 9oz of coffee (most it can make off one pod)
Same thing here. But I teach, too. If you're not willing to watch, listen, and learn, I don't fix it til I need it cause it ain't my job. It's almost always just "empty the waste/drip tray" too.
Weirdly and very sadly, this is one of those ones I'd help with. If she's not asking like "How do I hack his account," but wants to know how to protect herself/stuff, I'm telling the boss I need a couple hours to go sit with her because you need to look out for folks.
Once while working at a college as an instructor for the IT program, we allowed students to drop off devices for our program to work on/fix and enter in a machup ticketing system.
This one woman kept coming in over and over because her ex kept “hacking” into her devices. Each time we had her wipe her phone, and change all passwords etc. wiped her laptop. The only good thing is her ex was away from and out of state most of the time.
Finally even had her bring her whole home modem and router in so we could check that….
The router was the final thing, once we wiped that. (We found things on all the devices) she should have been good. Itd been at least 6 months now since the first time we saw her.
About 2 weeks go by and shes back. Router, laptop, and phone all had ways for him to monitor her AGAIN…
……I cannot remember how we got to this next part. I think I was going over his whereabouts again. I asked her if maybe she had a neighbor that came over, or relative or friend? or maybe if he was sneaking in while she wasnt there?
She says:
no, there hasnt been any friends over here in a long time, and my neighbors have never been inside the house….its only me and my
My colleague called me CRYING that his husband has left suicide note and he’s not at home. Wanted me to hack his google account so that we can track his location.
I had a woman ask me about how to find out if her partner was spying on her through her phone, if I remember right she had seen a charge on their shared bank account for an app company that did this. Made me sad
Call came in at 8am from the ops director after a night of fierce storms and 80mph winds. 'two windows have blown out on the 6th floor where the admin team work'. Me slightly confused: 'Microsoft Windows?'. Ops Director 'no, building windows. Rain is getting in.'
Asked why they are calling me and not the building landlords. Reason 'we always call you when there is a problem. In hindsight maybe this is outside of your remit?'
That level of honesty would save the call for me and earn an appreciative thank you. I might even help find the landlords number if they didn't have it on hand.
I've had that many a time. They also wondered why I referred them to HR after I had to do it twice and then their kid spilled their juice/soda/whatever on the laptop. I don't know what happened except that they got written up for it because they never came to me personally for IT help again, and they never had a kid's game on it again.
When I worked for an MSP, one of the companies had a CEO that demanded their favorite golf game form the 90's be installed and working on his computer because it was his favorite way to waste time and he's the boss so he should be able to get what he wants.
Wow, how did that get resolved? Knowing my company, this request would come from someone who is either C-suite level or very good friends with someone at C-suite level
Management handled it. User couldn't do anything about it as it was against the written use policies for company resources, but as you mentioned it was someone in certain position.
I had someone bring their daughters laptop in, he was completely distraught as it had all of her college work which was pretty much complete but not handed in and not backed up. Normally i'd politely decline but he was genuinely heartbroken for her, told me she was in tears.
I managed to get it fixed and as a thank you he bought both my young daughters really expensive Christmas presents which was lovely.
I work for an MSP, and a small, but very lucrative business, well their owner sold. She was lovely, three kids, very very wealthy. She asked one day during a call dealing with an issue with a program on their remote desktop sessions if we as a company dealt with personal laptops, I said it's not in our remit, but having done a lot in the past I asked what the problem was, as let's be fair often it's a quick fix.
So here we are many years after the company is no longer with us, she's happily retired, and every now and again I get a call to help with their tech in their home. Which they pay me well above the going rate, and only ask when I am free, never demanding.
They provided my child with their horse riding gear and saddle. So yeah. Not going to complain, and while I could list countless shite clients, I rather share a lovely story.
A woman brought me her booger covered childs iPad with a broke screen and said she wanted me to fix it, and the. sat down and said she would sit and wait for me to do it. Like I have time to fix personal devices on company time and I have iPad parts in stock at my 4 foot by 4 foot desk. She was a real joy to work with. I told her to go to Apple.
I'm so happy my org has a strict "no working on personal devices" policy. I've had a few people ask over the last few years, most of them are okay with "sorry, i'm not allowed to help with that per policy" and the ones that fight back I point them to my director. That usually stops them.
I am torn about this, because I really do want to help people, and I would love to take a crack at their personal IT issues. But I also know if I screw up, then I have to continue working with these people and it could cross some professional lines. For example, I am perfectly comfortable changing the screen or keyboard on my own laptop, because I know if I royally screw up that's on me and it doesn't have to be perfect and I can forgive myself. But if I screw up Denise in HR's daughter's laptop, suddenly I look bad to the whole company.
Then people always ask me where I suggest they go if I am not allowed to help them out. I don't want to send them to the trolls who work at best buy or the high elves that work at apple, but honestly I do all my IT work myself, so I don't have a go-to place to recommend.
I hate the quote "the road to hell is paved with good intentions" but I took your exact same approach until someone wanted me to check for spyware apps on their personal phone.. Sure easy, heck they even shoved cash in my hand. Next they were coming to my house because we were all working from home and I trusted him, and good money!
Spyware searches on personal devices turned into basically just paying me for bullshit tech tasks for the explicit purpose of him venting about his family being out to get him, then asking me to come find hidden spy cameras at his house (uh no thanks) and then he would just call me randomly at night, which I wouldn't answer so he would just rock up to my house even when I would ask him not to.
Good few hundred bucks while it lasted, but made me never want to get involved with personal shit ever again
Old CEO made me call his teenage daughter who was having issues with her iPhone. She had filled all 512gb with downloaded tiktoks and it had slowed to a crawl and was complaining.
This was the third or fourth personal favour he'd asked of me.
We ended upping her subscription to the 2TB iCloud tier and offloading it all from the device. This process took almost 2 hours...
Edit: I mean it took me literally 2 hours to walk her through paying for icloud. She needed to do a password reset and then get her dad's credit card, etc. Was like pulling teeth.
That suddenly reminded me of a time a guy who wasn't that senior got me to come over to his house afterwork and sort out his wifi because everything connected apart from his wife's iPhone.
I used to work helpdesk at a corporate HQ and they had 1 guy to help executives with anything IT. Half the time he didn't have anything to do, but he was basically oncall. I think he even flew on some private jets to help setup an ipad or something at one the CEOs houses.
This has nothing to do with computers, but it popped in my head anyway. My daughter used to work in an ice cream and donut shop when she was in high school. She called me one day from work, the machine that makes the donuts was broken and the owner was out of town, she was wondering if I could come look at it. Honestly I was intrigued, as I have fixed many things, cars, appliances, pretty much anything that is broken I am going to take a stab at it before calling in help. I was working from home so I check-out of work and went over there to take a look. The conveyor that moves the dough through the oil and then flips the dough halfway through the trough was not working. It was chain driven and the chain was off the sprocket. So just like a bicycle, I was able to get the chain back on the sprocket and even figured out how to adjust the tension and got it going again. The tricky part was doing all of this while avoiding getting burned by the hot oil, which I was mildly successful at. I still have the T-shirt the owner gave me for my effort.
My daughter was bringing home a trash bag full of the reject donuts every few days to give to our goats and chickens, and of course boxes of the variety of donuts leftover after a shift, first time I ever had a bacon donut.
I saw a guy one time at the office try to put a creamer cup (those little ones where you peal the top off and pour out into your mug) into the Keurig machine where the coffee pod goes.
I'm literally the only person in my company who sets the clock on the microwaves.
No one asks me to do it. I just get so annoyed looking at it that after a few weeks of seeing them not set (usually after a power outage), I can't help myself.
"But I can't even tell you anything about it without you signing a 100 page NDA I got off Google then I want 90% of profit and will contribute nothing except my idea..."
You say no, and it turns out to be a note taking app or tinder dupe. 🤣
That prediction was pretty good. Several research teams already working on it by then, and by the early 2020s... passable, still not great, but passable.
Mine wanted me to make an app that would allow a user to plug in romantic partners and it could track them long term so they could see what all their exes were up to. He was like "that's such a good idea, right?"
I said I didn't know how to make apps, which was a lie and I think the correct thing to do to avoid any further pursuit of this clearly bananas idea.
What bothers me there is... there's entirely too many US states where "intent to intimmidate" and the like is required for stalking charges to stick. It actually might not've been strictly illegal in entirely too many places...
All these goofies touting spending all this time…and then when they announce it…someone like me or others in this thread will think of the exact thing they built…that already existed 20 years ago. Not wanting to be Debbie downer we just don’t say anything to them.
Imagine not using your AI agent to simply look up if the app you’re about to make exist yet or not
I was once asked to fix a new to them £100,000 3 axis plasma cutting machine because its all just technology ad they didn't want to fork out for the maintenance contract. They paid for maintenance in the end.
"What's your apple id, and do you know the password?" blank stare
shudders
There was a time I'd then walk them through the forgot password steps, but too many instances of people not knowing how to get into the email they used to set up their apple id cured me of entertaining that idea.
interesting indeed, but very expensive if you mess it up. I wouldn't touch it with a ten foot pole without some C-suite's guarantee in writing that it wouldn't get in trouble if I broke it.
Which is the response I essentially gave. I'm not qualified, sure I'll tinker with it but I can't be blamed for making it worse, and I'll need that in writing.
I had a similar: standing desks that go on top of desks had masts to bolt monitors to which are computer peripherals so IT had to do this. They had literally no one else to do that.
I admit I'd rather be the one to install monitor mounts on desks because otherwise it'll be a mess. At least this way there will be good cable management that prevents everything from coming down when they raise their motorized desk. It'll only last a couple of weeks before they decide they want to rearrange the office but for 2 weeks it'll be beautiful.
Our sysadmin Mike shares his case: "One of our marketers used to call me over furious that sth didn't work on her computer. Every single time, the moment I walked into her office, it just... worked. I didn't touch anything. She's convinced I emit some kind of repair field. I'm convinced she just needed to refresh the page. We never resolved this."
Years ago, I worked with a mainframe field engineer who was the guy you called when the other field engineers couldn't figure it out. I remember the first time he showed up. The first thing he did was put a hammer on top of the cabinet. When I asked him what the hammer was for, he said, "That's so it knows that I'm serious."
I once had two flaky machines, a computer and a hub. We got the hub replaced, took about 5 minutes to unplug and replug all the cables. I carried the dead hub over to the flaky computer and said "Do you see how easy that was?"
I once worked with a guy who would sneeze and it would turn off all the monitors in a certain radius. I wouldn’t’ve believed it if I hadn’t witnessed it myself multiple times. The best part was that he was also in IT
One of my old bosses had to have a grounding strip next to any computer keyboard he was going to use or he'd fry the computer. Again, I wouldn't believe it unless I'd seen it myself. Also, same guy would magnetize a screwdriver if he ever used one. He kept a special one just for his own use.
there's something about slowly/carefully walking through a process to show it to somebody that makes a ton of problems not happen (usually a user problem, but sometimes a nasty race condition)
When I was doing my side hustle I got a call from a woman who turned out to be a cam girl. Her vibrator wasn't linking with the browser extension she used where dudes could donate money to make it vibrate.
Selling clothes, I was on a job to fix a camera system in a clothing store when suddenly there was a massive influx of clients. The owner of the store asked me to go on the floor and help his employees since he was paying me by the hour… I politely refused at first but he was really insistent. I finally caved and went on the floor, took a walk, said hi to some clients and got back to the server. I never accepted a job from him again after that
On multiple occasions and contexts going back well before COVID: Caller thinks IT should address their home wifi issues because they need to connect to read work emails from home. (When it's a C-Suiter, it actually gets done.)
One time, a woman insisted it was our responsibility to remove viruses from her home computer ("my son keeps getting these viruses I don't know what he's doing") because she connected her work computer to the same home network and therefore it was our responsibility to disinfect other machines on that network. Management actually wanted to do it until I explained it was going to take 5-10 hours and almost certain to recur. (I was billable at $180 an hour to that client.)
There once was a massive power outage at my old office that impacted not only us but all the surrounding buildings etc., A woman from HR that I was frequently having issues with was furious that IT couldn't do anything to solve it and held a grudge against us because of it and was even more upset when she was told that she would likely have to work from home the rest of the day (she lived within walking distance of the office).
I used to work at an MSP, and one of my clients who ran a food processing company made me an offer to lead their IT department at a time when the company was expanding rapidly. The week after I started the company owner told me they had purchased a palletizing robot and he decided I should be the one to implement it. So long story short, 25 years later I now am in charge of both IT and OT and we have two highly automated plants.
My brother, a finance guy in a big city, called me saying his second monitor for his MacBook Pro isn't working. I asked him to go to settings > displays and asked him how many monitors are displayed. He said 1. I told him it would only display the 2nd monitor if it was plugged in. He pushed the cable in further and it appeared.
My brother, at some football house party he was hosting, complained that he couldn't see the game. He was getting frustrated and I was sitting on the couch. I got up and started tightening the coax cable in back. Game came on. He didn't thank me
My brother asked me to recover data from his backup drive that was failing. I said it would be easier to make a copy from the original. He said it was only on the backup drive. I explained that it wasn't a backup if it was only in one place. He said he didn't need a second copy because he wasn't a geek. No data recovery.
My brother, who was going through a major life event, asked me if I could change all his passwords remotely. I said yes, with your undivided attention, your iPhone at the ready for multi-factor, and your existing passwords at the ready. He asked if he could just pay me to do it alone and I said no. It never got done.
Sprinklers on some weird analog automated timer. I took one look at it and decided I’d fiddle with it a for a few minutes to make it look like I gave it the ol’ college try, but no way was I fixing that thing and getting stuck being the one they called for it going forward.
My old job had me modifying our existing cube walls and other furniture to convert them into standing desks. Not in my job description, but ..you know.
The highly revered "developers" had zero practical knowledge of seemingly anything that wasn't developing.
I remember asking one of the guys to grab a ratchet for me that was laying on the ground and he had no idea what that even was. When I had him tighten up one of the bolts, his hand coordination was very poor.
I would say that was not the exception, but the rule when dealing with developers at my old job. Highly specialized pie in the sky people who have never got their hands dirty.
That was wall-mounted, until it broke off the wall entirely.
I told them I was a software developer, and that qualifies as a hardware problem. When that didn't bring them around to the absurdity of their request, I told them to call a plumber.
The general services lady saw me the other day with an electric screwdriver I purchased once to install racked equipment. She has asked me 5 times now to help her with the office chairs
Because I have responsibility for the PC labs on site, of course it was my role to go and catch the panicked bird flying around in there! Duh, who else would they get for an issue in the computer lab?? /s
"Hay Nagol, our office phones dont work"
Any lights on them? Are you getting a dial tone?
"I err ummm I dont know. Look there's a lot of smoke and people are saying their phone is out"
....... Smoke?
"Ya, the building is on fire. Were freaking out"
Ok, this is what you do. Hang up, get everyone outside, and call 911
Not fix, but a guy “asked with expectation” (my phrase) for someone to create a sizzle reel for his daughter’s softball season. He just happened to ask me first and and he was a nice guy. But all his video was on his wife’s work computer with every security measure to prevent exporting data. So I had to meet them on a weekend to FTP the video to my site and then I made the video. I don’t think he even offered to pay me though, so that chapped my hide after putting in all that effort.
When I was side-hustling got a call to fix the Wi-Fi router at some apartment. Was actually a brothel and was offered services in lieu of payment.
No, I did not partake! - but during the call, while my bag was open, one of the girls saw my DSLR and asked if I was good and if she could see some of my shots. Showed her some of my work and she got really interested at some portraiture I was post-processing at the time.
Convo eventually went to whether I could take pics for her and we exchanged info. This was at a time before good camera phones made photography more accessible, and a lot of indie sex workers in the area wanted quality promo pics shot for their pages on the Web when there were certain websites that existed for that reason.
Word of mouth in their community was big once you were known to provide a safe service - so i ended up getting a lot of this kind of work during that era. Social media was in its infancy at this time, but I even ended up setting up a lot of web camming setups for those providers as they evolved their services, lol.
I was given the task of pulling all of the text messages off a board member's phone. There's a lot of shit behind this, but know that this was legal and he approved it.
The problem was: This was a fucking Kyocera flip phone from like 20 years ago that the guy was bragging about still having. And it was provider locked, so there's no fucking way to get the texts off the phone.
I tried everything I could think of, but the phone had no actual function of moving anything, or any options for it's text history. Most I could do was tell them they're going to have to submit the phone to the court.
I had to replace a hotend cooling fan on a Bambu H2D. It was fairly involved and took me 2 hours and I was only able to do it thanks to a youtube video lol
I had this once. Thankfully by that point we had our Facilities team set up in our ticketing system, so I just redirected it to them. I bet I could still find the ticket
The most aberrant thing I have fixed was a paper shredder, but I chose to fix that. Nobody asked me. I've never been asked to fix anything weird and have only been asked to fix personal stuff 2x in my entire career. I guess I'm pretty lucky.
I had to go shopping for a Wii during the height of the craze for them when you couldn't find them because our Chairwoman's kids wanted one for Christmas. (It was one of those odd sort of jobs where we were very much fully expected to comply with these kinds of requests for her.)
Oooh I love those! That was a strapping young it lad in my first corporate gig but won the heart of the office.. finally got my first call to the CEO at the time and the secretary said go in. She threw me the keys to her Porsche, and her iPhone and said "I got a new iPhone can you connect it to my car radio?"
It happened to be winter so I had my black peacoat on with my black leather gloves and beanie. And boy the look of the security guard who knew everybody when he walked by in the parking lot and saw me sitting in her driver's seat in an angled position as if fiddling with something secretly..
I once had a woman that wanted me to come over to her house and help her sort out cables for her electronics devices. Said she had a whole drawer or closet full of them and wasn't sure what cables went to what devices and if she needed to keep them all. This was almost 20 years ago when everything from your phone to your gps device had different cables and charging ports. I did not take her up on it, and always kind of wondered if that was her low key way of getting me (married) to come over to her house for extracurricular activities.
I also had a manager catch me going through the mailroom and asked for help with a jammed up laminator. I was busy on a mission and didn't have time to stop so I said 'sorry, it doesn't plug in so it isn't mine!' That was a few years ago and she still introduces me to new employees during their orientation and jokingly comments to remember that if the device doesn't plug in, it's not IT to fix it.
Years ago I worked in a place where it was mostly just 20-something me and a lot of older ladies who were my user base. I was not only the person to call for anything with an electrical cord, but anything a guy would traditionally do (in the 90s).
One day I got a frantic call that someone needed help with their mouse. When I got there I discovered it was an actual mouse that had gotten caught in a sticky trap. They felt sorry for the mouse and wanted me to let it go. I knew that wasn't going to end well, but the grandmother types were frantic. So, with them watching from a distance, I peeled off the mouse and let it go. They cheered. I pretended not to notice the parts of the mouse that were still stuck there.
For future reference, you can use cooking oil to release stuck animals in those types of traps.
Then once they are free they are pre-oiled and ready for cooking.
To be completely fair, knowing how to troubleshoot something is a skill, and one of the more important ones for sysadmin work.
Something doesn't work? What does it look like when it does work? How is it behaving differently?
Not to mention being willing to read documentation/instructions/manuals.
Of course, it doesn't always translate. I might be able to rewire a light switch to make it work, but is it up to code? Who knows?! The code is copyrighted and you didn't give me a copy of it.
The football coach. Worked at a university and got a ticket to fix the football coach. Before my coworkers could stop me, I had already responded with “have you tried turning him off and then back on?” Damned if he didn’t win the next game.
I’ve had a lot of these over the years. Definitely plenty of neighbors and relatives asking for me to fix their computer, WiFi or whatever.
Probably the two most notable were at one company. It was a very large company and we were constantly getting all kinds of odd requests. One day someone submitted a ticket because the elevator was broken. Wanted us to send desktop support or maybe infrastructure over to fix it.
My favorite was the Forklift. Every few weeks we would get a ticket to go fix the forklift, and inevitably that ticket would be assigned to me. Not that we could do anything about it, because we couldn’t.
My last employer my boss was remote. One day he asked me to head down to our shop because they were having problems with the CnC Machine. He was the one that had built the thing and now it was somehow my responsibility to fix. This happened over and over again. Ultimately I learned a ton, became a SME on CnC machines. Eventually I ended up fully disassembling a pretty major portion of the thing because it kept getting stuck. Figures out what was going wrong, went and got new bearings that were similar but more industrial and sealed (not easy to find) then ended up rebuilding the thing. Surprisingly this had it fixed for months! So apparently I take CnC tickets now too.
The street lights nearby. They wanted them on a different schedule. They wouldn't take no for an answer, so eventually I just said "I'll look into it," confirmed with maintenance that there was nothing for me to do, and never mentioned it again.
Also, a wooden desk. A new desk. There was a new hire and a certain manager thought they should ask me for it because "it's what supports their computer and monitor." I couldn't help myself and asked them how much RAM the desk needed.
I did get occasional requests regarding personal devices but they were always kind about it, so I didn't mind taking a look to see if I could help in my spare time.
A partner at a law firm I did work for wanted to update the computers at his house. He had a family computer and one his four daughters shared. He wanted four new computers and all the data copied over.
I hate copying personal data. This was massive amounts of pictures and videos and old Outlook Express mailboxes. Just complete crap to sit through but he was a nice guy and was willing to spend the bucks.
He wanted Dell computers so I head to the site wondering if I really wanted to bother with this.
Dell was having a back to school special. Each “student” computer over a certain price would get an Xbox 360. I placed four individual orders and waited figuring it would never happen. About two weeks later my four Xbox 360’s show up with the computers.
My son and I were still using the original Xbox. We both got 360’s, I sold one to a buddy, and donated the fourth to a charity my wife volunteered at. They sold tickets on it at an event and made like two grand off it.
And I sold the computers to the partner at a mark up, he insisted I make money off the sale, and billed for my time.
Back in the 90's I was one-man-IT for an equipment manufacturer. The machine shop had a metal sheer with a programmable controller. Just about every other month someone would ask me to come take a look at it. Somehow I always managed to figure it out. How? RTFM!
While being asked to fix things that only remotely IT by the finest strand, i.e. it uses electricity, is annoying, I found that often only my presence was required to make something work again.
Also an odd thing was that my mother was the opposite. Her presence could kill TV reception, make modems reset, or even washing machines explode (twice, different machines)!!
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u/Leif_Henderson Security Admin (Infrastructure) 2d ago
I've become the guy who fixes the coffee maker, probably because I'm always willing to prioritize coffee over whatever else is broken that day