Do you have a copy of that?

An IT horror tale of office backstabbing and daily backups

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Sometimes in the course of IT events, a project comes to a group and it quickly becomes evident that there are redundant skill sets. At times, this redundancy can lead to a cohesive team that works shoulder to shoulder, bringing out the best in each other and beating project time lines. At other times, a redundant skill set can lead to territorial behavior and clashes over "who knows best."

While managing helpdesk for a midsize company, I learned about a new ERP system that we would be rolling out. Two of our developers would be point of contact. The first, "Taj," had been involved in a similar project prior to coming on board and was going to take lead. The second developer, "Opie," had been assigned some front-end integration tasks on the rollout.

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Part of my responsibility in help desk was managing backups -- a truly thankless job. Opie, who'd been with the company for many years, dropped by my office late one day and requested that I add one of the development servers to the backup jobs. (My "office," for the record, was a converted, windowless room with a giant workbench that was covered with laptops and desktops in need of repair or waiting to be deployed.)

Opie wanted to make sure he had a copy of the database backed up. He said he didn't trust the aging hardware and it wouldn't fit on a floppy. (This was well before the days of thumb drives and CD burners.) It was a straightforward request, and as we had several extra license keys, I added an agent to the server and began doing backup of the directory to tape every night.

The next day, Opie came down and asked me to restore the database backups to the server. I asked him what happened and he shrugged his shoulders, saying that he had somehow corrupted the database and wanted to restore from backup. He said that some of the integration with the ERP system was getting tricky and he might need to go back to tape daily. As we only archived tape off-site weekly, the tapes from the last night's backup were in the library. I said that it wasn't a problem, just to drop me an e-mail and I'd pull it back from tape.

This went on for a couple of weeks, with Opie dropping by late in the afternoon and asking for the file back.