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Catdaddy
6-Apr-09 10:53am
IT Mortician might be closer to how I felt with one job I had in the past. I was responsible for building and installing new machines for end users, which usually made me feel like Santa Claus. Whenever a department seen me walking through their floor with my push cart of new boxes everybody would hold their breath in anticipation, hoping that it was them who were receiving brand new equipment.
The dark side of this position was that I was also responsible for collecting all equipment from users who were downsized. If I walked into a department with an "empty" cart then I was usually treated like the grim reaper and nobody wanted to talk to me. Usually, I would receive tickets from HR to pick up this equipment and archive all data from the drives. Usually, that user was already gone by the time I got there. This wasn't always the case.
How dirty can you feel when you walk up to someone's desk who is about to be downsized and they have not even heard about it yet? I've been surprised like that more than a couple of times. And it's really crappy when you halfway know that person. It's usually the really friendly end-user that keeps a bowl of candy on their desk and shares it with you when you fix something for them. (Yes, it's true! Feed the IT people and they will give you better service).
I'm not sure what you would call this lowly task, but like I said, I sometimes felt like the IT Reaper.
poppaman
6-Apr-09 12:06pm
At one point I was employed by a medium sized division of a large US corporation. We were preparing for a rollout of new systems (50 new systems, about 175 new set ups total). Our procedure was to free up space on our SAN and image the old system to the SAN, dropping the image on the new system and updating drivers as required. Sufficient space was freed up as of close of business Friday...
On Monday morning, my co-worker started imaging the first wave of systems. After two or three were done, he received an out of space warning. I verified that there was indeed no available space on the SAN using our (at the time) state of the art space monitoring tool. Where did all of our space go???
Well, my coworker got to looking around and found a hidden directory on the SAN. It was full of "questionable" content (and I use that term in it BROADEST sense - the stuff in it would get you arrested in 20 or 30 states, including the one we were located in.....). Starring one of our support personnel. And his lover. Taken with the company digital camera. We thought we would go blind...
HenryTroup
6-Apr-09 12:27pm
"Back in the day" we had a water-cooled mainframe. In Ottawa, Canada, where winters are *cold*. Now mainframes of that vintage had variable power consumption - when there was less work, they drew less power. One cold January, right after the Christmas break, the mainframe started to overheat. The cause was that the water-cooling chiller had frozen, because there had been less heat generated over the break. One of the operations guys had to crawl into the chiller with a blowtorch, with his feet at -30 or so. That's the dirtiest job I never had to do.
Spyder19
6-Apr-09 1:55pm
You wanna talk about a nightmare, I've got one for you
A few years ago I was tasked with installing a new AP in a meat packing plant
Sounds simple enough, right ?
The problem was that there was no cat5 available, so I had to pull a new one, something I do at least once a week
Having the wire exposed in the cooler wasn't acceptable, so I had to climb through the space above the cooler and below the roof with the wire trailing behind me
They routinely clean the inside of the cooler with a steam gun, and the steam mixes with the blood and seeps into the space where I was crawling
So, not only was I crawling through rancid blood, but, the smell was so bad that I had to get a Dr's mask and coat the inside of it with Vick's vaporub
I still threw up afterwards...
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Dirtiest IT job you've ever had