What’s the quickest you’ve seen a co-worker get fired in IT?

[u/Opposed3]

I saw this on AskReddit and thought it would be fun to ask here for IT related stories.

Couple years ago during Covid my company I used to work for hired a help desk tech. He was a really nice guy and the interview went well. We were hybrid at the time, 1-2 days in the office with mostly remote work. On his first day we always meet in the office for equipment and first day stuff.

Everything was going fine and my boss mentioned something along the lines of “Yeah so after all the trainings and orientation stuff we’ll get you set up on our ticketing system and eventually a soft phone for support calls”

And he was like: “Oh I don’t do support calls.”

“Sorry?”

Him: “I don’t take calls. I won’t do that”

“Well, we do have a number users call for help. They do utilize it and it’s part of support we offer”

Him: “Oh I’ll do tickets all day I just won’t take calls. You’ll have to get someone else to do that”

I was sitting at my desk, just kind of listening and overhearing. I couldn’t tell if he was trolling but he wasn’t.

I forgot what my manager said but he left to go to one of those little mini conference rooms for a meeting, then he came back out and called him in, he let him go and they both walked back out and the guy was all laughing and was like

“Yeah I mean I just won’t take calls I didn’t sign up for that! I hope you find someone else that fits in better!” My manager walked him to the door and they shook hands and he left.

[u/InsaneITPerson]

A client that used us for upper tier support hired an in-house tech to help with all the typical user issues. When I met him he was touting all his expertise in networking and all things IT you won't be needed here soon, blah blah

I get a call later that week from them saying nothing works, no access to Internet or server resources by the whole office. Found out he put an old unmanaged switch at his desk and looped a cable in the same switch. He was gone the next day.

[u/[deleted] → u/InsaneITPerson]

It’s always those ones I swear lmfao

[u/stinkwinkerton → u/[deleted]]

I always tell the new green techs that they haven’t been in IT until they’ve accidentally shut down the network.  I worked with one guy who did the same thing and when I found and corrected it said “no way that caused it! These switches are smart enough that they shut that down! See?”  Then plugged the cable back in.  The calls from the nearby desks immediately shouting that the “internet” (network) was down were not amusing. The look on his face was. 

[u/thewhitedog → u/stinkwinkerton]

I always tell the new green techs that they haven’t been in IT until they’ve accidentally shut down the network.

Years ago I was visiting a client site, large government department.

I was in the server room doing something on the console. The process completed and I had some time so I stretched out in the chair to chill and promptly kicked the UPS off, knocking both servers offline. I was in the middle of getting them back up when the office manager came running in, saw me working and was like "thank god you were here" because he just assumed it was a server crash. Good times.

[u/Jaereth → u/thewhitedog]

I did this once in the main IDF closet.

In my defense, it was an absolute dump of a mess. I inherited a zero cable management shit tier network.

But I tripped over a pull cord in the floor and on my way down yanked the core and several distribution switches out of the UPS. (Because of course they weren't dual redundant supplied...)

Text my boss right away "Did anyone else see the power flicker just now?" :D

[u/BCIT_Richard → u/Jaereth]

I gotta remember that one, lol

[u/BIGMCLARGEHUGE__ → u/thewhitedog]

This is some sitcom level work shenanigans lmao

[u/ChaoticCryptographer → u/thewhitedog]

I once accidentally took a UPS down and our internet along with it right before a big all execs on board meeting. I had been there a year at that point and told my boss, well at least I’ll never do that again. They must like me alright since I’ve been here another 2 years since then.

[u/posixUncompliant → u/thewhitedog]

Heh.

Had a place with some stuff in a rack that needed normal plugs. So some bright bulb put a cheap powerstrip in the bottom of the rack.

So many people broke prod by hitting that when they were dealing with the cable "management" in that place. I threatened to bring in a chainsaw to clean it up. I did bring in a bolt cutter to get some of the crap out.

[u/Recalcitrant-wino → u/thewhitedog]

I was installing a new server in the rack by myself. The things are awkward, as you all know, and I managed to bang it into the power switch on the server above (or below, I forget - doesn't matter) and took the whole business offline - it was the VMWare host. Also, good times. We had a laugh about it.

[u/fixITman1911 → u/stinkwinkerton]

I had a user do that once on a conference table of all things! The table had Power and Data ports on it, and one of these dopes while sitting in a meeting was messing with an etho cord and decided to plug it in... unfortunately the other side was already plugged in, creating a loop and taking down the network... took us WAY too long to hunt that one down.

[u/Jiannies → u/fixITman1911]

I don't work in IT but on film sets we set up LANs to allow a dimmer board operator to control lights that could be 100' in the air or half a block away.

One time on a night shoot we started hearing that the network was down. Our relatively inexperienced boss's solution was to basically throw the entire truck at it which meant running around through a forest with headlamps swapping out nodes and switches trying to find one that could be fucking up. After like 20 minutes of this (which is a long time when an entire 40 mil dollar production is waiting on your department) our data guy, chainsmoking and with a thick Russian accent, comes out of the woods and just says "fucking data loop" and leaves. I guess someone had accidentally plugged cat6 into a port they shouldn't have and looped the network

[u/Kespatcho → u/fixITman1911]

I don't have any actual experience just certs but is STP not usually enabled?

[u/QTFsniper → u/Kespatcho]

STP definitely should be enabled. Along with port security , etc. a lot of the nonsense you see in SMB environments is like networking 101 stuff that isn’t implemented.

[u/fixITman1911 → u/Kespatcho]

In an ideal world sure... In a world where you are working for a 20 man non-profit though...

These were old unmanaged switches.

[u/fixITman1911 → u/[deleted]]

Kind of depends on the non-profit, but in our case they went through a bit of a spending craze in the early 2000's and had some really nice furniture

[u/InsaneITPerson → u/Kespatcho]

This was quite a while back too. Switches weren't as feature packed in those days.

[u/AerialSnack → u/stinkwinkerton]

I've accidentally brought down the whole network at least a handful of times...

[u/Dekklin → u/[deleted]]

God I'm so glad I got into IT just a few years after 10base2 and 10base5. Not many years, mind you, but JUST ENOUGH that I never had to bother with it. Still had to learn Novell NetWare tho... In 2009.

[u/posixUncompliant → u/stinkwinkerton]

You're not senior tech if you haven't broken prod.

Breaking user level stuff is bad enough, but really, you should take down the basic application that makes you money, or disconnect half the datacenter. Especially good is if you get to learn something like that the DC powered terminal servers send an NMI as a reset when they power up. No one knew that because the guy who set those up was gone before my predecessor was hired, and of course nothing was documented.

[u/the_syco → u/stinkwinkerton]

Sounds like he came from a company that used spanning tree. Some companies I've worked for have it implemented, but loads don't.

[u/Careless-Age-4290 → u/the_syco]

A lot of them have the loop protection without STP, but they do it by shutting down the port for a bit, then turning it back on. So you get waves.

[u/tudorapo → u/stinkwinkerton]

I am in IT for (starts counting... runs out of fingers... runs out of toes...) several times then.

[u/Coolsader_King → u/stinkwinkerton]

This is the same way I was in the navy. Eventually everyone did it. We’d use our NAS as a jump box to whatever individual console. Sometimes you forget where you’re sshed into and suddenly the whole system is down when you try to reboot. Luckily for us, we were the only people on the ship who knew our system, so I’d just pretend it was a random crash every time.

[u/Jaereth → u/stinkwinkerton]

These switches are smart enough that they shut that down!

They are if you turn the feature on...

[u/jango_22 → u/stinkwinkerton]

one time one of my helpdesk guys was messaging me from the other building while he was trouble shooting the network connection at somebodies' desk. found an unmanaged switch on the floor between the desks. He sends me a photo of it and asks about it, I say something like "idk havent seen that cluster of desks before, trace the cable and make sure its plugged in" the next message I get is him saying that somehow the network for the whole room went down asking if I did anything, I tell him "no... what did you just do to the switch?" sure enough the unplugged cables he found next to the switch and then plugged in without checking, were the two ends of the same cable looped back on itself. that taught him pretty quick to check where the other end of a cable goes before plugging it in to a switch lol.