Friday, June 26, 2015

World Record Malware Infestation

Here's ours, what's yours?






That's 3856 detections if it's too small to read. Making this even better, this laptop was only 2 weeks old at the point of this screenshot.

Thursday, June 25, 2015

Overheard at the office #23

Overheard in the datacenter while cabling up the KVM. I'm concerned more about why he seemed satisfied he had found the USB ports.

Coworker: ...where is the monitor port on this router?

Tuesday, June 23, 2015

Overheard at the office #22

An obviously confused suit was giving other confused suits a tour of the facility.


Suit: And over here you'll see the <<looks down at paper>> conformal coating booth... where we ummm... coat things... conformally.


Background: I was working as a bench technician and circuit boards came in by the hundred from assembly. I would test them all, repair the ones that didn't work, and then take them to coating once I had a box of working boards. Conformal coating is a thin protective coating that is sprayed over a circuit board to protect the board, components, and solder from oxidation and other enemies of circuitry. There was a large ventilated booth and pretty much an airbrush kit. I don't know if it's still done by hand, but that's how it was done then.

Monday, June 22, 2015

Overheard at the office #21

Coworker: No, I can't log in... When I try logging in, it gives me a goofy little error and puts me back to the login screen.

A goofy little error, why didn't you just say so? I've got that right here in the knowledge base.

Thursday, June 18, 2015

Overheard at the office #20

Dear Lord Baby Jesus, or as our brothers to the south call you, Jesús, we thank you so much for this bountiful harvest of Domino's, KFC, and the always delicious Taco Bell.



Our day before Thanksgiving lunch spread, inspired by Ricky Bobby.

Tuesday, June 16, 2015

Overheard at the Office #19

Coworker: They want to move from a workgroup to a full network.
Me: So they only have a partial network currently?  And they still get work done?

Said coworker confuses the terms network and domain.  Well, lots of things really. But today its network and domain.

The Big Black Ball

You may recall Mitch from a previous story involving his double, Box Mitch. I don't recall where this fits into the timeline in relation to Box Mitch, but here's another tale about poor Mitch getting a little more grief about something completely unnecessary.

At one point, Mitch went on a fitness kick. He was counting calories on everything he ate for lunch, counting every step with one of those belt pedometers, and then organizing it all on his phone so he could show us graphs. The worst of it was that he bought one of those big inflatable exercise balls to sit on. It came with a frame to hold it in place and to make it look more like an actual chair, but he was ultimately sitting on a big black ball all day. You know, because it would help him burn off an extra 3 calories a day or something like that.

This is where Daniel enters the picture. Daniel decided it was time to screw with Mitch a little bit. Nothing big and noticeable, in the beginning Daniel chose to keep it subtle. Every day when Mitch would step out go grab lunch or whatever, Daniel would go over to Mitch's desk and let a little air out of the ball. Again, nothing noticeable in one day, but definitely noticeable after 2 or 3 days.  So every couple days Mitch would pump it back up a little bit and complain about how it didn't hold air very well while everyone else tried to keep from laughing.

Finally after a little while of this, Daniel got pretty upset with Mitch (I don't recall why exactly this time, because it happened a lot) and just completely deflated the ball. Mitch had had enough of pumping it back up and just stuffed it into a drawer. He took the frame home, and the deflated ball sat there in the drawer for a few weeks, until inspiration struck again.....

Monday, June 1, 2015

Overheard at the Office #18

So I've got this coworker who insists on calling every single product in a class by a single name. Kind of like how a lot of people in Florida like to call every form of carbonated beverage a Coke. But he extends this out to ridiculous levels. Every printer is "The Printer," any layer 3 device is "The Firewall," and so on. It really comes in handy when you have no idea where to go, you can just blame "The Firewall," regardless of what is actually on the edge of the network.

Earlier today, this coworker managed to waste 2 hours of his own time in addition to wasting 2 hours of a client's time looking for "The Buffalo." According to him, a Buffalo Linkstation (which only exists in his head) went missing in a recent move, and he cannot wrap his mind around the fact that the Seagate Blackarmor that they do still have isn't The Buffalo, never has been The Buffalo, and never will be The Buffalo.  I guess a Buffalo Linkstation is the first NAS unit he encountered, so now every NAS in the world is "The Buffalo."  We did have a lot of Buffalo Linkstations deployed, so I'm going with that.

The same guy once told us in a meeting that grammar and spelling aren't all that important in network documentation. All you really need is completeness. So yeah, you just need 5 different things on that Visio diagram labeled "The Buffalo." Clear as mud.