Had a similar one a couple weeks ago; a "critical" system was down and they needed it fixed ASAP. I tracked it down, and it was indeed powered off - as it had been turned off when they did some electrical work in that DC last December, and it just never got powered back on.

Computers were different in the stone-age days...

This was on 1970's mainframe equipment, PR1ME specifically. I know when I worked on DEC PDP-11, Octal was common.

I think the ASCII we used then was OCTAL, using only 2 numbers to represent 64 characters. There were only uppercase letters, numbers and a lot of the symbols were not there. The 128 and then 256 character ASCII were "extended" ASCII.

I remember handing in a typewritten english assignment and the teacher, #1 hated it because it was all uppercase, #2, was convinced "the computer" helped me write the assignment.

I seem to remember that the world changed when we got rid of the PR1ME 300 and replaced it with a later model which used 128 character ASCII.

To quote Tom Lehrer:

"Base 8 is just like Base 10..........If you're missing two fingers...."

Edit - the 64 Character ASCII we used was a subset of the 128 character ASCII.

Or the old standard geek corollary: "There are only 10 types of folks in the world...those that understand binary, and those that don't" :).

For years I was a mainframe guy too (IBMs however), and hexidecimal was just a two digit "user friendly" way to express binary strings...I got pretty damn good at doing hex arithmetic in my head back then. I sure missed the "early days", but don't miss IT (as it evolved in later years w/ the corporate bs) nary a bit...:)

As seen when customer had major issue in AD with catalog servers, i external , got called because the BB's no longer worked. T + 3 hours

I'm like, guys, problem in AD... restart the servers so windows get's a new logon server, should be good after that. Other guy goes, no you can't restart the server. The other contracter manages the windows and hardware and monitoring. I'm like sure.
He get's the other guy in conference... He's trying to pull rank on me.
No , you can't restart those servers they are in 24/7 critical service monitoring,
We need a change request signed off by this and that.

I'm telling him, Dude, listen to me... It IS down, NOW, it has been down for 3, wait, 3 and a half hours now. I'm telling you , they need to restart right away.

He goes, no , i'll make the request, should have feedback on that in a couple of hours

As he finishes the sentence, i'm logged on, and i'm flipping the restart on 7 production servers, including a high availability pair.

While Genius on the other hand is ranting about the need for proper change request procedures so his monitoring reports don't go out of whack and upset the sla's.

Mean while i'm chatting with the guys on site on msn, explaining them the realities of life and how i deal with that.
They go "excellent, we are checking the devices"

Some more chit chat, and chat confirms , the BB's work again, i was right.

Now i turn in the conference: So your monitoring system ... Can you tell me what the status is of those 7 servers , now, and the last 15 minutes?

He goes : all running fine, no anomalies..
I tell him good luck with the change request.. I'm outta here

The funniest part about this was the one second delay between when I read it and whenI started laughing! Closely followed by watching my co-worker not get it at all. So sad.

I hope this guy is using VMPlayer or something and doesn't have access to production servers!

One of my favorite jokes! It's so rare that I can find anybody who gets it! Usually they just look like a confused dog then try to play it off like by forcing a little chuckle.

Brings back memories, and I forgot one: If the system/network is down, send me a trouble ticket then I'll get right on it...idiots :)!

Move!

Since I am in charge of building and deploying all of the images at my work (during the summer) with WDS, I coincidentally am in charge of backing up people's data before the image is deployed to their machine. Sometimes we occasionally allow a users personal machine on the domain, provided it has decent anti-virus, etc. If the machine is a total POS, I am usually told to put a fresh image on their machine and migrate their old data over. Long story short, you never look at someone the same when they have gay prn that is labeled quite plainly in the root of their document folder...

I suspect that's rarely a hot chick's machine.

We once had a slacker first line supporter..

Who spent much time at websites like chocolatestarfishwarrior.com and other stuff you really don't wanna know about. Real nasty stuff including the animal kingdom.

Obviously when there was a network bandwith issue somebody did some looking around on the firewall proxy and that was discovered.. End of month an email was sent going like this :

Dear network user,

For your convenience we provide the below list of websites that were in your frequent use.
Please make sure to add those to your IE bookmarks in order to facilitate easier access to those urls.

1 www.chocolate...
2etc
3etc
4
5
6
7
8
9
10

Anyway, i don't remeber the exact wording, but it pretty much boiled down to "cease and desist you perv"

It was extremely effective.

Okay for all you young'uns, here is a good one. Back about 1987 or so there was a computer virus named the "key pressed" virus that would flood the keyboard buffer so fast that those old MS-DOS applications would go bonkers with key strokes all over the screen and lots of beeping.

Well we got a call from a remote site that they had the "key pressed" virus and sure enough we could hear the computer beeping over the phone.... So my partener in crime, Keith and I drove over to see what was happening and brought out box of spare parts and such just in case. Sure enough the computer's screen was going crazy with ASCII characters going everywhere.

Keith picked up the keyboard and mouse to move them out of the way so we could get to the power strip and coffee ran out the left end of the keyboard...... When we asked what happened, the secretary said " well I did spill some coffee on the keyboard, BUT I wiped off all I could see....."!

We hooked up a new keyboard, ctrl - alt - del and then all was well.

nice one!

I've made plenty of decisions that could be second guessed. For instance. I'm smart, I hardly had to study through HS and got mostly A's. I got a really good score on the SATs and can pretty much learn anything that I apply myself to. I was going to school for Elec. Eng. I don't think I'd have liked that very much. I probably would have enjoyed something more computer related or even Mech Eng much more, but at the time, I knew so little about life (especially in the job/career areas) that I had no idea. Instead of buckling down and forcing myself through something, or trying another major, I quit going to school. That was obviously a pivotal decision, but the way that I look at life, it was the right decision. Yes, I suppose it's possible that I would have gotten a degree, a great job and been making lots of cash much, much earlier in life. Things could have been grand. But there's also PLENTY of opportunity for it to have put me someplace that wasn't good.

For me, so far at least, everything that has happened has worked out well and has been the right thing. I don't have any major regrets. Any minor regrets that I have are very minor, essentially inconsequential.

Now THAT'S FUNNY!

http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1312040278.jpg

Had a guy yesterday ask me for an "OMG4" fiber patch cable.

This is the only post I understand in this thread....

One of our Help Desk guys took this screenshot a couple days ago. I wonder if this created a job opening...

http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1313780137.jpg

Bordermanager says no.

There are days I think we need this sign around.
http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1313780918.jpg

As it is now though I'm the grunt in our dept. Currently getting a degree maj in IT min in cs.

There was a guy who was hired a few months ago and the first thing out of his mouth after I finished hooking up his workstation was "Do you guys do any sort of internet monitoring?....." needless to say he did not last very long

A creepy guy at work brought in his computer for me to look at and told me that Internet Explorer was having problems. I opened IE and his homepage is set to "about:tabs", which just displays his most visited websites. They were all for craigslist casual encounters to neighboring states. That was an awkward situation, especially since the guy has a pregnant wife. Based on the trend of things, I hate working on people's personal machines.