incompetence
Blogging might be light today -- Catherine's occuppied with her Italian side-project, and I'm swamped at work. Normally I'd bitch and moan about whoever's incompetence caused the current avalanch of bug-fixes, but in this case the blame falls squarely on me. I did a shitty job on this project and now it's time to settle accounts. Fortunately the client is an academic institution -- it's not like they have particularly deep pockets for follow-on work, anyway, so the damage will be limited.
It could be worse, and occasionally has been. My professional low point was probably when my coworkers discovered I had been running Kazaa on one of the company servers from Italy (in order to get some homesickness-alleviating American TV & movies). It was common knowledge that one of my coworkers used P2P constantly on his work desktop, but doing it on the server didn't go over nearly so well -- I almost got fired for that one. Anyone else have some mortifying workplace stories to share?
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Two weeks ago, just before the Thanksgiving break, I installed a remote desktop client on our file and database server to save me the "hassle" of leaving my desk to maintain it in the server room. The only trouble was doing so killed our netinfo database, preventing everyone in the company from logging into the server. No one had thought of a backup system to prevent this sort of problem, so it took a day, a night, and another day to get it recovered and all of the users and groups recreated. As it was, this was very bad. Unfortunately many people were also trying to meet deadlines that were looming around that time.
I got caught parking my car in the lot with an expired parking ticket (after doing it without repercussion for about 3 months), I got lucky and was actually leaving right when the guy was writing me a ticket for the tow truck guy to come and take me away, so they weren't able to tow my car but they did call my office and tell my boss that I had been doing it. The lumpy Peruvian lady who hands out parking passes said I was being a very bad boy.
And there was that time in 5th grade when me, Tina Petz and someone else (Brian Crandall maybe?) wrote obscene things like, "congratulations on your successful sex change operation" in people's yearbooks and had to call our parents and tell them, juvenile voices quivering, what we had done.
I also did all that bad stuff you did plus I downloaded porNOGraphy
I once shot a man, just to watch him die. But it was in a daydream, so it probably doesn't count.
I once took home an Eberhard Faber Mirado® Black Warrior Pencil, Medium Firm 2.5 & kept it. There is no better pencil on the planet. I still feel guilty about it, sometimes.--s
If we're counting stolen office supplies, then I should note that if my boss ever finds out about my rubber band ball it'll have to be claimed as a corporate asset.
Incompetence? Where do I begin? Once I set a $75,000 color copier on fire by running through an unauthorized brand of phototransfer paper so that I could make my friend's band's t-shirts for them. It was tough to cover my tracks on that one.
i'm nowhere near kriston's league, but when i worked in tech support, i was helping my department do an inventory of all this old junk they had in a portable. thinking it was just an informal inventory of stuff we were going to recycle anyways, i listed one of the machines by the name my coworker and i used when we first came across it: "big-ass printer." luckily she caught my clever witticism before the boss signed off on it.
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