Tales from Tech Support

My first job in IT still haunts me for all the stupid shit we did while bragging about how great we were. Most of that coming from the boss who you could easily convince me invented narcissism himself.

Any way to bodge a job but still call it working was a success story. The boss would boast about finding little tricks to get around Microsoft best practice guides and saying you don't need all that fancy shit that's just a way for MCSEs to overcharge for support.

He had absolutely no interest in IT, it just happened to be the business he got into. He never kept up with anything and I honestly wouldn't be surprised if he's still running XP for everything today.

A community center approached us for a job with two requests. Install Windows on about 20 PCs, all ancient beige towers with room for four optical drives. The second was to come up with a way to stop people stealing the RAM from them as they would pull off the blanking plates and reach inside.

They'd already tried hot melt glue but that's nothing a light kick won't solve. Our solution was to brick it up with a load of dead optical or CD-ROM only drives that were worthless, and when we ran out of those we had drive bay adaptors to fit those 3.5" card reader hubs that were partially blanked at the front. They looked so fucking bad, but being a charity with no funding to spare they went for it.

As for Windows, the boss approaches it within the limits of his knowledge. In goes the torrented XP CD with the license key I still remember off by heart.

Boss: "Fuck 'em they're a charity right? Do they have license money? No"

We get it up and running and then next comes the also torrented disk imaging software CD. We make a clone and image the rest.

We get a call a bit after the computers are collected. There's a problem getting them on the domain because they're all named "Computer01".

Boss: "So? Just rename them?"

They call back again, same problem still.

Boss: "We did what you asked, must be an issue with your domain"

As far as he's concerned he's been paid for work done, not his problem.

I, actually having an interest in an IT career do a bit of research. It's the only time I've ever had to know anything about it so it's hazy now all these years later but I think I figured out the PID (a unique identifier unrelated to the hostname) had been cloned so the domain would reject multiple computers claiming to be the same device.

I tell boss this. He does not call the community center to offer further support or solutions.

But narcissist that he is, he knows he's fudged the job. Rather than make things right with A FUCKING CHARITY he instead moans and whines for days about how Microsoft are money grubbing bastards and overcomplicating everything just so you have to do everything "their way" and rake in money through certification training and exams.

I noped out of the place after far too long there. I'm still in IT and been successful enough to learn just how BAAAAAD that business was, now I know enough to reflect. Still literally keeps me up at night sometimes.

I'm glad he went bankrupt.

And no it wasn't FCKGW or whichever one everybody asks.