You know it's bad when....

[technical.angel]

1.) You have to lean a personal fan into a computer to cool the insides off enough to work on it (power supply fan failing in a computer that's in a very warm office)

2.) It's nice, bright and sunshiney outside, and you can't come up with a reason to be outside.

[lordlundar]

3.) after taking one look at a computer, deciding "death by fire" is a top tier option.

4.) When you look at the work order and there's multiple pages of prior techs.

[edible_hat]

5.) The computer takes 15 minutes to start up.

(this seriously happened to a PC somebody donated to the school my mother teaches at. I timed it. There was so much malware on there that the owners decided it was easier to get rid of it and buy a new one. I decided to DBAN it and reinstall Windows.)

[draggar]

4.) When you look at the work order and there's multiple pages of prior techs.

4a) When you look at the work order and there's multiple pages of the end user's
"troubleshooting"

6.) ... the first words in the end user's notes are "Well, last night I downloaded..."
6a.) ... or "last night my kid...."

5.) The computer takes 15 minutes to start up.

My work computer does that, but it's all the anti-spyware, Sygate, anti-virus (McCrappy) and all the other crap they put on there to keep people from installing crap like malware.

Too bad it doesn't work too well and I'm in IT.

[technical.angel]

When the number of your work orders jump from 12 to 28 in the matter of 10 minutes, (darn you, Office 2007, darn you!!!)

[vman]

Your "security guys" disable your network access because "the development web-server you're running on that machine has been hacked!!"

You check it out, and not seeing any evidence of said hack, ask them how they determined that the computer had been hacked.

They say "We looked at the web-server logs and they (the logs) said the server kept responding to these addresses with 404 bytes of information."

Yes, that's the 404 - File Not Found http response, not the amount of information traversing the network (and yes, I do software development).

[powerboy]

When the owner of the company is trying to "fix" the computer. Seriously, his solution is to uninstall random crap. He took off my Microsoft works. And most of the receipts got written by that program. Basically to make a long story short. All he should have done was run spybot and update the Anti-virus program

[LambChop]

...when you're told that the server is fried, but you still have to take calls.

[edible_hat]

You know it's bad when the owner says "it's long past time I replaced that piece of crap"

This was in my job at the service station when both tills required a hard reset at the same time for the second time that day.

[Eric the Grey]

A faulty UPS system drops power to the core router in the data center, affecting traffic to ~20 different plants...

All you can do is look at the phone you KNOW will be lighting up with incoming calls any second...

and :


Eric the Grey

[Anriana]

The queue jumps from single to triple digits.



There are entire states on the outage board.

[draggar]

... the client mentions torrents.

[technical.angel]

When you see LimeWire installed on a staff member's machine.

[technical.angel]

When you're about to pass out from the stench of too much cologne.

[technical.angel]

Calling between the campus and the outside world DIES!! DIES, I say! While our outsourced wiring guy is on campus!

So, while trying to figure out the extent of the problem, who to call (we have wayyyy to many phone related companies), I have to find my list of work orders for the wiring guy to prove to the network admin that he wasn't doing anything that COULD BRING DOWN THE ENTIRE PHONE NETWORK.

Heartbreakingly funnily enough, after I called the dept head to tell her we were back up, she received not one but TWO calls from our service provider apologizing and taking full responsibility.