rSlash - r/Talesfromtechsupport I Helped My Stupid Boss Fire Himself

Episode Date: March 10, 2022

r/Talesfromtechsupport In today's episode, the new boss in an IT department decides that he's the most important person there, so he literally steals another worker's email. Unfortunately for Mr. Boss, this new email address gets Very Important emails that must be addressed immediately. The worker tries to warn his boss about these emails, but the boss ignores him. Eventually, the inevitable happens and the company gets into huge trouble because somebody was ignoring those Very Important emails. Since the stupid boss is the one who controls the email account, he's the guy who gets in trouble! Go to ExpressVPN.com/slash to get 3 months free with a 1 year subscription. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to our slash tales from tech support, where someone tries to mess with the IT guy. Our next read it posted from Wrathwood. I was a Tier 1 phone jockey, and this was my first adult job after college. So you can imagine how surprised and nervous I was one day when I get an email with a subject line. Forward Disable Facebook NOW! It was written just like that, and all caps, with two or maybe three exclamation points. Inside, there was a long message chain containing an extended rant from our marketing executive, sent to the CEO.

Replied to, forwarded to the CIO, replied to, forwarded to my manager, and then kicked down to me with no explanation. My manager did this kind of thing a lot. Rather than open a ticket in the ticketing system that he insisted we use a certain way or explain anything in his emails, he would simply forward us an email chain of a conversation he'd been having with some store or department manager, some executive or some vendor, and we would have to read

through it all and figure out what he wanted. This email was one of those. And since it came from people up the chain from him, I had to read through all of his pathetic groveling and deferential bootlicking to reach the part where he made his unqualified promises about what I'll do in how much time. Eventually I surmised the following. The marketing executive is upset that his employees are spending work time on social media. He decided that this is all IT's fault. He wants social media disabled on all computers.

He sent this complaint to the CEO because it's not good enough to contact IT and just open a ticket to get something done. He has to try to get someone fired while he's at it. Okay, fine. We actually had webcens, so I wrote up a ticket, opened up the admin console on webcens, and added Facebook's URL to the blacklist, done and done. I replied all to the message chain and let the executives know that we're good. Immediately, I got hammered with replies from the CEO, my manager, and the marketing executive

who had made the request. They all wanted to know why I disabled Facebook on their machines. Exercising all the restraint I had, I apologized and explained that when they said, Disabled Facebook on all computers, I didn't realize that they meant for there to be exceptions to the rule. I grabbed one of our tier 3 guys and he helped me set up Mac filtering and webcents. We made a group for the executives and managers to be accepted from the social media block out, and then block Twitter, Instagram, and all the other common social media sites while we were at it.

Thinking the issue had not been properly dealt with, I updated the executives who seemed placated, updated the ticket, and then closed it. 15 minutes later, a red-faced young woman appeared in the IT office. She's from marketing, and she was upset because she couldn't reach Facebook or Twitter. I gently explained that those had been blocked by the request of her department's executive. But you're not supposed to block me, I'm the social media manager.

It's my job to be on Facebook. Now I can't work. Oh, hang on. I placed a quick speaker phone call to the marketing executive and got his admin assistant. Marketing executive's office? Yeah, can I speak with the marketing executive? It's about the Facebook blackout he requested.

Oh yeah, he's pretty upset about that. Of course, can I speak to him? After a minute she got him on the line. Opie, glad you finally got it right. Sir, your social media manager is in my office right now So tell her to get back to work sir. She can't she says it's her job to run the company social media pages And she can't work now because of the block do I have your permission to unblocker silence You mean we're paying someone to be on Facebook? She works for your department, sir.

Unblacker for now, and tell her to come see me in my office. Okay? I turned a look at the social media manager, and she was already walking out. I said, hey, are you all right? She turned back to me. I'm fine. This is the third time this month that dinosaur has forgotten that I work here. I'm used to explaining my job to him.

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And fair warning, this next post is pretty long and kind of a slow burn, but man, the cosmic justice at the end is so good. A number of years back, I was working for a company that had been around for many years. I was only relatively new myself, but there were a couple of old guard senior engineers who had been there from the start. These were the people who knew where all the obscure, undocumented insider stuff was, and they could fix most problems in five seconds that the rest of us might take hours to solve. One of these guys in particular, Joe, was a bearded, friendly guy who had kind

of a Steve Wozniak vibe. He was always happy for us to approach him with our questions, and he invited us to leverage his vast knowledge of how the company's sprawling IT infrastructure worked to make our lives easier and to cope with the constant unrealistic expectations of upper management. He was a real old-school engineer, someone who loved his job and was well respected by everyone around the department. But that all ended when they headed the IT department retired.

The old head of the IT department was a man of comparable experience and knowledge to Joe. He was replaced with someone from the outside who was young, brash, had a business degree, and had little technical knowledge. And coincidentally, this guy's name was also Joe. Henceforth, I'll refer to this new boss as New Joe, and the IT expert as old Joe. Fortunately for us, New Joe didn't interfere too much with the technical aspects of our day-to-day jobs, at least at first. So when the company first started out, they weren't too concerned with formality when it

came to email addresses. As the company grew, they tightened the bolts and they created an official policy with more formal email addresses. So for example, an email address might be, but people who are around from the early days would just have their name at company.com. So like, daBni at rslash.com. It was somewhat of a status symbol and a sign of authority in the company to have one of these old-school email addresses. And even though these people would have a longer email address, they would always use the shorter one in official communications. The retired hit of IT had one such email address. As did old Joe in the form of Joe at company.com. So whenever you got an email from

someone with a short email address, you always knew you were talking to someone important who had been there for a long time. Most apartment heads were longterm employees, so they all had short email addresses. But it wasn't long before New Joe, the head of IT, became jealous of all of his peers. But as a new employee, he was stuck with his long formal email address. And they were not issuing shorter email addresses unless you were someone way up the food chain. Even as the head of IT, New Joe had no authority to create a new email address for himself. So as the tale goes, New Joe called Old Joe

into his office and the exchange went something like this. Hey, Old Joe, great work on that capacity report and getting it over to me so quickly. We should be able to get approval from finance to expand our storage way sooner than I thought. Not a problem, is there anything else you need from me? Nope, everything's taken care of, thanks. But I happen to notice when you emailed it to me that you're using a different email address

than everyone else. Yeah, that's the one I've always used from when I started, and everyone here knows to reach me at that. Also, some of our older systems are hard-coded to send alerts to that email address, so I have to keep using it. Oh, I've got no problem with that, but I was interested in getting one of those short email addresses for me. It would make it easier for people to, you know, know that I'm the head of the IT department, rather than just another employee around here.

My predecessor had one, so it shouldn't be a problem for me to have one as well, right? Can you make this happen? I'm sorry, I wish I could, but it's HR that makes that decision. And it's their policy to only issue personal email addresses at the top corporate domain level for new sea level recruits and their immediate assistance. Look, you've been here for a long time. Surely there's some way to do this, or you know someone you can make this happen. I'm sorry, but that's a decision that's way above my pay grade. I'm happy to put in a request with a hit of HR to see if they could do it for

you as a favor, but I'm pretty sure what their answer will be. Okay, thanks. Just do it and let's see what happens. So Joe puts forth the request. And of course HR denies it, citing policy and saying that they don't want to set a precedent even as a favor to Joe. Old Joe heads back to New Joe to give him the bad news. Hey, so you know that request that I put through to try to get you a top level email address?

Unfortunately, HR shot it down. I did my through to try to get you a top level email address? Unfortunately, HR shot it down. I did my best to try to push it through, but they were firm on their current corporate policy of not issuing any new ones except for those at the very top of the company. I'm sorry to hear that. Are you sure that you did everything you could? Yes, it's out of both of our hands, unfortunately. Find in. And Old Joe was right.

There was no way the IT hit was going to be issued a brand new personal email address. However, New Joe's position as head of IT did allow him to authorize the reassignment of existing email addresses. New Joe soon realized this was possible, any form to plan, calling Joe back into his office for another conversation.

Hey, Joe. You know how we can't get new personal email addresses created? But we can assign existing emails into my name, right? We can do that, yes. You do have the authority to reassign existing email addresses. Did you want your predecessors address? I mean, we could do it, but it would confuse a lot of people if they saw your email coming from someone who's quit. Well, what about email addresses of existing staff?

Well, you do have the authority, but it would still confuse people. And on top of that, you would be getting all those legacy alerts and notifications, which would make you responsible for them. I think I can handle forwarding a couple of lousy emails whenever I see them. I have a greater need for visibility here, and there's no business requirement for you to have one.

So let's start transferring the email address, joe at company.com, to me, immediately. Let me know once it's done so I can let everyone know. So poor old joe was forced to dig his own grave and give up the email address that he had held since day one at the company. He definitely wasn't happy about it, but he did as he was instructed. Falling back to his long regular corporate address, he sent out an email to the immediate team in his contacts to let them know what

was happening, and to please use his full email address moving forward to contact him. At the same time, New Joe proudly sent out a company wide email letting everyone know that his email address had been updated, and he could now be reached at joe at company.com as the head of IT. Weeks went by, and it was clear that New Joe was taking every opportunity to send out emails using his new address. He also got new stationery and new business card showing his new email address. New Joe was clearly reveling in having one of those coveted short email addresses and the prestige and recognition that it instantly gave him, especially when dealing with other

offices and people who didn't realize that he was just a newcomer. Life was good for New Joe. That is, until one fateful morning when New Joe wasn't in his office browsing Facebook like he usually would be. It turns out Joe had forgotten about his responsibility to forward through important notifications when they landed in Joe's inbox. He had set up a role to handle them, sure, but not to forward them as promised, but instead, delete them directly from his inbox without notice.

One important alert involved a very important long-term defense contract. One of our key requirements was to perform daily and weekly backups on a certain system, and Old Joe had warned New Joe about this, both verbally and in writing. The old backup unit had failed, and it was repeatedly sending out notifications warning about the issue. It would have been simple to fix it, but nobody was fixing it because nobody was getting alerts, so nobody knew that there was a problem. Eventually, the client requested old backed-up data from the previous week. But the backup team discovered, to their horror, that no such backup existed.

This meant that several weeks of data had been completely lost. The client was not amused. Our company CEO, with whom they had a very close relationship, was even less amused. When word came down that our company would have to pay the client a massive fine. New Joe tried to throw old Joe under the bus. But Joe, in all of his old school wisdom, had ensured that he had done a complete cover his own ass when handing over the email address, including email exchanges with New Joe,

highlighting the importance of sending out these alerts to the right people at the right time, including detailed instructions on how to set up forwarding rules and where to send them. And yet, New Joe completely ignored all of Ol' Joe's warnings. HR policy made it clear. It was New Joe's email, so it was New Joe's responsibility. New Joe didn't even last through probation, and he was gone within one month. Everyone was wondering who would get

the new job as the head of IT. But then everyone was smiling when they walked in on Monday to see Old Joe sitting in the IT Head's office. And the wake of what happened, management decided in their infinite wisdom that the head of the IT department should be Old Joe. Old Joe worked as our IT manager for a few years, and during that time he was one of the best IT managers I've ever worked for, and his position of power didn't change him from being the friendly, helpful, and supportive teacher that he was. I was sad to see him go, but while he was with us, I always smiled when I saw his emails coming through from the old, friendly address of Joe at Company.com, which he had reclaimed and which had been returned to its rightful owner. I don't know about you guys, but I think that new Joe sounds like a complete

idiot. If someone were to say to me, yeah, you can have this new email address, but you're going to be in charge of absolutely critical email alerts that you know nothing about, but if you screw up, we'll cost the company millions of dollars. I'd be like, yeah, just give you a different email address. I don't care about it that much. Our next Reddit post is from Salty Firetrucks. So I worked tech support for a big German retailer, and the CEO's laptop needed some updates on several programs.

I go into his office, and he was already annoyed about the fact that this was going to take longer than two seconds. So he said he was going to go on a break, I do the updates and leave. It took me like 30 seconds. I get a call from him five minutes later. You screwed up my computer, my screen is flashing and I can't press anything. Get in here now! Sweat is pouring down my back as I took the elevator and came back to his office. What the f did you do?

I can't do anything here without you guys messing up every tiny little thing. I swear I'm getting a whole new department at this stuff happens again. I look at his computer and the screen is flashing. I couldn't even get it to reboot. My panic was intensifying. Then I looked over to the side of his desk and there's a remote numpad with a folder over the interkey. I pushed the folder off the numpad and I couldn't even hide the grin off my face. He said, this didn't happen. Okay, don't tell anyone downstairs.

Huh, that's the first thing I did, you condescending douche. And then I guess we're to assume that the second thing you did was code or Reddit to tell millions of people the exact same story. That was our slash tales from tech support, and if you liked this content, be sure to follow my podcast because I put out new Reddit podcast episodes every single day. episodes every single day.