From Funny To Horrifying, 40 IT Professionals Share Their Wildest Jobs

Back when I first started ages ago, a woman called in and said "my mouse isn't working!" I asked her if it was wired or wireless.

"I don't know! Why would I know that?"

"What do you mean? Is it wired or not? Is there a wire on it?"

"I said ***I don't know!*** This isn't ***my*** job to know it's ***yours!***"

So I asked her if she picked it up and walked away, how far would she get.

I was the one that got in trouble.

The unfathomable amount of CP that I have come across both professionally and independently repairing computers is breathtaking. From Mother to Grandfathers, cops to mechanics, youngsters to old folks.
It's pervasive and f*****g disturbs me.
I have an in with one of the local PDs and drop a note each dime every time. No passes here. If I find it on your machine, so do the locals and the stateies.

My husband does not work in IT but he should. He worked on a facilities team at an expensive private school, and one day got a ticket to remove/trash a 75 inch TV. He approached the ***head of the IT department*** asking why he needed to trash it when he had just installed it brand new. The ***head of IT*** told him it won't stop shutting off. My husband loaded it into the work van and dropped it at our house instead. Later he came home, plugged it in...

and turned off the 10 min automatic power off timer. We got a fancy TV for free!

Had a customer come in with his laptop and a bag of keyboard keys. He said he was working on his computer and received a phone call and stepped out of his home office. His cat found out how much fun it was to pop off the keys on his laptop, one by one and almost every single one.

Received a call from the FBI Cyber Crime division. Said be at a conference room at one of my healthcare clients in an hour. Got my team together and showed up.

Was informed that a large medical practice that used our software had been infiltrated by a hacker that had posted a video of himself on some kind of dark site walking around their large office (500,000 square feet) and bragging about his expertise and claiming to own our network. They played us the video. He was employed there as the night security guard. We quickly saw that he did not gain access to our net.

They informed us that he had given his notice and his last day would be Thursday. He has posted a bunch of threats to the dark site about what would happen that next holiday weekend, after he was gone.

It did turn out that he had gained access to the network of the surgery center in the same building. And he has used that access to remotely disable the HVAC system for hours at a time during surgical procedures.

On his last day, the FBI rolled up at night. Waited for the older security guard to leave the building to patrol the parking garage. Then knocked out all power and lights to the big building, lock all the doors, pulled up in about eight black vans, about 30 guys with submachine guns jump out, sweep the building, arrest him and quickly leave.

We were counseled to shut down the network for a week, in case he had planted time bombs to be triggered near the 4th of July. We did.

Turns out he had a young wife and two kids. Was offered a plea deal for three years in prison. Decided to go to trial. I was a witness.

He was sentenced to 11 years.

A twist. The pastor at his church testified as a character witness. Said he had never had an issue with him. Turns out the FBI had hacked the Church computers with a warrant and found that he had been fired as the IT guy at the church. Pastor was charged with perjury and sentenced to prison too.

An outgoing software dev put an easter egg in our ERP before he left.

Anyone who typed the word "RAPTOR" in any text field, would have a Raptor from Jurassic Park fly across their screen with a loud screech. Only 3 of us on the team knew about it.

Little over a year later during a demo of our Asset Management module a manager asked about inputting vehicles, the trainer asked what kind of vehicle he drove, "An F150 Raptor". So the trainer, as a demo, input the vehicle description and BAM!

**"RAAAAAAWWWWWWRRRRR!!!!!!!"** comes screeching with this Raptor flying across the screen in a room of 50-60 people, including our CBO, and most of our upper managers. My wife is one of those upper managers so she sees me in the back of the room trying so hard not to laugh. She gave me this look like "really?"

Our boss just calmly said "Well, that's not a bug or a feature. Looks like we'll need to fix that." He had no idea.

The next day he went back through the commits and saw where it originated. During an after action meeting he kept it low key and just assigned it to me and this other dev who knew about it to take it out. He finished by saying "And please don't put easter eggs in our code.".

I did IT in the mid 90s. I had a small vacuum cleaner I used to clean out dusty cases. One day one of the people I supported came into my office and asked if he could borrow it to clean out his home PC. I said sure and gave it to him. He then continued to stand there working up the courage to ask me something else. Noticing his dilemma I asked if there was anything else I could help him with. He, with a completely serious face, asked if the vacuum cleaner was going to suck the data off his hard drive. Now I, up to that point in my career, had never laughed out loud at a user but I couldn't contain it. The relief on his face was priceless when I reassured him his data was fine.

On my way to a client site, the client called and asked me to pick up a pizza.

Me: "You are charged by the hour, you know that right?"

Client: "Yep"

Me: "What kind of pizza do you want?".

IT for medical professionals. Big institution. Doctor brings in a dead laptop, they killed it by spillin' something on it, they were stupid and didn't backup any data so my task was to pull the drive and recover their files.


Open up the laptop and learn it's full of body lice. Full. So I double-bag the laptop, call Facilities to report an infestation. My shop gets tented and fumigated, their lab gets the same treatment. Meanwhile I leave work, drive to Walgreens, get a couple home de-lousing kits, drive home, strip down in the backyard and de-louse myself. May have been paranoia but I ended up tossing my clothes & the backpack I used to carry to work; I even tented my car for 3 days (that was fun) to k*ll any bugs that may have hitched a ride. De-loused myself and my dog, too, just to be safe, and cleaned my whole house like I was expectin' the queen for dinner. I wasn't taking any chances with bugs that a) make a livin' by suckin' blood, and b) were somehow survivin' in a medical lab that had God-knows-what goin' on in it.

Not wild, but ridiculous: I drove 40 minutes away to look at a client's computer, who said the PC was not responsive. When I arrived, he said "Look" and pressed a key on the number pad. Nothing happened. I pressed Num Lock and drove 40 minutes back.


A week later, the same customer said his computer was miscalculating formula amounts, so I drove there again. He says, "Look...I type in that I want a pint, and it prints out a formula for sixteen ounces." After giving him an elementary math lesson, I drove 40 minutes back again and requested that he have his computer taken away.

I work with a lot of engineers, like literal rocket scientists. The number of really intelligent people who don't know what simple things like "can you minimize that window" or "let me see your desktop" are is simply mind blowing. I am thankful everyday that Teams added the ability to take control of someone's cursor.

I feel like the more advanced a person's specialized knowledge becomes, the more rapidly their general knowledge declines. Some kind of weird inverse correlation.

Big company, couple of hundred users, each with their own network drive (hotdesking scenario, so they could get their docs, no matter where they sat in the call centre/rest of building). The server that housed the "home drives" as we called them, was running low on disk space, so we sent out emails to everyone saying the shared drives were for work docs only, and that we could see images, mp3s, mov files, etc, and that these should be deleted if not work-related.


Fast forward a few weeks and the disk usage has gone down, but still really close to full, so the lowest paid member of staff, me, was to find the worst culprits and report back on what the largest content in their drive was.


The very first person I checked had a huge drive (most under 500MB, this was 10s GBs). Sorted by size, 2GB+ .mov file, named totally randomly with numbers, like 93829084320834 - Opened it, CP. FML. The subsequent police-led s**tshow was not what I needed to be involved in at 19 years old.

Got called to investigate/unplug a laptop that had viruses detected on it. When I arrived, this laptop was in the open with the login information taped to the desk. This laptop was given local admin privileges by someone before my time for some application. This was in an office area that was always unlocked and 10 steps from the entrance of the building. No one was in the office as they went home early, including management.


On a laptop filled with everyone's information (SSN, names, addresses, and more), Limewire, games, p**nography, and more. The two who worked on this laptop just used it like their personal laptop with occasional work being done on it.


The laptop was promptly disconnected from the network, confiscated, and returned for analysis. Yes, there was spyware and we don't know how much personal info got out. This was reported to higher management. The two who used it disappeared quickly and quietly after that.

My colleague got a call from a customer who was a Pastor as he needed help with his computer. It was a weekend, and my colleague knew his machine name so he remotely logged onto it as he in parallel started calling him. Screen loads, and it’s playing lesbian p**n, on his work computer, in the church. Needless to say it was awkward as the pastor answered the call a few seconds later.

Drive to an office for emergency oncall service charging the client $400+ dollars an hour to plug the power back into a switch which their cleaning staff had knocked loose.

Someone recently called my helpdesk requesting that we clear the roads so she could get to work.

"The sky is falling and waters in the way"

Meaning
"It's raining really hard and the streets are flooded"

As the IT helpdesk, of course there's nothing we can do about that.

Got paid my on-site visit minimum of $375 to plug in a phone cord to a fax machine. The young front office person did no know what a landline was.

Other workers screen shot her windows screen, made it her background then moved her task bar off screen. She kept clicking start but nothing would happen.

Take literal magnets off of the laptop so that it would work again.

Lady from the office downstairs borrowed my bosses keyboard whilst waiting for a replacement.

When hers arrived she washed the borrowed one in the kitchen sink and left it on the draining board to dry out.