techrecovery | Mar. 11th, 2004

And now, on to a ranting about user stupidity. :)

Our email server went down at the weekend - someone killed Active Directory very well indeed, and now no-one at the numerous sites the place I work for has any email at all.. as such, we altered the intranet website to tell our users this, and made a "SHF" message (Shit Hit the Fan) pop up at login telling them the same - this is a message that takes up the WHOLE screen, and you have to close before you can do anything at all.

Little me, on the helpdesk, yesterday - email now down for four days.

*Ring!*
Me: "IT helpdesk!"
user: "I can't get into email!?! Its not working and I know I havent gotten my password wrong and I need to send something urgently to *someone else*
Me: "Yes, I'm afraid the email system is down at the mome.."
User: (Butts in)"Well! Get it back now!"
Me: "....."(waits to see if irate user is done)
User: "Hello?"
Me: "Yes, I'm afraid the email system is down at the moment, an.."
User: (Butts in again!)"You told me that already!"
Me: (Stubborn bastard) "Yes, I'm afraid the email system is down at the moment, as it is across all sites at present. It looks like it won't be back for some time - some of the other tech's thing 3 weeks."
User: "No one told me!!!"
Me: "...you did read the message when you logged in, right? The one which has poped up every time you would have logged in over the last few days, right?"
User:"...oh, that... No, I just closed it every time, I didnt think it would say anything important."

Doh!