College Comedy

[doctoreon.livejournal.com]

I work at a community college Help Desk, therefore we are obliged to hire student workers. As you know, in every class there are students who will get an A, and there are those who will get an F. This is a tale of the latter.

Just now, a couple of our students called my co-worker and me over to inform us of our dunce's latest blunder. It seems that his home computer's virus protection software's license ran out in January. Of course, he got a virus - actually, a lot of them.

Well, he came up with a brilliant solution! He brought his home computer to work, pulled out the harddrive, and put it into one of our computers so he could use our virus software to clean his harddrive.

Oops.

Too late, now both harddrives are infected. The trojans switched off the virus update and scan functions and everything was shot to hell. The techs around here were just trying not to cry we were laughing so hard.

Then, we stopped and realized we're stuck with this guy as a student worker, and we did shed a tear or two.

Comments

[indigo-max.livejournal.com]

The bad thing is that I too, work at a Community College in Tech Support and have an employee (not student) that would pull this kind of thing if he could.

Max...

[doctoreon.livejournal.com]

Heh...come to think of it, I have co-workers that aren't students who would, too.

[darkblade1.livejournal.com]

That's a shame...he should be killed. ;D

[abstrak-tokatl.livejournal.com]

uhm.... which college is this?

[shadowheel.livejournal.com]

Reminds me of a coworker at $job[0]. He was hired because he was an MCSE. Yup, you guessed it, a fresh-out-of-cattle-school MCSE.

Since we ran on all whitebox computers, our running thing was to give a new tech a box of parts that excluded one critical component (typically a memory stick or IDE ribbon) and told to build his/her own system. The intention was that we'd come around before the thing was hooked up to the network to verify everything was working as it should be, ask the new hire what assumptions were made, and only THEN to join the thing to the NT Domain.

We were duly impressed when, instead of asking for one, he pulled a memory stick out of his backpack and got the machine fired up (we highly valued the MacGyver spirit, more so than technical skill that can be taught later). Unfortunately, this also also impressed $phb (my bosses' boss). $phb decided he would PERSONALLY hand this new hire the NT disk for the second phase of his evaluation. The WRONG NT disk. Can you guess which one?

Imagine our surprise when we started getting calls from our devs. "I can't get into the build server!" "I logged out for lunch, and I can't get back in!"

Turns out our erstwhile new technician had finished installing the NT Server he had been given, had wheedled the admin password out of someone (we never did find out who), and had joined the machine to the domain. He then proceeded to systematically delete the domain userbase, citing "Well, I didn't put these in, they must be training accounts."

It took us a week to get file perms straightened out. The tech was retained - against my protests among others - and was later fired for running his own consultancy using our phones and office space.

[mg4h.livejournal.com]

The stupid.... oh, god.

"Must be training accounts..."

[simplycosmic.livejournal.com]

Doesn't your school's IT department have a problem with staff, particularly student workers, mucking about with the school's hardware for their own benefit?

[doctoreon.livejournal.com]

Yes, of course. We were all just too busy to pay attention to what he was doing, though. Generally, when we're not using him to do to grunt work, he just sits around playing on the internet or goes out and smokes.