Tag Archives: mostly true

Every IT department has “regulars” – users who submit tickets so frequently they ought to be issued customer loyalty cards. Users whose computers spend more time on the help desk bench than on their desks. Users who use the Ash … Continue reading →

In the previous installment of this story, I have learned that the company somehow managed to fill 200GB of free space on the network shares, overnight. I was more baffled than surprised, as this sort of thing was not new. … Continue reading →

It’s Monday morning, and I’m sick. I thought that I was smart when I got my flu shot a few months ago. I figured that I can cock-block the influenza virus, and skate through the winter unscathed. What I did … Continue reading →

Before I begin this rant I want to make it clear I am not a Dell hater. I am a rather happy owner of a Dell XPS desktop and I work on a team that professionally maintains a fleet of … Continue reading →

The thing about being an IT professional or a sysadmin is that your workload comes and goes in waves. Some days are just slow and lazy, and there is not much for you to do. You are all caught up … Continue reading →

It has been almost a week since Steve’s visit. My daily interactions with Verizon have settled into a very predictable pattern. Every afternoon I get an “unexpected” visit from an on-site tech. I explain the problem is not local, and … Continue reading →

On the last episode of The Firewall Saga we met Steve – a peculiar Verizon technician who turned out not to be the “Network Specialist” we were promised. I managed to co-opt him into a crazy plan of getting the … Continue reading →

Welcome to the penultimate yet another installment of the Firewall Saga (it was supposed to be penultimate but it did not work out that way). If you haven’t been following it, please try to catch up. It will make more … Continue reading →

My morning ritual at work is at follows: I roll into the office, scamper into the IT cave, drop my bag down, turn my computer on and while it boots I make a bee line for the local coffee dispenser. … Continue reading →

The saga continues. If you haven’t been following this series, you can catch up to speed here. What follows might be funnier that way. It is the day after the Beef Instrumentality Incident #631. We are finally chugging along on … Continue reading →

If you haven’t been following this series of posts, please familiarize yourself with the previous entries. Things will actually make more sense this way. Or you can just jump in. Last time when we left off, my new friends Toby … Continue reading →

As you may recall from Part 1, our Checkpoint Firewall-1 has a weird quirk. It’s like that guy from Memento – every time you reboot it, it forgets all the license keys, assumes it is being run illegaly and goes … Continue reading →

My office is protected by Checkpoint Firewall-1. It is one of those fancy-shmancy enterprise level firewalls, that thankfully I do not need to maintain. You see, me and my brethren in suffering are the “internal affairs” team. The firewall falls … Continue reading →

It’s Friday morning, and the IT cave is misty with the heavy anticipation of coming weekend. No one is working. Some people are reading reddit while sipping their morning coffee, while others are twiddling with their phones. The intern is … Continue reading →

Bob and Alice never met in person. They both lived in different time zones. Bob worked in a company located on the East coast, while Alice was a California girl working on the opposite end of the continent. Few decades … Continue reading →

This is the story of “The Big Printer” which was named so, because of it’s relative size. It was big, compared to it’s neighbors who were rather small desk printers, that became network enabled – mostly against their own will. … Continue reading →

Allegedly the whole thing started on a weekend. One of the high ranking directors (those who get the keys to the office) managed to escape the clutches of his family, and hide in the familiar and peaceful confines of the … Continue reading →

It started with a fairly innocent directive from the powers that be: “Our on-hold music sucks. Figure out how to change it. By yesterday.” In an of itself, the request was perfectly reasonable. The music was indeed, very, very bad. … Continue reading →

Every once in a while I have a silly store I would like to share, but it is not long or funny enough to warrant a full post. So I have been sort of mentally collecting these, until I had … Continue reading →

I just read Steve Yegge’s latest blog post and loved his little stories. I also discovered Davesecretary stories, especially this collection and I thoroughly enjoyed every single one of them. You can probably see where this is going, no? I … Continue reading →