You open a program for work… and suddenly it doesn’t work.
So you tell your supervisor.
They tell you to call the help desk.
You call the help desk… they can’t help.
They tell you to submit a ticket.
You go to submit a ticket… but first you have to create an account.
To create the account, you have to link your work ID.
To link your work ID, you need your phone for a code.
Then it makes you create a new password (not your usual one, obviously).
Then you have to verify your email.
You wait… finally get it… click the link…
…and it makes you log in again.
And grab your phone again. Another code.
Finally—you’re in.
Now you fill out the ticket, using that random username you were given on day one and told never to lose.
You submit it.
It says: “Pending supervisor approval.”
Your supervisor calls:
“Why did you submit this?”
So now you explain everything…
and walk them through it… step by step… because they don’t understand any of it.
They approve it.
You get an email:
“This will take up to 4 days.”
You need it done tomorrow.
So now you ask who to escalate to.
Your supervisor asks their boss.
Their boss asks someone else.
Eventually, a VP gets involved.
They tell you to contact a guy—Mr. Patel.
You call Mr. Patel.
He asks a million questions.
Eventually he realizes:
“This broke after a Windows update.”
So now he has to talk to his boss.
Meanwhile, your boss keeps asking:
“What’s taking so long?”
You explain… again.
You go to lunch.
Come back—Mr. Patel messaged you 5 minutes after you left:
“Call me.”
You call him. Voicemail.
He calls you back an hour later (because he was “in a meeting”).
He says:
“You need a new computer. That’ll take 5 days.”
Your boss’s boss is now on your case because only you can do this one task.
You ask if there’s another way.
“No.”
Now your supervisor tells their boss, who tells their boss…
and suddenly the VP calls you directly.
You explain everything again (for the 4th time).
He makes one phone call.
Suddenly—you have admin access.
You fix the issue in 5 minutes.
It’s now 6 PM.
You spent all day waiting, escalating, and explaining…
…and the thing you fixed?
Didn’t even matter—because the other team never showed up anyway.
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If you give a mouse a cookie…
I mean yeah more or less
that’s Microsoft products for you
Just make sure everyone forgets you have admin access…use the power sparingly and avoid IT ever looking at your computer again.
If your IT doesn’t routinely audit this, they deserve shenanigans.
you have to create an account??? no. once my enterprise login stuff works I can generally make a ticket without making a new account for it.
Enterprise IT is fun isnt it.
If I can predict it, I’ll skip to the last step and just not attempt to do it.
This works because the person who is supposed to remind me of the task has a to-do list that takes about two years to go through. By the time she gets to reminding me it’s already irrelevant.
Sounds like you have a single point of failure which isn’t IT’s problem; they can’t be your continuity plan.
I’m the VP who actually knows how the things work. So after I solve your problem I:
Write the instructions in an email for the 4th time and send it to everyone involved (your name was probably in CC list, sorry about that)
Double check the internal documentation and add a bit about windows update going rogue
Notice the logs say I’m the only person to ever look at this doc
Send a second email about reading our documentation (now you’re also in the BCC list too somehow, sorry about that)
Get a text from my wife to see if I’ve left work yet
Email our Microsoft rep and CC IT to chastise them about the update but also to see if this violates our SLA so we can get some credits
Check on the status of the SSO epic, since none of this would have happened if that had gotten finished in Q1 '22 like it was supposed to
See no one has been assigned to any tickets in that epic since the last time something like this happened 15 months ago
Spend 10 minutes daydreaming about opening a bike rental shop in Amsterdam
Email the DoE about making sure the SSO epic ends up as an OKR in Q3
Similar but yes
You guys can get a new computer in 5 days?? At our company that takes at least 5 weeks and that only if it has been escalated.
I am honestly impressed that this all happened in one day.
Nope. But I had the issue of my password being so long and complex (password manager) that something got fucked up in my work’s IT system.
Switching to a simpler password solved it.
I was specifically told not to use special characters :)
How cooked is my work’s IT system?
Sometimes I pre-entively set my password manager to generate 0-9, lowercase a-z only pass because sometimes you look at a login page and you can just tell putting some \ ¢ £ % $ will blow up systems older than the building
This just means (usually) that your system synchronizes with something that doesn’t support special characters (e.g. mainframes).
Remember kids: Mainframes suck. They’re awful legacy garbage that holds back adoption of superior, actually secure technologies. Soooo many things that make you go, “WTF?” in IT can be traced back to having to support legacy systems (like mainframes).
That’s what happened with ours. They were pushing to have longer and more complex passwords, which was great, since forever they had stuck with an eight character requirement (which I couldn’t believe, that’s breaking a few basic rules of security that I knew about, and this is a large corporation).
So I figure okay, I’ll make my next password something that’s finally decent. Except when I go to use the older terminal based systems that are still crucial to operation, they won’t take anything past eight characters… because that’s what they were programmed for. Turns out IT had jumped on the better security bandwagon before they either had gotten to migrating things at the core level, or they didn’t think that far until the tickets started hitting. Likely the latter.
It all works now, but it was funny having to go back to a less secure password for a while because of a slight oversight or assumption on IT’s part.
At our place it was email clients using whatever is the default encoding of Windows to encode passwords. Usually not UTF-8, like every other piece of software using that password.
Yeesh, I’d be willing to bet they’re storing passwords in plain text…
Not that you should be anyway; but don’t use any password you’ve used anywhere else.
Are the passwords being stored in plaintext!? That’s the only reason I can think of why special characters wouldn’t be able to be handled.
We had that issue at work with email account passwords that could be entered into a browser in UTF-8 but would be sent by email clients on Windows in whatever the default encoding there was, usually not UTF-8.
The server just blindly pushed the bytes it received into the hashing algorithm. It didn’t have any means of identifying the encoding used either way. We “solved” it by showing a warning about the bug when people logged in and entered a password with non-ASCII characters. Many people used a web-based email client anyways so it wasn’t such a huge issue anyways. We didn’t want to force customers to only use ASCII symbols.
Dafuk?
Very
Corporate life in a nutshell. Remember this every time some smooth brain defends corporations or “the private sector” for “being efficient and cutting red tape”
Wow.
I’m usually more in the know on IT than most IT people at companies ive been at. Ive always wanted to do it as a job but dont have the “paper qualifications” necessary. I basically do IT at home in my spare time anyway xD
Oh god, I might be starting a job in IT for a major government service. How screwed am I?
Frankly, stuff like this is not usually that common.
There is a truism about life, though, that is especially true in the corporate world: You think up an idea and it sounds easy peasey. When you actually try to implement that idea, you tend to run into a number of things you didn’t initially think about.
There is often some separatism and administration overhead that can be annoying to deal with, but it’s a crapshoot as to any particular organization will be moderately annoying vs. extremely annoying.
There is shit in almost every job. So do what you like, you might as well.
That said: When I was young, I thought if I read the employee manual well and followed all the rules, that was the way to advance. But in reality, it’s about people. Figure out what things are done “by the book” and what things are done…not by the book. Don’t stick your neck out, but try to help others with things you can help with, and learn who can help you. Beware those that seek credit or seek to get others in trouble, and pay attention to who has favour with the C Suite. It takes time, but just realize that politics happens everywhere - humans gonna human.
Also, document document document. Someone asks you to do something wrong? “Hey, sending this email jsut to confirm you wanted me to do X” - keep a paper (electronic or written) trail. Don’t be paranoid, but keep track of things so you have a record of who told you when. Then when shit hits the fan, you can help redirect it away from you.
There aremany benefits to a siloed operation that all relate to preventing overwork and scope creep.
This example is part of the cost.
We use copy and paste a lot.
Exactly. Organization is necessary to make progress. But it’s easy for organizations to become about organizing the organization rather than the work/progress. heh
