House of IT Horrors

["Dude VanWinkle" <dudevanwinkle () gmail com>]

I got a kick out of this, there is a page 2

page1:

from: http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,2042505,00.asp?kc=EWRSS03119TX1K0000594

Ghosts and goblins, haunted houses, and smashed pumpkins—sometimes the
most harrowing horrors are only steps away from your cubicle or
office.

Just ask Steven Calderon.

Calderon was in his second week working as security guard for Fry's
Electronics when Anaheim, Calif., police walked in and arrested him
for crimes including child molestation and rape.

Fry's had requested a background check on Calderon, which was done by
The Screening Network, a service of ChoicePoint, the $1 billion-a-year
data broker based in Alpharetta, Ga. When it came up with criminal
warrants and felony charges, nobody—not Fry's, not the police—stopped
to ask if the data supplied by ChoicePoint was accurate.

Calderon spent a week in jail for crimes he didn't commit because an
identity theft report he'd filed in Norwalk, Calif., in 1993 wasn't
connected with the criminal files that were created in his name.

He went to jail for an IT error.

While, fortunately, not all IT disasters are of these cataclysmic
proportions, every weathered IT professional has an all-too-real eerie
tale about a day when everything went wrong. Even 10 and 50 years
later, these pros retell their horror stories with a startling
sharpness, more haunting than ghost stories.

Invasion of the Inept VP

John Mitchell (not his real name), a senior support analyst with an
insurance company in Madison, Miss., like many worker bees, had his
most chilling IT calamity at the hands of a higher-up who believed he
had it all figured out.

"A senior VP, who fashions himself a 'programmer,' decided to install
the latest version of Visual Studio 2005 before we, the IT staff, had
a chance to test it. Once installed, his code no longer worked. His
solution? He uninstalled a previous version of Visual Studio," said
Mitchell.

Peter Coffee looks back at almost 25 years of IT screwups. Click here
to see the slide show.

Mitchell's IT group came to find out that he had not one or two, but
three different versions of Visual Studio on his machine.

"Yes, we should be able to control this since we're IT, but we've been
warned against 'stifling a user's creativity,' which loosely
translates into 'He's a VP. What are you going to do, tell him no?'"

Adding insult to injury, the VP put in a Severity 1 trouble ticket,
which was supposed to mean that he was incapable of continuing the
duties of his job until it was fixed, when it was really more of a
Severity 3. Mitchell's group, however, had no choice but to drop
everything and make this machine their first priority.



"Our programming staff attempts to decipher his code but can't because
it seems they're not trained in early Egyptian hieroglyphics," said
Mitchell. "It then gets transferred to me. I turn his machine inside
out trying to make this thing work. I uninstalled and reinstalled
every VB application on his computer multiple times, manually cleared
the registry, Googled every variation of 'broken Visual Studio 2005' I
could think of, lit a few candles, said a few prayers, but nothing
worked.

"Meanwhile, the VP, who took the day off, made sure to phone every 2
hours for updates and to offer 'suggestions.' For two solid days, I
monkeyed with the problem, but couldn't fix it. His code continued to
crash."

So what happened? Mitchell came in to work on the morning of the third
day to a voice mail from the VP who was driving him up the wall, in
which he said that while he had been at the office that weekend, he
realized that he'd mistyped a character in his data collection string.
Once he made the change, the code worked perfectly.

"'You can close the ticket,' he told me," Mitchell said. "Fortunately,
my office has double-insulated walls; if not, I'd be telling you this
from the unemployment line."

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