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There were thousand tickets in the backlog, and I was on the trail of a weird printer issue. I had a suspect, but that wasn't enough to close the ticket. I'm Anonymous. This is my story.
Whenever you hit the Print button, a request launches into the ether. “Print one copy of this file, double-sided.”
Everybody has a nemesis. A dark mirror of yourself, a challenge that is everything you hate. If you've ever worked tech-support, you know what that is: printer issues.
I'm Anonymous, and you last saw me in the case of The Ghost Cursor. This is my story.
As the days marched on, the chill in the air turned from bracing to painful. God had hoofed it down to Florida for the winter, and this year, he'd stolen Hope away with him. Between leaden skies and dirty slush, gale-force winds sent snow tearing down city streets to sandblast one and all into their constituent atoms.
The real WTF is that our long-time friend and submitter Argle failed to dissuade all three of his sons from pursuing IT careers of their own:
Back circa 2012, my three sons all got jobs at a company that had a brilliant web project. So brilliant that it had the support of a Disney VP, the mayor of the city, and other VIPs. At one point, my sons asked to borrow money to invest in the project. They are good boys (one is now a senior developer with Proctor & Gamble), so I backed them.
The waters are even more dangerous than we imagined. Have a look at some of the crazed whales our brave submitters and commenters have encountered in the wild.
First comes an Anonymous tale of woe:
Janči, a master's student of bioinformatics, was seated near the back of a large classroom. This was a simple compulsory elective course geared toward biologists. The professor was currently walking the class through their latest assignment. "We'll need to connect to some Linux servers," he announced.
The other students seated nearby traded blank stares. They were all Mac and Windows users with no IT background. Meanwhile Janči, a veteran Linux user, started feeling a little smug. An easy A was at hand.
From our Anonymous submitter:
Our company creates graphs to visualize data. We have many small fish customers, but we have one whale who uses our product that is 90% of company revenue. (WTF number 1.)
Read (Part One here)
When Ellis awoke on Sunday, the unusual cold broke through her drowsiness right away. Her new thermostat was programmed to maintain a lower temperature overnight, but at 6:30AM, it was supposed to climb again, kicking the heat on right when she got out of bed.
Our anonymous submitter relates a tale of simplification gone bad. As this nightmare unfolds, imagine the scenario of a new developer coming aboard at this company. Imagine being the one who has to explain this setup to said newcomer.
Imagine being the newcomer who inherits it.