Dilbert Contest: The Best Real-life Storage Insanity Story

User: Help! All my pictures are gone from my computer!

Me: Didn't you have them in your network folder?

This contest is great; it’s like a support group for IT folks. Here are some of the things that have happened to me in about 10 years in the field…

Our Mac users are our worst offenders for not cleaning out old email and data files that are no longer needed. (Some more than others). No one, and that means NO ONE including the President's office, is given unlimited quotas.

The electrician shook his head and assured me everything was grounded properly and that I shouldn't worry my "pretty little head about such technical stuff". Strike 1 for Pointy Haired Electrician (aka PHE).

Why is it that the people with the least need for storage space have the biggest offices?

User: I need help, I have a important meeting and I'm unable to show my presentation, stored on my USB stick.

Here is your highly redundant, multi-million dollar, SAN running a highly-available cluster ensuring that all data and services such as GroupWise are always available to the business.

It was my 15th anniversary of working for my company. My manager/director at the time organized a lunch in my honor for his management group (about 10 people). A date and time was settled on and a meeting place designated to gather and travel to car pool to the restaurant.

All I can say is thank goodness for salvage!

RR wrote: There's a Dark, Ugly Side of IT Guys too. Sample: Nobody really trusts anybody! I know a guy who was in the department for 8 years, and they never really gave him the ability to change passwords for the users he served. They wanted to keep the numbers down on who could do this to 2 or 3 people… If we all took vacations at the same time, it was a nightmare for the users who forgot or didn't change their passwords before they were forced to change them. Users were locked out until an administrator could be reach on their vacation.

Pointy Head: "I can't save files to the server."
IT Guy: "Hmm..It appears VP Fred has filled it up with his entire collection of birthday podcasts."

One day our Help Desk received a call from an irate teacher indicating that they were not able to save their report cards and they had no doubt that the problem was caused by "The Computer Guy" who had been spotted in the school the day before.

“No problem. Your I’ll reset your password to the word password with a capital P, and a zero for the 0. Once you log in you’ll be prompted to change it.”

( long pause )

“I’ll make sure I typed it right… OK… For your password type capital P, lower case a s, lower case s, lower case w, the number zero, lower case r, lower case d.”

TS: Am I to understand that the only copy of your book manuscript is
small enough to fit on a floppy; and the only copy is now jammed in your
machine?

PHP: Well, you don't need to say it that way.

RR wrote: Oh this is just a little of my collection! Sample: "You're the IT guy, you should know how to do all this stuff.... NOW! By the way I need to re-arrange my office space, can you help me move this heavy desk?"

When the primary file server at my Fortune 50 company ran out of file space and crashed, hamstringing some 6,000 employees, the Novell engineering team was called to the Director of IT’s office… the PHB. This was the first time “The Problem” occurred.

In our environment, we start all users off with a 200 MB personal "H" drive disk quota. If users need more space, we usually increase their quota as long as it's work-related materials.

While investigating the RFP for a backup vendor, an assistant manager explained that the current solution was not working, getting up, banging on the table and yelling "NDMP doesn't work".