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This week, reader “Earl” tells us that just this year he responded to “a Craigslist ad for a Novell NetWare Admin to figure out why .nlm files would not be loaded and fix the issue.”
[...] The return call came “almost instantly” and Earl “gave them my expensive price and advised them that I was not the first choice for a NetWare admin, but I had extensive system troubleshooting experience.”
Those caveats didn't matter: the person who placed the ad said he's run it for months and months and never had a reply from anyone in the USA. Earl was just 90 minutes away by train and got the gig.
When Earl visited the site, he was told that an electrical storm had taken out the NetWare server and Windows 95/98 clients. Said server was a Dell PowerEdge 1300 with 64MB of RAM and a 10GB IDE hard drive. Earl reckons it was built in 1997 or 1998, so was a bit taken aback when told this was “the new server”.
[...] Next came a request to boot up the Compaqs, which had power supply and fan failures. A request to swap the disks from the dead Compaqs was not something Earl could do, as they had tossed out the necessary SCSI cables a few years back.
Earl was asked to do all of these things so the company could run its bespoke accounting program, which was written for it in 1993.
The developer, it turned out, had died in 2001. But the source code was in the company safe … on about 2000 pages of dot matrix printer paper. And there were backups of the old data … on 20 years worth of floppy disks and a pair of CD-ROMs.
[...] Earl told the company that they'd need a working server, running NetWare, before he could even begin to contemplate the task of typing in the source code so he could see if the backups could be restored. Then he'd have to hope that a Pascal compiler could cross-compile for NetWare to have even a chance of setting things to rights.
To the company's credit, it tried hard to meet his requests. Two weeks later Earl says he returned to the company, where a working PowerEdge 1300 with a PCI network awaited.
[...] But he didn't have his own monitor.
[...] He somehow got to work. DOS 6.22 and all the device drivers “installed like a charm”. NetWare 4.1 installed. It was seen by both Windows 95 and 98 on the frail network. Now it came time to restore the application.
But it turned out that the stack of disks contained only data, not the application. Even the 10MB disk from the “old” server was uselessly corrupted.
Earl tried to explain this problem, but the client was having none of it and showed him the door.
Earl tells The Register the client owes him about US$5,000.00 for his time and is showing no signs of paying up. At least he didn't have to re-type all that source code: perhaps there weren't enough keyboards in the office!
(Score: 4, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 06 2016, @02:22PM
Welcome again to On-Call, our Friday wallow in jobs that are nastier than yours.
I once had a supervisor who informed me that creating shortcuts on my desktop was "destruction of government property", and threatened to have me refereed to the DOJ for investigation. Her office was next door to mine with a window partition. I would occasionally glimpse her typing to a blank screen during my sanctioned potty breaks.
I believe my soul consumed itself at some point during her tutelage.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 06 2016, @03:46PM
Heh. Call center AC here. One of the things I remember was that we weren't allowed to open notepad or calc even though those would have been incredibly helpful. Co-worker nearly got fired for using notepad to keep track of details about his caller's problem instead of using scrap paper.
I think I can picture your old boss exactly. Probably obese, right? Avid churchgoer? Babysits instead of manages?
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Marand on Saturday August 06 2016, @09:36PM
I once had a supervisor who informed me that creating shortcuts on my desktop was "destruction of government property", and threatened to have me refereed to the DOJ for investigation
Sounds like someone I worked for once. There was this Windows 95 system (well after it was out of support, mind; it was that kind of place) with so many files in the "My Documents" folder that you couldn't even look in it without the file manager exploding, and I got tasked with figuring out the problem. So I fixed it, moved the files (old reports, crap like that) into subdirs by date, showed what I did and where I put everything, and got a "good job, thanks" when everything worked properly again. Would have been a nice story if it had ended here, but no.
A day later, I got accused of deliberately breaking the computer and hiding files for "job security".
It turns out she only knew how to open files from the 'Recent Documents' menu and had no idea how to actually access files, so she had been opening the same ~8 year old doc from that menu every day for years. So, when the file got moved to a dated subdir, I got accused of deleting company data to deliberately interfere with her job. Despite showing where I put the files and how to access them when I did it, and showing it again after being accused of deleting it.
That wasn't even the worst thing I dealt with there, but it was the only one relevant to the topic. I got sick of everyone being used as a scapegoat for her incompetence (and her boss protecting her no matter what) and walked out on that job not long after.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 06 2016, @10:46PM
There was someone like that at my old job. The worse part is that we all suspected (and I do mean "all," as most people who had to deal with her regardless of department) that some of that was actually purposeful "incompetence." My suspicion is that one day, one of the techs went full on BOFH on her and remoted in to her computer at night and changed a single formula in an Excel document in her MRU list. Took about a month for the problem to trickle up and get traced back to her. She couldn't handle the idea that she made a mistake and it blamed it everywhere. Her boss, trying to protect her dug through everything to blame someone else. Except, all the evidence pointed to her: the remote log was empty, the email archive of IT activity didn't mention it, the file access log had nothing, there were no "smoking-gun" emails, the changed numbers obviously came from her, and the numbers from Excel were put down on a paper report required for auditing. The higher-ups ended up getting rid of her and the boss for "wasting their time" with the witch hunt. The only reason I suspect sabotage is that the mistake didn't make sense for her to make, given what the content and purpose of the workbook was; not that I'm too broken up at the fallout.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Marand on Sunday August 07 2016, @04:12AM
The worse part is that we all suspected (and I do mean "all," as most people who had to deal with her regardless of department) that some of that was actually purposeful "incompetence."
This part of your story sounds very much like the situation in my story. She'd be the one to set up schedules and then later "oh, I can't do that, I have a thing" and make someone else cover her ass. Constantly. To the point that she was probably not even working 20 hours a week. Acted like it was a mistake or something special came up every time, but bullshit on that.
And, despite shit like that, and her screwing up everything she touched (especially on a computer), her boss kept covering her ass. Did anything it took to deflect criticism. I went into overtime covering her work, and he asked me why. When I mentioned I hit it due to covering for her because she was constantly fucking off and skipping work, he told me I better find a way to do her job WITHOUT going into overtime next time and then quickly changed the subject.
It was like that constantly, not just for me but anybody else dealing with her. She was untouchable, because they were friends outside of work and had worked together for years. I heard things fell apart after I quit, because she still wasn't showing up for work half the time and nobody else would cover for her after I left. Yet she never got fired.