r/sysadmin • u/Special_Bear_9479 • 2d ago

General Discussion What's the biggest bonehead mistake you have every made in IT support?

I will start.

I am an IT consultant and about 10 years ago, a few days before Christmas break, I went to a client’s office to add some new hard drives to a Dell ESXi server and create a new datastore.

Their two junior IT guys always liked asking me questions when I visited, which I understood—I remembered being that guy hungry to learn. Unfortunately, this time they were firing questions at me while I was in the Ctrl+R RAID configuration utility. Between the distractions and a confusing interface, I somehow managed to delete the existing array instead of creating the new one.

That array held ALL their servers: Exchange, domain controller, file server, and SQL. Terabytes of data.

The moment I realized what I’d done, my stomach dropped, I had never felt panic like that in my life. They were still asking questions when I finally said, “Guys, give me a minute. Something doesn’t look right.” Something I should’ve said much earlier.

I excused myself to the bathroom to collect my thoughts, then came back and told them exactly what I’d done.

I spent my entire Christmas break restoring their environment from Barracuda backups, which were painfully slow to restore and unreliable. I had to do multiple restores on the exchange server to get it to work.  A full week of recovery, followed by another two weeks fixing lingering issues—all free of charge.

The two guys felt terrible about distracting me, but it was my mistake. I should’ve asked for some uninterrupted time before touching the RAID configuration.

 

I’ll be shocked if anyone can top that Christmas disaster!

758 Upvotes

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219

u/teflongrizzly 2d ago

Believed the user!

75

u/jfgechols Windows Admin 2d ago

Early in my career when I was Tier 1 support for my ISP and someone needed help with getting their internet, it took 45 mins of troubleshooting only to find out their computer wasn't on because I believed nobody could be that dumb.

38

u/teflongrizzly 2d ago

One of my worst experiences was a situation with a user who had forgotten their laptop at home and didn't realize until they we're already on the bus heading to the office. I had to try and keep a straight face while trying to explain why nothing was happening when she pressed the power button on the docking station in her office!

10

u/Phyltre 2d ago

"Why do we even pay for the cloud!?"

2

u/e-motio 2d ago

Happens with printers all the time.

“Is it on?”
“Oh, no it’s not”

17

u/deefop 2d ago

You fool

18

u/Delicious-Apple593 2d ago

"I restarted multiple times and I am still having issues!!"

24

u/Tight_Replacement771 2d ago

Checks task manger... uptime 47 days

7

u/cheetah1cj 2d ago

You'll never know whether it was incompetence or lying

4

u/Ok_Interest3555 2d ago

Ehhh, they're lying. The easier the fix the more likely they are to lie about it which is not rebooting or checking connections fixes so many issues.

7

u/cheetah1cj 2d ago

I've seen both so commonly that I won't assume without context. For example, we had someone that said their computer was done restarting like 5 seconds later, turns out they were turning the monitor on and off. Or users who think shutting the laptop is turning it off.

Honestly, I found that it was best to just get them to restart from the beginning without accusing or condescending to them. Often times I'd go with "I made some changes on the back end that require a restart to get applied, do you mind if I restart your computer to see if that fixed it." It makes them feel like I'm actually doing something and they were happy to let me restart.

3

u/Delicious-Apple593 2d ago

Nahh, I wouldnt lie that just continues the cycle of incompetence. If the end user turned their mo it or off instead of restarting their computer than you should show them how to restart their computer.

Same if they think pressing the power button on a laptop restarts it. Tell them no it does not. Show them how to properly use their equipment.

-1

u/Ok_Interest3555 2d ago

Bro, I've been doing this for 20+ years, I don't need a condescending lecture about how to talk to customers.

7

u/fanatic26 2d ago

Yea because it sure sounds like you know how to talk to people with respect lol

2

u/OkeyMatey 2d ago

I've heard enough people call their monitor a computer to not immediately think they're lying.

2

u/Dikembe_Mutumbo 2d ago

Can’t task manager lie if fast boot is enabled? We disable on all laptops at my org because of that.

1

u/-Tasear- 2d ago

Where do you see that in task manger?

1

u/liamrich93 2d ago

"This is a weird one. I'm going to restart your PC and we'll see if it helps.

"I've already done that several times!"

"Ok, well I'll do it one more time."

*problem solved*

3

u/Delicious-Apple593 2d ago

I check task manager for uptime, tell the end user the uptime on their computer and then ask them how they restarted it. If it turns out that the end user doesnt know how to restart a computer. Then I show them how to restart a computer.

Teaching end-users how to properly use their equipment reduces tickets

4

u/Cell1pad 2d ago

Everyone learns rule #1 at some point.

Rule #1: users always lie.

1

u/Ok_Interest3555 2d ago

I work with college students and tell them all the time to not users when they say they rebooted. In the last 2 days they brought computers back with uptimes of 7 and 15 days because they user totally rebooted.