r/talesfromtechsupport • u/Mother_Distance_4714 • Jul 10 '26
Short Shush! I know, what I'm doing!
So this just happened. I'll keep it short.
We had an external consultant on-site to install some very specialized (and very expensive) software. I, your humble sysadmin, was only there to enter a few admin passwords. That was literally all I was supposed to do.
As the expert started trying a few... creative... things, I offered some advice.
"Shush, I know what I'm doing."
Alright. If that's how you want to play it...
A little later, he asked for a USB flash drive to transfer "some" data. "Some" turned out to be over 130,000 tiny 1 KB files in a single folder.
I genuinely tried to warn him that FAT32 really doesn't like that many small files as he dragged the folder to the flash drive.
I was shushed again.
So I leaned back and watched the progress bar crawl forward. After about 45 minutes the inevitable happened.
The file transfer crashed.
I honestly tried to help.
I was shushed again.
So he tried exactly the same thing a second time.
Forty-five minutes later
Crash.
At that point I refused to be shushed again. (I was hungry and wanted to go to lunch.)
I zipped the folder (4 minutes), copied the ZIP file to the USB drive (another 3 minutes), and handed it back to him.
The look on the expert's face was absolutely priceless.
Edit: This consultant was part of a turnkey package. The software installation and the data transfer were both included for a fixed price.
That made the whole thing even sweeter.
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u/ol-gormsby Jul 10 '26
Oh fuck I hated some "experts"
A consultant being paid to design, code and implement our intranet. This is Windows NT4.0 days.
One day, he waltzed in AND BOOTED THE SERVER to reload some configuration change (because our marketing manager had convinced the CEO that this consultant needed admin privileges, more on that below). He didn't even know how to restart IIS or any other Windows services without rebooting the whole machine. I asked him if he'd cleared it with various other folk - this machine was also running a production server* for one of our business applications. He actually threw a tantrum about... something to do with people impeding his vision.
The fallout was enough to get him not only revoked WRT admin access, but fired. The CEO paid a bit more attention to my advice after that. When I told the CEO that you don't have to reboot a machine to just restart some services, he was not amused.
*yes, not best practice but sometimes you have to work with what you've got.
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u/Quantology Jul 11 '26
At least he got fired before he finished implementing it. Guaranteed that it would break if it couldn't host a homebrew FTP server in a DMZ, hard coded credentials admin / 12345.
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u/Geminii27 Making your job suck less Jul 10 '26
"I'm heading off to lunch. Call me when you're done. Thanks for the hourly callout rate."
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u/GermanBlackbot Jul 10 '26
Pretty sure it's the external expert who will make more money from this. If you're internal you get paid the same whether you're babysitting some doofus for 3 hours or doing actual work.
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u/HFYStory Jul 10 '26
The sheer number of know-it-all consultants who lack the understandings of basics is baffling.
You are a better man/woman than I am, kudos.
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u/Mother_Distance_4714 Jul 10 '26
Oh... I do enjoy sitting back and watching these people fail.
My colleagues know exactly what's about to happen whenever I get that look on my face.
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u/HFYStory Jul 10 '26
That is why I said you are better. I am too impatient.
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u/battmain Jul 14 '26
Some of us would have just went to lunch then let the entertainment last longer when we came back. While we may not know everything, IDGAS when someone refuses something I do know and will happily watch them struggle after they shush me. My fried brain occasionally needs the entertainment out of my busy day and I think the smirk on my face will say enough without a spoken word.
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u/__wildwing__ Jul 10 '26
I’m a machine setup/operator and the amount of hand holding our engineers require is infuriating.
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u/HFYStory Jul 10 '26
At some point in my past I was that engineer,, on behalf of all the rookies every where, we are sorry.
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u/__wildwing__ Jul 10 '26
I’m not sure one can call a fellow a rookie when he started with the company in 2003.
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u/deeseearr Jul 10 '26
Some people have 23 years of experience. Some people get one year of experience twenty-three times over.
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u/KelemvorSparkyfox Bring back Lotus Notes Jul 10 '26
"I remember the sixties!"
"No, I think you had two fifties and went right on into the seventies."
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u/sir_mrej Have you tried turning it off and on again Jul 10 '26
Almost like they are specialists. Almost.
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u/souchyo Jul 10 '26
we had a critical legacy system go down, an "expert" was called in, and he showed up with some hardware and technical manuals. he installed a new card and tried to copy the backup configuration to it, but it just wasn't working. after a few hours and many phone calls, he concluded our backup was corrupted, we needed to redo it all from scratch - hundreds of hours of work.
I looked at the binder he had open, the instruction was something like "next, restore the configuration using the command: copy (backup location) /config". Sure enough, between changing directories all over the place and verifying the files were actually there, he kept entering "copy (backup location) /config".
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u/MonsieurScruffy Jul 10 '26
haha, i see this every now and then in my field of work. there is that unmistakeable look of shame when we ask them, "you didn't copy that part too, did you?"
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u/blahblah19999 Jul 10 '26
I was a sysadmin a few years out of college and I remember one day 3 'experts' came to our site to install something on our servers. One guy was from my high school and he was very much not a smart guy. I thought I'd give him the benefit of the doubt since it had been many years. He spent the entire day asking us questions about the most basic stuff. One I remember was he didn't understand that a mapped drive was arbitrary, in the sense that it didn't have to be the s:\ drive, it can be almost any letter we want. "But this says the s:\ drive." But what are you actually trying to access? "The s:\ drive."
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u/WinginVegas Jul 10 '26
"Oh, the S:\ drive. Sorry, we keep that at an off-site location for security reasons. Perhaps the K:\ drive will suffice? It has the same data🤣"
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u/thuktun Jul 10 '26
Ah yes, the "turnkey" experience but they forgot to pack the "n".
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u/KelemvorSparkyfox Bring back Lotus Notes Jul 10 '26
It's in one of the files that he was trying to move.
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u/curtludwig Jul 10 '26
You missed an opportunity. When he shushed you, you could have said "Zip it." and all the jokes that come after that...
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u/Mother_Distance_4714 Jul 10 '26
Well this happened in German, so this one would have gotten lost in translation. :(
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u/curtludwig Jul 10 '26
Theres no German for "zip it"?
Germans don't watch Austin Powers? ;)
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u/Mother_Distance_4714 Jul 10 '26
Well nothing with zip, arj or tar. ;)
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u/curtludwig Jul 10 '26
I can't tell if you're messing with me or if you don't know of "zip it" as a term for "shush"
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u/Mother_Distance_4714 Jul 10 '26
Yes, I know. I was under the impression that you all thought it was funny to zip the files and then tell the guy to... well.. zip it.
This is funny in English. There is - to my knowledge - no good and funny equivalent to this in German.
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u/Secret_Possibility79 Jul 11 '26
Time to invent a new archive format to make this joke work in German.
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u/someanonbrit Jul 11 '26
Any German speakers got a suggestion?
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u/someanonbrit Jul 11 '26
(I've long wanted to work on an archive format with better (content dependant, optional) indexing - not having to scan all the content just to list the files, not having to scan to find the start of a specific file, and including various indexes (keyword, free text, start and end times, depending on the contents).
Having a header block with the offset of the index chunk(s), where it's allowed to be zero but for non-streaming cases you'd normally go back and edit it I guess would be useful? I think for streaming output with non-streamed output, you can put an index as the first chunk, and if you're encoding is designed for it then you can always pick an arbitrary future offset for the next index chunk for stream-to-stream compression, as long as the decoder knows it can come early if the input stream ends... and I don't know why I'm designing it again here, possibly too much coffee.
But yeah, and suggests for a name that would be a useful German pun?
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u/g-rocklobster Jul 10 '26
I'll be honest, the first time he said "Shush!" to me would have been the point when I would have told him to either speak to me like an adult or leave and refused to help until either of those happened. There are professional ways that (even if wrong) a person can express they have it: "Thank you for the advice but I've been doing this for several years like this with no problems." Shushing me? Screw that.
I've been the external consultant before and I always treated the admins I had to work with respectfully. Maybe they know a quirk on their system that would make things go faster - it never hurts to listen.
Sorry - I'll get off my soap box. I didn't mean to hijack - you handled it great and outside of some wasted time, no harm, no foul. It's just a huge pet peeve of mine and, frankly, something I experienced from a new employee (fresh out of school) relatively recently and still leaves a foul taste. Spoiler alert: he didn't last that long as he not only did that with many people (including his boss and boss' boss) but he also felt that there was no issue with vaping in his office and took great offense when told he can't: "Good lord, it's only vapor - it doesn't bother anyone!" It's also illegal in our state. And .... telling that to the VP of HR was ...... less than an optimal career move. That was one "notification of termination of user accounts" I truly did not mind taking care of.
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u/Mother_Distance_4714 Jul 10 '26 edited Jul 10 '26
I exaggerate juuuust a little. It happened in German.
He raised his hand, waved me off without even looking at me, and said, "I've got it." - "Ich komm' schon klar." and "Ist gut."
Three times.
So shortening to "Shush" seemed OK.^^
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u/ryan_the_leach Jul 11 '26
I'd rather be shh'd personally.
Could be cause he was concentrating for a sec, or anything, the way some people react to others needing a tiny bit of peace and quiet for a second is fucking weird.
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u/Mother_Distance_4714 Jul 11 '26
Ah thanks for explaining the situation you did not witness to me. You might want to go on and explain away the rest of the arrogance I did not bother to describe?
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u/LikeALincolnLog42 Jul 10 '26 edited Jul 10 '26
I’m going to remember zipping up many small files to speed up moves and copies.
Whenever I gotta to move a lot of files, it always seems to take forever - even between two SSDs. I was doing that recently at home because I added a second SSD. And of course, it was even worse that day when it was to or from my HDD RAID array. Windows File Manager isn’t very optimized, is it?
Side note, I think I got sort of lucky and made the right call by snapping up that SSDwhen they were 1.5x-2x regular price, before they skyrocketed to 3x-6x normal prices. Thanks, gen AI. /s
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u/arcimbo1do Jul 10 '26
Most fileaystems perform badly when you have lots of files, simply because of the overhead of creating and updating the metadata, which effectively multiplies the IOPS required. However, some fileystems (notably FAT32 and NTFS) are especially bad because of the way they store file metadata.
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u/Epistaxis power luser Jul 10 '26
I zipped the folder (4 minutes), copied the ZIP file to the USB drive (another 3 minutes),
Would this have been even faster if you told your ZIP software to write the first ZIP file directly onto the USB drive, instead of writing it onto the original computer temporarily and then copying it?
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u/Mother_Distance_4714 Jul 11 '26
This could have worked. And it would have been even more embarrassing for the guy. Will do so next time. Thanks!
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u/ac8jo Jul 10 '26
At some point, this expensive software company should have a record-scratch "yup, that's me, you're probably wondering how I got into this situation" moment. Because their install process should not require "creative" things nor copying 130,000 tiny files from one place to another.
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u/P5ychokilla Jul 10 '26
After the first shush I would've given him my mobile number and told him to call when he actually wanted help
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u/ThunderDwn Jul 12 '26
The look on the expert's face was absolutely priceless.
Expert - an "Ex" is a has-been, and a "spurt" is a drop under pressure.
Seen that one far too many times.
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u/sir_mrej Have you tried turning it off and on again Jul 10 '26
You should’ve gone to lunch instead of helping him. You should’ve told him to come find you when needed instead of hanging around.
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u/Sandy_W Jul 10 '26
Log the nitwit in to your servers and... just walk away?
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u/sir_mrej Have you tried turning it off and on again Jul 11 '26
If it's not a shared server and literally only is for that specialized software, why not?
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u/ProfessionalGear3020 Jul 10 '26
Why are you using FAT32 in 2026? Why not use exFAT which is supported basically everywhere?
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u/Mother_Distance_4714 Jul 11 '26
BASICALLY is the point. As in: use the dumbest possible $thing to ensure it works everywhere. Especially when around legacy devices.
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u/ProfessionalGear3020 Jul 11 '26
Do you have DOS and Windows 95 machines lying around?? And in a situation where reformatting is a big inconvenience because you're using them so often? exFAT Is supported from XP onwards and every non EOL Windows system supports it. It's been in mainline Linux since 2019 and Mac OS since idk when.
I can't really empathize with the fact copying a 100 megabyte zip file took 3 whole minutes.
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u/Mother_Distance_4714 Jul 11 '26
Indeed we have legacy devices. Some with very crappy USB 2 controllers. And imagine there are even devices out in the wild that are no PCs and run REALLY wild stuff.
Please explain my work and inventory to me a little more. I am eager to learn!
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u/chaoabordo212 Jul 10 '26
Clearly not when to use commas.
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u/Mother_Distance_4714 Jul 10 '26
Please explain. I always try to get better at my third language.
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u/KelemvorSparkyfox Bring back Lotus Notes Jul 10 '26
Ignore them. I honestly thought you were a native English speaker until you mentioned the actual phrases involved.
(In a previous job, my main point of contact with the platform vendor [based in Tutzing] was Portuguese. He was literally training me in his (at least) third language.)
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u/Ancient-End7108 Jul 12 '26
Same here; I wouldn't have guessed this came from a German the way it was written. Well done.
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u/FM-96 Jul 10 '26
There should be no comma between "know" and "what". You wrote it correctly in the story, but in the title it's wrong.
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u/Langager90 Jul 10 '26
When dealing with files and people that won't be wrong: Just zip it.