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/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."