Monday, January 25, 2021

Tech Support Employee Gets Fired And Unfired On Same Day


It sounds like this unfortunate tech support employee was stuck muddling through a gig that suffered the inevitable pitfalls of having an incompetent manager on duty. Honestly this dude J sounds like a complete waking nightmare to work alongside. We're just glad to hear that this dude was able to get out of the toxic job eventually. 

Check out another tech support horror story with this company that insisted on their server not being fixed, and then the fallout that ensued. 

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Font - r/talesfromtechsupport + Join u/Blempglorf · 3y 1 How I got fired and un-fired in the same day. Long r/ALL So this one goes back to '99 or so. I was working in the corporate headquarters of a very large telco, responsible for the email system for HQ - about 1100 users at the time. Like all the sysadmins at HQ, I was a contractor, working through a bodyshop outsourcer. My boss was a guy l'll call S. S was the site manager for the outsourcer, and was the direct manager of all the contractor

2.

Font - The customer contact was a guy l'll call J. J was what they called an IT planner - basically a systems architect. He had dotted-line responsibility over all the sysadmins, including me. I also had a backup there, who l'll call B. B was a competent sysadmin, capable of handling most day to day stuff. We normally kept staff in the office from 8-6 on workdays, with an on-call rotation for certain specialty areas, including email. Back then, we carried a pager (yes, an old school beeper) for

3.

Font - J informed me that there was an email outage, and that I needed to remote in and get it back up immediately, and then drive to the office to start a root cause analysis. I informed him that I was in no condition to drive (let alone touch a production rig) and asked what B told him when he called the on-call pager. J told me that he didn't call the oncall pager because this was way too serious of a problem to trust the backup sysadmin. He wanted me working on this, and that if I can't be r

4.

Font - The next morning I had an email from B, telling me that J had called him at home (rather than paging the oncall rotation.) It was a very simple issue - our backup software went screwy and started writing out hundreds of GB of temp files, which filled up a critical volume on our production email server. Temp files deleted, email services restarted, problem kicked over to our backup software SME to figure out what happened. Total downtime after B got the call was about 15 minutes. The next

5.

Font - J then demands that I hand my office badge to him, and calls security from S' phone to have me escorted out of the building. I'm in absolute disbelief at this point. S gets up and goes off to points unknown, just as security arrives to see me out to the parking lot. As l'm driving off, I see J's boss, l'll call her M. M is running across the street to the parking lot. Strange, but I was more focused on how the hellI was going to explain this to my wife when I got home.

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Font - I got home, and my wife was sitting on the couch, just absolutely livid. Now this was REALLY weird, because I hadn't told her what happened yet. "Those motherfuckers fired you!?!?!" I'm confused as hell at this point. My wife told me that M called her, and that I need to call her back as soon as possible. Come to find out, when S had went off, he was going to M's office to explain the situation and keep him from shitcanning me. M heard from S, and freaked the hell out. When I saw her runn

7.

Font - So I let them stew for a while. M called about 20 minutes after I got home. We let her go to the machine. S called as well, just as my wife and I went out to get some lunch. Over lunch, my wife and I talked about how we would handle this, and (largely for financial reasons) we decided to talk to them to see if we could work this out. We got back home to 3 more voicemails from M and S. About 30 seconds after we walked in the door, the phone rang again. This time it was J, obviously on spea

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Product - I worked there for another year after that, before another J fuckup made me leave once and for all. That was a whole 'nother story. Edit: Here's the whole 'nother story! Edit 2: Gold? Wow. Thanks, whoever you are! 7.1k 451 ↑, Share

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