Back around the time of Katrina, I worked as a Help Desk monkey in IT for a retail chain. Well we gave the retail users an assignment that had to evacuate. They were to cover all computer equipment with tarps and the like to protect them, check in with us, and then go. Or just check in on the way out the door to evacuate if need be.

As a generic IT person for a certain retail outlet I saw a lot of weird calls, more than my share and somehow I got all the natural disaster calls. Since we had to make a new ticket per piece of hardware instead of a single ticket I wrote twelve for one store once. One of which was Tornado ripped roof off building, register five needs a new keyboard and a new roof couldn't hurt.

Like everyone, we're struggling financially right now. Things are pretty tight and if things don't turn around we may have to layoff some staff. Our VP was asking for suggestions on how to cut costs at our meeting the other day and some one suggested getting rid of things like birthday balloons, Christmas gifts, and other perks throught the year. Not a huge amount, but it all adds up.

When I got in to work this morning, my badge didn't work. With everything going on, that certainly made me nervous as I walked to the front entrance.
The admin let me in, and took my badge number. No "Your boss is waiting to see you"; just "Maybe there is something wrong with the badge system."

I calmed down.
Later, there was an email asking for the badge numbers that didn't work.

I get annoyed with requests to open a set number of ports on a firewall when the numbers don't match.
For example:
Please open the following 10 ports: 49120-49130.
I respond - Do you want:
A. Eleven ports - 49120-49130
B. Ten ports - 49120-49129
C. Ten ports - 49121-49130
For the moment you're getting:
D. None of the above.

I was doing application maintenance at a user site.
In order to compile a program on the development machine, They required me to get their IT guy to get the password out of the safe, use it to log me in for the compile, and then change the control password. Every time, every compile.....

GE has shed all of their partners that they have had over the years except for a few, could this be so that they can go after customers direct? Could be since they are sending renewals direct to customer and by passing partners to get sales.

I'm working for a research company. They schedule research shifts via a web system. I received this message today, 1/27/09:

"Your request to change or delete your shift from Friday 23 January 15:30 to 17:30 has been denied. You are still assigned to work that shift

The person processing your request made the following comment: Please ignore this message; shift in past.

About 15 yrs ago my sister Chris,was working for our State Dept of Housing. I work in IT so she would whinge to me about the poor old legacy system they had.
She complained that info would have to be rekeyed into various places, it was badly designed and it drove her crazy.
But there were more insidious problems.

Customer site was having a big cleanup and were discarding boxes of the old 8" diskettes.
Feeling nostalgic I rescued one box of diskettes.
Later showing PC savvy friends the diskettes, they were amazed and had never heard of diskettes that large.
One asked for a diskette to take to work as a stir.
Of course, yes.