When I first started, the director of IT at the time ordered a WiMAX provider as our ISP, and left soon after. The IT shop was moved into the Finance and Administration department. One day, the director there came in and told me that there was a visitor who wanted to get Internet access from his laptop wirelessly. I informed him that we don't have a wireless network set up in the office.

This story takes place 5 (1999) years later from “Beware of Menacing Managers” in the “Back in the Day” Section.

Well the fire imspector for our company retired, and the new guy was very young, and wanted to prove he was better than the old guy. He came in a decided that Power strips plugged into extension cords that led to the UPS were unsafe, and gave us three weeks to replace them.

Not really IT related, but the recent stories about power-failures reminded me of one my dad told me.

This little story starts back in '05. I was working at a small IT help desk that worked on rapid, deployable systems. Nothing really fancy, just a desktop with a large 20'' monitor, 2 160GB removable drives, and an UPS. The software came preloaded out of the shop so that all the user had to do is follow the little brochure that the help desk cooked up to plug it all together.

While at my previous job, I got & accepted an offer at another company. I was quite thrilled by this, as my then-current job was pretty bad. So, I notified my immediate supervisor. After getting over her shock (this was completely unexpected, as I had been very discrete in my job hunting), she went to tell the I/S director.

In the server room at our somewhat small business we have a server, a PBX and a paging system. If we lose power, when the power comes back on the paging system draws to much juice and pops the breaker to half the room, including the phone system. The UPS system can hold it for about 30 minutes, then the system crashes.

The Management funda has always been unchanged, neverthless after being bullet ridden for so many years now I am bullet proof.

So the bossman asks for a new report to track a lot of plant floor statistics. Being an Access guru, I ask if he wants to add a table to an existing database to track the new bits of info. No, he says, just put it in Excel. With a sigh, I go to building an Excel spreadsheet. Then, a few months later, he wants to know if we can add some info from one of our Access databases.

We recently hired a Customer Service Supervisor that had a laundry list of experience in the Help Desk and Supervisory areas. As a person talks with him it's very evident that he has worked at every company in the U.S. and Europe.