Asklemmy

I used to work at a company with a...slightly incompetent...IT department. A couple stories:

We had a problem with the company network crashing, about once a week. It was an ongoing problem for almost a year.

The engineering department used Unix based CAD workstations. The rest of the company used Windows. To run Windows apps, we engineers had a Citrix server that would we would remote into, and run Office apps from there. One day, one of the engineers discovered an admin app that would let users logged into the Citrix machine to send instant messages to any other user. It was both useful, and abused, because the messages weren't tagged with a sender. You could pretend to be anybody.

One day, an outside IT contractor (the internal IT department was incompetent, so they hired a contractor) discovered a log of all the messages. He came into Engineering, and just told us the log existed, and to be more 'professional' when sending messages.

He must have told the IT manager, because next I know, the entire department is called into the VP's office, interrogated about the IM app, and sent home while they decide what to do. Sent home without pay.

Over the next few days, engineers were called in one-by-one for meetings with HR. Turns out, the IT manager told HR we were using the IM app to purposefully crash the network. Never mind that the contractor told her that wasn't possible. She was intent on finding a scapegoat.

HR decides to suspend everyone without pay for a week. But nobody is fired because there's no proof and no "confession". While everyone is out (I found out later) the network crashes.

Things get back to normal, time passes, and a couple months later, the network just stops crashing. No more problems. It turns out, IT had installed the wrong printer driver for the engineering plotter in another department. This other department only used the plotter about once a week, so they just used the plotter in engineering. It was overwhelming the network whenever it was used. This was fixed quietly, without fanfare. We engineers only found out about it a few years later, after the IT manager left the company.