Last week, I wrote a feature was called Stupid User Tricks (http://www.infoworld.com/article/06/04/13/77021_16FEusergoofs_1.html), an anecdotal study on how to protect your infrastructure from not-so-smart user moves. Although I had a number of such stories myself, I decided it'd be fun to open the thing up to readers; so I held a little backpack giveaway (http://weblog.infoworld.com/smbit/archives/2006/03/the_stupid_huma.html) for the best snippets of snarky user fun. The results are worth a read.
Unfortunately, the deal with the editors required that all entries have something to do with protecting a network, not a workstation, which left out a number of good stories because they came from help desk personnel, the poor folks who deal with user logic day in and day out. It didn't sound 100 percent fair to leave these folks out entirely, so I figured I'd pick a couple of the best ones and share them here.
First, one of mine: This is the tale of the executive editor for a technical magazine (no, not InfoWorld -- further back in the misty forests of time) who harried a desktop admin into getting him a brand new Toshiba Tecra with the (then) new Windows 95 on it. The notebook cost more than US$6,000, and the editor had it for less than two days before it went back for a rebuild because he deleted several important files from the System directory -- no real reason why. I was in his office when the tech returned the notebook, a sulky look on his face. He sternly warned the editor to leave the Windows stuff alone. The editor nodded and thanked him.
I'm in the guy's office the very next day when the tech shows up. Editor hands him back the notebook, saying it's dead. The poor admin does a bad job hiding his annoyance and asks what's wrong with it. Editor hems and haws for a while before letting it slip that the thing stopped working after he did some "clean up." The admin heaves a sigh, squeezes his eyes shut, and asks what "clean up" means. Turns out it means that the editor didn't like the fact that there were two directories for DLLs in Windows -- one 16-bit and one 32-bit. So he combined them into one folder. Strangely, the system can't reboot. I thought the tech was going to slug somebody.
Larry Kahn submitted one that was too long for the feature. Seems one of his users brought a notebook back -- dead -- saying he had no idea why it stopped working. Larry gets into it with him, and it turns out he decided to take the corporate notebook on a romantic vacation with his wife. To get in the mood, the couple decides that hubby should paint the wife's toenails. In the process, he spills an entire bottle of nail polish remover onto an open laptop. He tries to clean it out, but the stuff pretty much melts several critical motherboard components.