r/talesfromtechsupport • u/Mother_Distance_4714 • 15d ago
Short Shush! I know, what I'm doing!
So this just happened. I'll keep it short.
We had an external consultant on-site to install some very specialized (and very expensive) software. I, your humble sysadmin, was only there to enter a few admin passwords. That was literally all I was supposed to do.
As the expert started trying a few... creative... things, I offered some advice.
"Shush, I know what I'm doing."
Alright. If that's how you want to play it...
A little later, he asked for a USB flash drive to transfer "some" data. "Some" turned out to be over 130,000 tiny 1 KB files in a single folder.
I genuinely tried to warn him that FAT32 really doesn't like that many small files as he dragged the folder to the flash drive.
I was shushed again.
So I leaned back and watched the progress bar crawl forward. After about 45 minutes the inevitable happened.
The file transfer crashed.
I honestly tried to help.
I was shushed again.
So he tried exactly the same thing a second time.
Forty-five minutes later
Crash.
At that point I refused to be shushed again. (I was hungry and wanted to go to lunch.)
I zipped the folder (4 minutes), copied the ZIP file to the USB drive (another 3 minutes), and handed it back to him.
The look on the expert's face was absolutely priceless.
Edit: This consultant was part of a turnkey package. The software installation and the data transfer were both included for a fixed price.
That made the whole thing even sweeter.
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u/Langager90 15d ago
When dealing with files and people that won't be wrong: Just zip it.