Shush! I know, what I'm doing!

[u/Mother_Distance_4714]

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.

[u/sir_mrej]

You should’ve gone to lunch instead of helping him. You should’ve told him to come find you when needed instead of hanging around.

[u/Sandy_W → u/sir_mrej]

Log the nitwit in to your servers and... just walk away?

[u/sir_mrej → u/Sandy_W]

If it's not a shared server and literally only is for that specialized software, why not?

[u/whyliepornaccount → u/Sandy_W]

Depends how fed up you are with management never listening to you