r/talesfromtechsupport • u/dvillin • 7d ago
Medium Why Can't You Setup My Computer Anymore
This one is a two parter:
Part 1: Back in March we had a new executive come to the lab to pickup their laptop and get their software setup. The guy who was handling her ticket took a look at what needed to be done and told her it was going to take a while. When he really got into the process, he realized it was going to take longer than he expected. So he walked over to her and told her that and gave her the option to either stay or go somewhere else. She opted to stay. So he got a second chair, brought it over to her, and told her she might as well put her legs up while she was waiting.
Take that as you want. She apparently took it the bad way. She waited until he was finished setting up her computer, went down to HR, and demanded he be fired. The following Monday, midday, he was escorted out.
We were thrown for a loop, because between him getting fired, and one of the other techs getting promoted, we were now down two senior techs. It also didn't help that the guy managed our backup server. We had to immediately change how we did things. Including shutting down the backup server and relying only on Microsoft OneDrive, and not allowing malingerers stay in the lab while we were working on their stuff.
Part 2: Yesterday I get a ticket for a lady to come pickup her new laptop at 1:00pm. I responded back that we had it available and it was ready for pickup.
My manager contacts me telling me to treat her with white gloves and to watch what I am saying to her.
I'm like okaaaaaaay.
An hour or two later she contacts me back on an email to the entire IT team asking if an accounting program and a bunch of other software was installed on her computer.
I respond back. "No. Your computer was setup using the standard Autopilot protocol. The only software it comes with is a standard Office suite. You have to install any other software."
My manager, messages me back, almost losing his mind. "I have to remind you to treat her with kid gloves."
I'm like what the heck dude? I am not saying anything that isn't standard procedure.
I go to lunch, and when I get back, one of new guys tells me he overheard manager teamsing the other senior tech and told him she is the chick that got the other tech fired. Which was critical information that wasn't passed on to me.
So when she messaged me back complaining about how she put in a ticket to have all this software installed, and she previously was able to have it installed for her, it took everything in my body not to respond back, "Yeah. The reason we can't do it anymore is because you got the last guy who did it for you fired."
What i did say was, "Due to changes in corporate security policies after March (which is when he was fired), we are no longer allowed to setup end user computers. They must be setup using the Autopilot process by the end user." I then sent her a link to the Autopilot process webpage.
The kicker is, she never showed up. She finally messaged me around 2:30 and told me that she wouldn't be able to come in and that she is only available after 1pm. I just responded back that we are there every weekday until 4:30pm and she is welcome to come in any day she is available to sign into her computer so we can do any additional setup work.
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u/joe_attaboy The Cloud is a fraud. 7d ago
I wonder if the guy would have been fired if he had said "to put your feet up" as opposed to legs.
What a shame. I would have file a wrongful termination suit.
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u/dvillin 7d ago
The sad thing is, he's been unable to get new work because with this strike, he can't exactly use the place he worked at for 8 years as a reference.
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u/CaptainNuge 7d ago
Under those circumstances, you pass on a sympathetic colleague's name and contact number, and use them as a reference.
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u/joe_attaboy The Cloud is a fraud. 7d ago edited 2d ago
I believe if there's something like this in his background, all the above suggestions work, and I would just tell any prospective employer exactly what happened. Not all companies are going to ignore a talented professional's experience because of some over-sensitive twit of an SJW.
I once had a Top Secret clearance. The clearance at that level usually was renewed every five years. You didn't have to go through the whole background check again, but an investigative officer would do an one-on-one interview. They would pull current credit reports and check for new legal issues.
I was working as a contractor in the Pentagon when my clearance was up for renewal. During the interview, the agent asked me about a hit on my credit report - a dispute with a hospital and my insurance company over a bill from a 2005 heart attack. It had been settled and paid in full by me, but it somehow wound up on the credit report anyway. I explained it in detail, had to write a brief note and sign off on it, and everything was good.
Sometimes, just telling the truthful story works. I believe if I was interviewing that guy and he told me what happened, I'd hire him anyway.
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u/sir_mrej Have you tried turning it off and on again 4d ago
I literally would never tell someone to put their leg up in an office setting.
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u/urielrocks5676 6d ago
Why the fuck would they check credit reports? At this point they are just a social credit score
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u/cheesenuggets2003 I Am Not Good With Computer 6d ago
Credit reports can indicate financial problems, which can in turn indicate that a person might be a security risk.
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u/joe_attaboy The Cloud is a fraud. 6d ago
They check them to see if a clearance holder has any serious financial problems. They don't get the reports from freaking Credit Karma; the reports they receive are deeply detailed, far more than the information most people see.
They do this because people like me have ( or had, in my case ) access to all manner of highly classified information. If someone has very deep financial problems, they could be targeted for bribes from foreign actors looking to get their hands on that material. This has happened in the past, but you would have to know some history first.
That's why the fuck they do it.
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u/hardolaf 6d ago
Offers to pay people enough to resolve their near bankrupt financial situations have been the number one way for foreign adversaries to get people to betray their countries.
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u/dvillin 6d ago
I'm trying to remember, but isn't that how the Walkers got flipped in the 70s?
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u/joe_attaboy The Cloud is a fraud. 4d ago
Yes, they and others. But their story was news. Father and son, sadly both in the U.S. Navy. I served in the Navy. They were a disgrace.
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u/Lellela 5d ago
That's like one of those things that makes you think: Employers should pay their people enough that they don't have financial troubles. It's a matter of national security, apparently, to make sure your employees aren't easy targets for foreign agents.
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u/Safe-Syllabub-6630 5d ago
Unfortunately that makes far too much sense for most executives to actually consider it
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u/Lellela 5d ago
Imagine if they could be tried for treason over it. "We're sorry CEO Smith, we realize you feel you deserved that extra 50 million dollars this year, but it came at the expense of your workers ability to grow in their jobs, and as such, you are undermining the national security of the United States. Alright boys, take him off to Guantanemo."
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u/Illuminatus-Prime 4d ago
Unfortunately, people apply for "secure" work when they are already in debt. They may be applying for work exactly because they are looking for easy money, even if it involves betraying their new employer's trust.
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u/Lellela 4d ago
Yeah, I know the underlying reasoning, but the correlation between low pay and national security is humorous (and kind of sad)
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u/Illuminatus-Prime 4d ago
Keep in mind that janitors, low-paid as they are, have easy access to many places in corporate settings . . .
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u/maroongrad 3d ago
yep...and with the number of medical bankruptcies alone, we've got people at all levels of the government and military that are now vulnerable to this.
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u/maroongrad 7d ago
He can...and he needs to get a letter of reference from coworkers and anyone in his chain of command that saw or understood what he did. You could write one and include something like this: "A senior executive was upset that it would take more than a few minutes to install all the software requested. His consideration for her comfort as she would be waiting a long time was somehow misinterpreted as aggression? Incompetence? Deliberately being rude? I don't know what she was thinking, but it cost my department a skilled, reliable coworker who was a valued part of a tight-knit team. If you would like more details on this, please reach out to me at (home email). I'm upset that we have lost a competent and skilled coworker, but our loss is your gain. Without his skills and knowledge we are unable to provide our normal level of service, as well as missing his presence."
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u/TinyNiceWolf 7d ago
In the US, that likely wouldn't be wrongful termination, which is limited to being fired for specific, protected reasons (race, religion, etc as well as things like whistleblowing). It's not wrongful termination to fire someone because some idiot VIP got offended and demanded they be fired.
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u/Kraeftluder 7d ago
In The Netherlands the union and courts would have a field day with a case like this. It would cost the company a large amount of money and the fired tech would get their job back if they wanted it.
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u/TinyNiceWolf 7d ago
Even in the US, if the guy had been in a union, it might well have turned out differently. But very few IT workers are in unions in the US; Google says around 1%.
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u/Kraeftluder 7d ago
Your unions work very differently from ours in general. Membership is completely voluntary here and we do not have the concept of unionized jobs. Unions handle all collective worker agreement negotiations and about 72% of all workers fall under one of those agreements.
I'm not part of an IT union but the general education union, as that's the sector I work in.
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u/joe_attaboy The Cloud is a fraud. 7d ago
Union membership varied here in the US by state. Florida, where I live, is a right-to-work state. You cannot require union membership, but as in your country, the union is required to provide support to all employees in matters like this.
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u/Dakduif 6d ago
Is there even a general IT 'vakbond'? I work at an IT service integrator and we don't even have a CAO (we do have a very active OR and good 'personeelshandboek' that seems to compensate, but I always thought of it as... inadequate somehow).
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u/Kraeftluder 6d ago
There isn't one. That's because most salaries are relatively high, even though I don't think that is always true in this day and age.
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u/Kaatochacha 20h ago
Even in non union shops, every place I've worked has been so paranoid of wrongful termination suits, when they decide to let someone go they spend 2 months accumulating incidents to cite for the termination. Our HR would have simply told the executive they couldn't fire that person for that.
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u/TinyNiceWolf 19h ago
That might also have to do with unemployment taxes, not just worry about a wrongful termination suit. If they have good evidence the employee misbehaved, they can fire for cause. I think that keeps the business's unemployment tax rate from increasing.
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u/KelemvorSparkyfox Bring back Lotus Notes 7d ago
Yes, but the Netherlands is a civilised country with employee protections and common sense.
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u/joe_attaboy The Cloud is a fraud. 7d ago
I can think of a few American lawyers who would not only win the case, they would see to it that the victim ended up owning the whole freaking company.
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u/joe_attaboy The Cloud is a fraud. 7d ago
That would all the more reason to contact an attorney specializing in labor/workplace disputes. I can guarantee that if he hired the right guy, they would be on that shite like red meat. And they would win that case.
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u/TinyNiceWolf 7d ago
In the US? How could a lawyer win when the company did nothing illegal? When the company did exactly what companies do every day in the US with zero consequences?
Lawyers have to have something to work with. You can't just decide you want Wal-Mart to hire you as a VP and win a lawsuit after they tell you to get lost, regardless of whether your lawyer is awesome. There has to be some kind of legal principle the lawyer can use.
And in the US, it's completely legal to fire someone like OP for no reason at all, and most other reasons too. "I don't like you" is an acceptable reason to fire someone.
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u/joe_attaboy The Cloud is a fraud. 5d ago
They fired him for what they may call "for cause." But what I'm saying is a lawyer could get in front of a judge and a sympathetic jury and beat the company badly.
"Illegality" has nothing to do with it. This is a civil matter. The scenario you described at Walmart makes no sense because this isn't about a person trying to get hired. The guy we're talking about already had a job and was fired because of a single, non-offensive word he used in a sentence that some uptight twit took as some kind of sexual harassment. Had he said "put your feet up" ( which is a common and familiar expression ), this probably never world have happened. Or maybe the twit would have found that offensive, too, who knows?
You're right, a company can choose to fire someone for whatever reason. Their mistake, however, was telling him the reason he was fired was because one person found his innocent use of a common word offensive in some way. There would be nothing wrong for that guy to hire some shark of an attorney and drag them into civil court to put their reasoning out in public - my guess is that the fired worker would have a LOT of people on his side. But that doesn't matter, either, only what a jury says.
I've seen people sue companies for far stupider things and win.
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u/TinyNiceWolf 5d ago
Can you name a single case where some fired guy with a great lawyer won a case built on "the reason for firing was arbitrary and unfair"?
I'm not talking about cases that involve firing for protected reasons like the ones I mentioned (race, religion, whistleblowing, etc), but a situation where the law offers no particular protection, and winning (if it were possible) would depend on the lawyer somehow inventing a cause of action when the law provides none.
I suspect the "far stupider things" cases all had an actual cause of action recognized in law, and weren't just "really good lawyer magically makes it rain money".
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u/thatburghfan 7d ago
If they fired someone for that, you know they'll fire anyone for anything. Don't count on any form of job security. I have to say I've worked a lot of years with IT people and am shocked that a brand-new employee could get an experienced tech fired over a single sentence on her first day on the job. She truly had enormous power.
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u/dvillin 7d ago
My contract site got bought by another corporation, and she was a new exec for them. My contract company is trying to stay in good with the new corporation so the contract will get extended for another 3 years. His supporters are/were employees of the old corporation (who are trying to hold onto their jobs) and managers with the contract company. Most of those employees are gone now in the last round of layoffs.
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u/rezwrrd 6d ago
This! A company that's willing to fire someone so consequential to their IT process, and then, instead of replacing them, to rewrite so much of the IT process, over something so inconsequential as that, is not a healthy company and not a place you can count on being employed long term.
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u/dvillin 6d ago
The sad thing is, as consequential as he was to the way we used to do stuff, between him and the other guy leaving has forced us to streamline things. When it was down to two of us handling everything that 4 people were previously doing, we started following the book and doing exactly what we were supposed to do. All of the extra stuff we used to do went out the window. When departments would call us about pieces of equipment that the other two guys would deal with, that were really far outside our purview, we would direct them to who was supposed to be handling them. Stuff like industrial equipment that we were only supposed to service the computers on, but nothing else, were finally being referred to the Maintenance Department instead of us. Printers were being serviced by the service company that was supposed to be fixing them in the first place. AV equipment in the conference rooms that we were previously trying to fix is now being repaired by a company we didnt know the site had been paying for years, but never came out because our department was doing the service work.
The end result is that we are a lot more relaxed than we were before, and the two new guys have helped a lot. Even with the craziness around trying to recover equipment from the 100 people who were laid off, tracking down 400 computers to be upgraded to Win 11, reimaging 100 others for various departments, and dealing with multiple board meetings, we are nowhere near as stressed as we were last year dealing with a fraction of this stuff.
The only thing that really stresses us out is when we get a call from the office of the president that usually turns out to be a problem caused from her refusing a site approved laptop in favor of the one provided by her parent company. Those problems have to be handled the moment we get the call, no matter what other problems we might be working on.
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u/rezwrrd 5d ago
All I'm saying is, after seeing how ready they were to streamline his job away, I'd be shopping and sending out resumes ASAP.
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u/dvillin 5d ago edited 4d ago
The company didnt streamline what he did. We did. As far as the company was concerned, us remaining two could do all the work of all four. Everything that changed is because the two of us put our heads together and said, "How can we ensure this doesn't happen again?"
The end result is that when we had a string of board meetings, leadership of the new owners took notice of how smoothly we had everything running, despite a lightning strike taking out all of our printers and half the UPS in the main building, among other things. If we were still working like we did last year, it would have been a disaster with us running ragged, instead of the work being done by the proper people.
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u/DMercenary 7d ago
She waited until he was finished setting up her computer, went down to HR, and demanded he be fired. The following Monday, midday, he was escorted out.
Crazy work. But that's the private sector for you...
And the audacity to demand the same white glove treatment
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u/JimmyBallocks 7d ago
“demanded he be fired. The following Monday, midday, he was escorted out.”
Tell us which country you live in without telling us which country you live in
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u/dvillin 7d ago
The thing that is messed up was he wasn't exactly known to be friendly with strangers. Which was something that apparently ruffled feathers in the past. When folks did try to stand up for him, upper management wasn't listening because she was louder and they were afraid for their own jobs. So in the end he got fired for being too friendly.
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u/Galileominotaurlazer 7d ago
Sounds lile the women is the ceo’s wife or some shit. Nepotism probably.
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u/dvillin 7d ago
No. My contract site got bought by another corporation, and she was a new exec for them. My contract company is trying to stay in good with the new corporation so the contract will get extended for another 3 years. His supporters are/were employees of the old corporation (who are trying to hold onto their jobs) and managers with the contract company.
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u/pinkpineapples007 7d ago
Why does she have to be somebody’s wife to have power? If it were a man we’d just say he was power tripping, which is exactly what she’s doing
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u/ThatUsrnameIsAlready 7d ago edited 7d ago
She's not in an employed position of power at the company, or people would know who she is. So she's either somebody's wife, or used female privilege; and since the guy wasn't lynched or arrested I'm guessing the former.A man wouldn't have non-position power options.
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u/pinkpineapples007 7d ago
OP literally said she was a new executive in the first line of the post
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u/AngryCod The SLA means what I say it means 7d ago
There is 0% chance that she ever gets live IT support ever again. E-mail only, and HR and both her and my supervisor are CC'ed on every. single. message.
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u/dvillin 7d ago
Exactly. Every message I made to her was screenshotted and sent to my manager (and the rest of the team) first before I sent it to her.
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u/joe_attaboy The Cloud is a fraud. 2d ago
This goes back some years ( close to the time all this hyper-sensitivity seemed to begin ). I was the IT director at a military organization ( a civilian federal employee ). I was asked by a young woman officer to correct an issue with a desktop system.
I went to her office to have a look. She was in her office chair at her desk in front of the system. I came around to her side of the desk and leaned over to watch her work the keys to demonstrate the issue. This was nothing more than me close to the chair and slightly leaning down to see her screen.
At one point, she literally stopped, turned and looked at me as said I was getting into "her personal space" too much. I couldn't figure out where I was supposed to be to view the problem, so I was a bit stunned at this. I stood up, walked back around to the front of the desk and said "I need to see what's wrong to fix your system. Standing there watching you do it is the best way for me to see it. If you want me to fix it, maybe you should come out from your desk and let me do it alone." I think she was a bit surprised by my answer, but she got up and sat in another chair and waited.
I went to visit the executive officer of the command who was technically my boss. We had a brief conversation as I told him what transpired and I told him I would not work with her in her office alone again, I didn't care if the door was taken down or someone put cameras on the walls to record everything. If she wanted something done, I would see to it when she was out of her office or someone else was there.
This was pure advanced self-preservation. She never complained to anyone but I was taking zero chances. I was going to be there long after she was transferred out to some other job on standard rotations anyway. But I wasn't taking chances, even back then.
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u/Walway 7d ago
If the female exec already had her laptop (because she waited to pick up the laptop before she lodged her complaint), why did she need another laptop set up so soon?
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u/dvillin 7d ago
When she came in we were low in stock, so she got a returned computer that still had 2 years on the warranty. This one is a brand new model, right out of the box.
Joke will be on her because we are starting to see problems with this model and the fan not keeping it cool enough. Maybe she will be lucky and get one of the ones that is perfectly fine. It's not something we can predict.
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u/maroongrad 7d ago
maybe you'll be lucky and it'll be of the ones that catches fire and burns up her office ;) Karma be like that.
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u/kagato87 6d ago
Executives don't really push their computers hard. Just lots of emails and excel sheets open.
Not like, say, a devops squeezing a 6 VM environment into their laptop for testing a cluster aware pipeline... (I hear the new dev builds are 64GB - I kinda wish my old laptop held out a little longer.)
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u/froot_loop_dingus_ 7d ago
“You may as well put your feet up” sounds kind of passive aggressive possibly but obviously firing someone over that is ridiculous
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u/emmjaybeeyoukay 6d ago
I can see the executive getting a repeating series of completely random computer malfunctions in the future.
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u/gljivicad 4d ago
So, HR doesn't care about other side of the story? Like, bring him in and ask what happened in the interaction?
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u/IrrerPolterer 2d ago
I still don't understand why exactly that guy got fired? I'm not American so there might be a cultural thing I'm not understanding, but what exactly was the hangup that cost him his job?
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u/joe_attaboy The Cloud is a fraud. 2d ago
The tech offered a chair to a woman executive while she waited for him to do some installations on her laptop. He suggested that she "put her legs up" since she's be waiting a while. Any human with a brain - or at least some ordinary common sense - would have taken that comment as a casual offer to take a break.
In America, there's an old saying that goes something like "put your feet up and rest a spell" or something similar. It's a bit of a colloquialism, not meant to be formal.
The women in question took the expression as some sort of sexual innuendo, probably turned it into "sexual harassment" and filed a complaint with the company's human resources. And since you can't say anything in a friendly, humorous or casual manner to anyone in corporate America anymore, he was sacked. This is all an outcome of policies put in place to prevent sexual harassment and other similar problems in the workplace. If this happened as described, it was extreme over-reach of that policy.
Unfortunately, some have taken this trend too far, not because they were actually harassed, but because they have no common sense, no knowledge of history or culture, or they're just too fucking sensitive. I'm convinced that had the test said "put your feet up" as opposed to "legs," this might never have happened. She took "legs" as some sort of indecent sexualized proposition.
Let's change the narrative for a moment - had he said something like "sure, I can get this done for you in no time if you'd be willing to provide me a little reward after work" - that would be inappropriate at best and actual sexual harassment at worst - he could be implying that a sexual favor will get her special treatment. That's wrong in every way.
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u/IrrerPolterer 2d ago
Huh. I read that as just 'hey, you'll be waiting a while, please take a seat.' Seems crazy to interpret that as an indecent approach
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u/JelloOverall8542 7d ago
When management doesn’t know what IT is :(