Monday, August 8, 2005

Clientcopia.com - funny story of a computer user

I found this on clientcopia.com - an aggregate of aggravations caused by clients in the IT world. This particular one is about a computer user at a University:

I was IT support for a major East Coast university. Part of my responsibilities was keeping the corporate training rooms up and running. As a classroom, our instructors were provided with monitoring software to view what was on the clients' screens. I got this call from one of our instructors (a competent,intelligent individual).

Instructor: Mike, please come up and explain to this user WHY she is being removed from the class.

Me: Huh?

Instructor: You need to come up for this. Trust me.

So I go on up and see what the problem is. Often the job of IT support is to referee between the knowledgeable and the clueless. The student and the instructor are out in the hall. Both are irate.

Instructor: This user has violated our acceptable practices policy, and is being removed.

Student (female, corporate lawyer): The instructor is lying! The computer is off! You can't prove anything!

Me: Ma'am, I have never known this person to lie, but I will be happy to verify the problem.

We go back into the classroom, and the first place I look is on the instructor's workstation. I see a constantly running series of lesbian porn videos playing on this student's PC. I quickly checked the time/date stamps, and all had been downloaded in the previous two hours.

Student (at her desk): See? My computer is off.

Me (in front of the class, loudly): No, ma'am, your monitor is off. Your PC is still running fine. Would you like me to display for the class the disputed videos?

Instructor(stifling a laugh): I don't think that would be wise.

Student: You can do that?

Me:Yes, I can.

Student: I'll leave now.

The funny twist of the story is that the woman in question is the corporate lawyer responsible for setting up the acceptable practices policies!