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Office Depot. They are still using IBM machines from the 90s with receipt printers the size of a shoebox.
A company making signage and signal lights for road construction, with 15 employees. Their former IT guy had switched all of their PC's to Linux for ideological reasons and to save money.
Then they found out that they had a long term contract for an accounting software that housed all their customer and billing data, only ran on Windows and required a server-client model.
So they hauled in the boss's private laptop which ran Windows 7, and installed both the server role, database and client software on it. When his employees needed to access the accounting software, the boss had to stop what he was doing and grant them full access to his laptop via teamviewer. When the boss's laptop was off or he was on vacation, there was no way to access any price info, customer contact info, or financial data (This was during Covid when everyone was working from home).
The laptop was set up to back up (using Windows 7's integrated backup tool) to an external drive which wasn't attached and no one remembered ever existing.
The Linux server (which was actually a gaming PC) was running and attached to an MCU when my company surveyed their infrastructure, but no one (including the former IT guy) knew the correct root password, and we never found out what it was even doing.
This is surely the worst of all.
I had another customer who wrote down all passwords to everything in an unprotected Excel sheet and uploaded it to OneDrive, with the comany's single, shared Microsoft login being [email protected] . The password was companyname in lower case letters with no 2FA.
And another one who had their server in a shared office that was inside the owner's privately owned apartment building. During the Christmas holidays, the owner turned off the heating for the office to save money, which crashed the server when temperatures dropped below freezing inside the room.
Small business IT is wild. It's one of the main reasons I quit my job at that small MSP and switched to a larger company's internal IT.
Oh God please stop.
Wow. Just wow
I know it's a bit of a silly example, but in the public school in Korea where I taught for a while, teachers would write their Windows passwords on post-its and stick them to the monitors. Haha!
I can vouch for this. My coworker has his password post it noted to his monitor now
I started a job at a university department. A previous admin had a habit of re-purposing desktop machines as servers. There were at least a dozen of them. The authentication server for the whole department was on an old Dell desktop. All of the partitions were LVM volumes, and the volume group consisted of 3 physical volumes: The internal SATA drive, a bare SATA drive in an external USB cradle, and an external USB SSD.
This is why we drink.
Iβve often had the impression that universities are the best places to cut your teeth in IT. Even though the pay isnβt great, the environments are said to be some of the most complex youβll encounter. Any credence to that?
I think that there's something to that, at least in the case of large universities which are divided into many, many organizational units. They also offer student jobs, which allow good opportunities for learning.
I had a student job with the HPC group at my university. I was working on adding features to some tools they built from the ground up, which was really fun. It's also nice to work with a bunch of PhDs that are really passionate about their area of expertise.
The IT guy wasn't really an IT guy.
A non profit where the Executive director is the only IT person (she's not tech savvy at all). It's horrific.
Given the way it works, no one who knows better can easily donate time to a charity. It's a paperwork and taxation mess to do a good thing.
I had a boss at an animation company (so not exactly a hub of IT experts, but still) who I witnessed do the following:
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Boot up the computer on her desk, which was a Mac
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Once it had booted, she then launched Windows inside a VM inside the Mac
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Once booted into that, she then loaded Outlook inside the Windows VM and that was how she checked her email.
As far as I could ascertain, at some point she'd had a Windows PC with Outlook that was all set up how she liked it. The whole office then at some point switched over to Macs for whatever reason and some lunatic had come up with this as a solution so she wouldn't have to learn a new email thing.
When I tried to gently enquire as to why she didn't just install Outlook for Mac I was told I was being unhelpful so I just left it alone lol. But I still think about it sometimes.
I'm not certain that it's still the case but several years ago Outlook for Mac was incapable of handling certain aspects of calendars in public folders shared groups and there was some difficulty with delegation send as.
At the time the best answer I had was for the Mac users to use Outlook as much as possible and then log into webmail when they needed to send us. It's been a few years so I can't help but think it's been fixed by now. Or the very least equally broken on PC.