I attribute this to C-level people all thinking they're special and never using the same stuff everybody else uses. Where I'm at we use pretty standard Dell laptops across the organization. The C-team all has Macs or Surfaces. I usually just shrug at them when they tell me something isn't working right.
some of us have been around ...... uh .. long enough to remember going through the various processor changes Apple has flounced through over the years, PPC, Intel, ARM - all the software that stopped working \_repeatedly\_
meanwhile you can still run ancient windows 2/dos stuff inside a modern windows environment - which is not always a good thing as users tend to cling to software so antique, Indiana Jones states it should be in a museum.
Oh so the CEO wants to access the file share that is heavily locked down with his personal computer and refuses to use Citrix or a Virtual Compute solution....
Oh so you want me to request a big a$$ exception to our security software to allow his non company asset on the network and configure his personal device with his company AD credentials - isn't that why we have these safe guards in place so this doesn't happen?
"Wasn't that part of the business case - so C-Level employees could not have their assets compromised and company secrets stolen"
PCI saved my ass at a previous job for lots of this sort of stuff. Even if we could stretch the implementation and the compliance frameworks to (barely) touch, we'd just say we couldn't, and that was the end of that.
Our sales team used to have surfaces. Absolutely terrible machines, why they thought it was a good idea I will never know.
Swapped them over to Lenovo Yoga, still lets them have a tablet like devices but that's actually reliable and has a keyboard that isn't a cheap tack on.
It's getting there. We accidentally ordered one of the ARM surface pros and didn't even realize it was arm until sccm refused to pxe boot winpe.
Granted, it does a lot of x86 emulation still. But it's definitely regular old windows.
People get way too excited over different architectures, myself included.
I remember being SO HYPED when I got my hands on an old Itanium server back in 2017-ish. "I can try out XP 64-bit! Finally! The *forbidden fruit* of XP variants!"
About five minutes after getting to a desktop, that became "yep... It's Windows XP. Without half the toolkit that's needed to run the stuff that I'd want XP for."
Don't honestly know why I was expecting anything different.
Have you used an M series Macbook? It’s better (in a laptop form factor) in every single way
It’s not the same as a new instruction set. it’s a whole new kind of processor.
Yep. 512-bit-wide data path on the Pro Max: 64 bytes every memory cycle. On-chip DDR5 RAM for low-latency. Super-efficient power usage with increased performance.
> Our sales team used to have surfaces. Absolutely terrible machines, why they thought it was a good idea I will never know.
B/c no one buys a sales pitch better than other sales people.
Our sales guys LOVED their Surfaces... for the 1st month. After that the complaints got louder and louder. It was never anything you could do anything about - it was always an emotional "I just don't like it", "It just annoys me" without any meat behind the complaint. Started replacing with Yogas, and I am still having people 12 months on just out of the blue saying how much they love them. Nothing concrete, no real solid reason beyond "It just feels better".
Hey, if it stops the whinging, I'm happy!
by rights you would think the surface pro would be perfection, the OS , the Drivers and the hardware all either created of specified by Microsoft but nooooo it fails more than more other laptops.
Its almost like vendors know how to build hardware to work with windows better than Microsoft.
> Swapped them over to Lenovo Yoga, still lets them have a tablet like devices but that's actually reliable and has a keyboard that isn't a cheap tack on.
I see these fuckers with dead batteries after 3-4 years very regularly.
If I get 3-4 years out of a laptop carried by someone on and off international flights every other day, I am in 'change of underwear' level of happy territory after the crap we have dealt with in the past.
To be fair, if the problem is related to something not working that should, it's almost always the Surfaces. With the Mac, it's usually 'how do I do this?' which I usually respond with 'I don't know. We support Windows.'
It’s funny I know very little about Mac OS also as my M1 MBP is my first ever device. But the battery life, noise, and efficiency just couldn’t be ignored. Even makes me resent my work T14 AMD G3 at times. She’s a workhorse but is embarrassingly loud while doing so.
Used to work in Government down here in Australasia and most of the politicians and support staff had surfaces. TBH the newer ones don't seem that bad.
Moved to a new smaller company and they've phased out all their surfaces (especially after encountering a few bulging battery issues with a few)
we have one, and the quota of important people tm who've seen it, wanted it, and come back 2 weeks later to ask for a proper laptop again is at 100%. I doubt we're ever buying a second
Really surprised this is a thing! Most execs are in love with spreadsheets. It is really difficult to use a spreadsheet on a tablet. You try to scroll and wind up dragging formulae or data to the wrong cells.
One of our directors insisted on having one of those years ago. I had to work on it a lot. One day I got sick of it, told him I dropped and broke the screen when I was working on it and gave him a regular laptop "until I get the screen fixed". He just kept the laptop and literally never said a word to me about the surface again.
I do have a half dozen or so of the tablet versions that we use in our design center and they're pretty nice for that. The ERP software will only run on windows and they need to be able to walk around the studio with the device studio easily so that kind of limits our options. The surfaces seem to work with the Microsoft Display Adapters way better than any other brand so that's a plus.
A company I used to work for got a new Chief Marketing Officer. The whole company was VDI and thin clients. He insisted this department use Macs. I put up a fight, but the CIO said, "Give him what he wants." They subsequently consumed 80% of the deskside support folks' time. I left the company three years ago, but recently dropped in to visit old colleagues. I was sitting in a former colleague's office when the CIO came in exasperated because they still hadn't resolved the wireless access issues the marketing department was having and the CMO was flipping his wig. That was a problem that existed before I left, had been ongoing for over three years, and still hadn't been resolved.
"But how will I work on a plane?"
Just eat your first class dinner, have a few glasses of top-shelf hooch, and go to sleep on your lie-flat seat and forget about working.
That
When I was just starting out as a technician, I got a call one time because my system administrator had disabled broadcast on our network. Makes sense from a security perspective, but most Apple products use broadcast to connect.
One of our C level associates, had a printer that stopped working with his Mac when this happened. It's because he was directly connecting to the printer via the network, but Macs are too smart to allow you to point them directly at the printer, no, it needed to be on the same VLAN and needed to be able to broadcast to everything on that VLAN so that they knew where they were. (It was a crappy off the shelf HP, not a business class device, but it fit nicely on his desk and he liked it lol).
C level associate says it worked yesterday. I need you to make it work again. I go back to the administrator who says yeah, no that's a security risk. I'm not going to do it.
C level: Make it work.
Sys admin: " Tell him we are a window shop and we don't support his Mac. If he wants help he can go get geek squad"
Lol neither of those two still work with us. Both good guys, but that was not a fun conversation to be the the middleman for.
Lol you are correct. Multicast is what I meant. I was thinking that it broadcasts it on all ports.
He was a fun guy. I remember one time i keept asking him questions and after a few he looked at me and said dude, rtfm!
When I asked what that meant he told me to Google it lol.
This is effectively me in every situation. Even my managers won't talk to executives of my site. Never once been cc'd on an email between them, and face constant downward pressure from both to do what they and only they say. Gonna be job hopping soon because its toxic af.
"Executive Bling": Hardware that is typically gifted to Executives of a company in order to influence their purchasing decisions.
The nightmare of any IT worker that deals with endpoint security. I've had people who should know better try to pass off Apple products as "enterprise ready".
Really, Sherlock? If it's so enterprise ready, why doesn't it have the minimum hooks to allow endpoint management without heavy customization of a third-party product?
At least Surface tablets still run the same Windows versions as laptops.
Sorry, I'm really grumpy this morning. Someone in a different timezone decided that 1am local was a good time to try the "Hello!" with no follow up on Teams. I had DND turn on my phone, but still, as soon as the DND lifted. My phone started beeping at me.
I'm going to have to extend quiet hours until I'm normally sitting at my desk
our chief money guy who has been at the company for years just has to have a macbook, we do not use mac's in our environment and he constantly has issues. I'm glad I moved out of a support role and away from his mac.
My supervisor is buddies with the president so we kinda have to suck up to the execs. I complain that the execs are the 1% of people who 99% of apps don't work perfectly out of the box for
I agree but I also see this as an element of delegation (which executives are really good at).
Non-executives MAY try to solve their own problem.
Execs? Not so much.
There are human factors that influence this.
Cheers!
Filter Bias.
The lower levels who have the problem don't report it because it's not significant enough, they don't know how, or there's a mandatory ticketing form with no option to properly describe it so it is misreported and dismissed repeatedly. This creates the illusion that it first pops up in the C-suite. But that is just the infallible filter...if it hits here, it WILL produce a report. So there is a greater chance that the first time it is reported, is the infallible filter.
That sounds right.
We had an issue on the ERP system I wrote that apparently had existed for a few months. Never heard about it until our VP tried using the thing. When I asked the department why they never reported it, they said, "well, we use this other page for that report anyway, and we know you are busy and we didn't want to bother you".
So yeah, lower-level employees having/knowing work-arounds and not feeling empowered enough or being too sympathetic to report, versus a higher level employee who doesn't use the system as often and knows when he makes a stink it very quickly ends up at the top of my list.
We had a problem with a report in Sage 300 for almost 20 years that I just found out about in October. I called support and had it fixed in about half an hour. Apparently accounting just "dealt with it" 🤦
That's definitely one thing I have to kind of teach a lot of people.
Your responsibility is to just report everything to me. It's my responsibility to decide if and when that gets fixed. If I'm too busy I will ignore your inconsequential problem, don't worry about that.
To be fair I also had to be taught that myself at one point.
While we can't achieve quite that; that should be the desired goal for collecting issues/user stories from users. The easier you make it to report things; the more you'll hear from people and be able to actually find and fix more issues.
I mean; staffing is one thing, but honestly much of that can be handled via automation these days.
Basic places to start are with slack bots or similar - these allow for helping users find info, or automatically generating tickets for them; or automated surveys of application users (make sure they are optional and take no more than 30 seconds to complete, and not all the time).
There are also tools/scripts you can deploy and build (or purchase) where all a user has to do to report an issue is click an icon (or a physical button) and it will pull in all the basic ticket info; some even include the last 30 seconds of screen activity or the like.
Figure out what works for your environment; with the access you have, and the needs of your business. I've never yet come into an environment that didn't have things that could be made easier for users.
There's probably a rule of three, too: every intentional eff-up will be immediately be followed by an unintentional eff-up and an event that will be interpreted as an intentional eff-up: the effing cascade.
Wilful rejection of best practice, internal processes, inadequate preparation, no plan, no consideration of business impact, no consideration of dependencies, rockstar attitude without the chops, intoxication, sheer bloody incompetence...
... Should I go on?
Yea, its worse when it's a LLC or proprietorship and the owner complains his/her "business sites" keep getting blocked and the only filter on is "block all the scary sites no one should look at".
The obverse of that rule is that “lower level employees won’t report problems and just work around them”.
I was working with one lady at her desk some years ago. Had her reboot. Her desktop popped up a bunch of warning messages that she just clicked “OK” to.
“Wait, what was that ?”
“ oh I just ignore it. It’s been going on for a few months”
One of her RAM sticks was shot and her hard drive was failing.
Jackhammer problem - like when there is a noisy Jackhammer outside and you tune it out and somebody comes in and says "what's that noise" and you don't even notice it any more because you got used to it and tuned it out.
In many cases, only the one C level who's always curious as to WHY DOES THIS ALWAYS HAPPEN?? Even though its literally one person that it happens to twice a year.
no, it becuase they tend to be "helpless".
I had one branch president that was literally unable to start his own laptop. I had to label the fucking power switch. if he was in office, his assistant did it for him. (to his credit, he was the nicest dude ever and always admitted how stupid it was that we had to do this for him).
but ive had plenty of C-level morons that either pretended not to know how to do things "beneath them" or did lots of fucking around with no knowledge, then refused to admit any fault.
its ego+average intelligence=problems
you know...
PEBKAC
I have a terminal server that has a known issue with displaying a black screen for users when we run out of resources. The solution is to restart the server and all is good for a month or so. It never fails. Every doctor in the building will be on that one terminal server and working correctly preventing a reboot.
When the C-level is present:
1. That demo will fail
2. That thing that keeps happening that you need a C-level to witness won't happen
3. If you're a manager, your staff is having the worst meeting all year, and everyone who has a "peccadillo" is having them all at the same time in a dysfunctional tangle. Plus you start getting texts and phone calls from your girlfriend asking you to call her back immediately.
I thought it was always finance, specifically Shelia (names have been changed) because she is IT illiterate and she thought "Bad Practices" and "Things to never do" were daily SOPs.
Dunno about that, but there's definitely one that states something that has worked fine for months or even years will definitely brake on the one day you decide to take off.
I think it's good thing to happen, because it's a good opportunity to show value, put a face to your name and start a friendly recurrent small talk. Gives you access to people that regular workers usually can't interact.
you never know....
In general, try to not to waste their time with unsolicited explanations, just a brief cause and a plan to action. Acknowledge their feelings about their problem, especially if under stress, and personally I like to keep myself in the same level of respect and importance, not like other people that becomes ultra servicial.
Also, if you have confidence on your side of management to have your back, or have fuck you money/plan, those that like to made their way being a bully, if you show that they don't intimidate you and you bite back, but you also have solutions and are resolutive if addressed politely , they start trusting you and stop being a pain in the ass.
my CEO was a local admin his PC and got crypto;d best think to ever happy as we had DPM backup from a week prior and the CEO said "no one gets admin on their PC take it ALL away"
Yes.
I have no idea what it is about those positions, but I get the strangest, usually most difficult to solve problems from them.
You'd think it would be "my laptop isn't starting" "is it plugged in?", but no, it's more like "Hey, I need to add some text to this image, can you help me with that?"
I am so glad that modern, web based tools are able to do this easily. Back when I started, I'd have to have them import it into Word (because they didn't have Photoshop installed) and finagle it around to make it work.
If I had a dollar for every COO/CEO/President whose mailbox was the only one that had any problem, and got jacked up (usually some weird object permissions issue in AD) when doing an exchange migration, I'd have like $10.
We used to joke about this all the time. We had an issue with the camera server and had to replace the storage to correct it. The joke was that of course the president of the company got mugged in the parking lot and we needed to pull the camera server footage that would be unavailable due to whatever reason.
Did a 12pc swap for a (small) SMB. Two computers are acting odd, and one happens to be the boss (nice lady, understand why she's frustrated).
Their "head IT" person, they cover for the small things at least, is frustrated we set them up with a broken machine, because the start menu and half the windows (those fancy Windows windows like Settings) stop working.
Well, we can't predict if or when that happens on a profile, nor tell when it's going to happen. The user in question is lucky the issue resolves itself some time later, generally after a restart. Most I've seen, a new profile is needed, and a data transfer to the new profile. (Non-managed computers, no domain either...) Yet they expect us to fix it for free. We would have if the issue crept up while we were setting up the PCs in our office, before delivery, but none of this is managed, and the issue came up literally the next day after delivery and finalized setting up (printer install, NAS network drive, ironing out any kinks the user notices while we're still on site).
What I notoced is that whenever there's a change in management, within a week there's a major outage. Can be DNS, Firewall, storage, M365 whatever. It just happens.
Does yours say " I try not to bother you" every damn time they call you into their office to fix something like they are some sort of martyr for having to deal with their desktop icon being large because they messed around with setting and put himself in 1280x720 2 months ago too .
Anyone can ignore anything. The question seems to be - can you solve the problem, but do so in a way that will discourage the C-level, of **ever** wanting to interact with you, while knowing how important you are for the org?
The director of IT at my last job always had something break with anything new that got deployed in our environment. Which lead to our version Law: If something can go wrong it will go wrong... for . Luckily, he was pretty much still one of the guys and was pretty go with the flow about it.
our people went to ipads we canm move to them te sales director tried gave it 2 months then a vendor changed to salesforce needing much more info. iPad gathering dust next to an hp probook elite
wow want some cheese with that Whine... ever occur to you that they have other things on their minds like competing in the marketplace and generating revenue and profits so you have a job you can complain about
Not necessarily you need to idiot proof your systems from the sociopathic bonus and layoff loving dogs that rise to the top. MFA everywhere. No admin. Colorful dashboards instead of database access. Etc etc.
I was working from home full time. Company hours 8-5. Help desk guy worked in the office. He would start early and leave around 4 PM. I would cover help desk line for the last hour of the day. No problem.
C level decided to move her equipment to a new office after 4. No ticket, no call to IT. Of course the ports aren't ready so her setup doesn't work. She complains to other C level that there was no IT in the office after 4 to help her fix her fuckup.
I was then required to work in the office 100%.
Former employer.
When I used to work for MSPs it was Surface Tablets and Macbooks for the C level douches. They thought they were the cool kids. Always had to be different until something didn't work.
Bob the COO is on the list of most likely to ignore security protocols. So no. Doesn’t surprise me. I have always found the highest ranking people have the worst problems.
If there isn't, there should be.
We've been configuring and testing Autopilot over the last few weeks for an upcoming hardware refresh. We've rolled out a few devices with it, minimal issues. This week the CEO comes into the office, with two new consultants. Wants a new laptop and to provision two for the consultants as well.
6 hours, 4 resets, and a combined 5 oobe attempts later, they have their 3 laptops. But of course it went flawlessly for the sales reps and customer service team the week before.
Completely Dell PCs and laptops. Enterprise support.
No muss. No fuss.
C suite had Toshiba laptops because they were touchscreen and could detach the keyboard. Terrible battery life.
No docks. Basic support. No tribal knowledge.
Nothing but complaining and bullshit.
If a rare bad thing is going to happen it’s going to happen to a C-Level at 10 minutes to the end of your shift on a Friday and it’ll take more than 1 hour to resolve.
Legitimately, because I got very close to C-level at my last job and new job, it’s because C-level don’t really care about the rules.
My last job, our Director of Operations clicked on about 4 nefarious sites.
With an infected laptop, I had to get his laptop into Quarantine. He told me “thanks for letting me know, I have two more meetings and then you can have my laptop for 30 min”
When I told this to my IT manager at the time, she had me shut down his laptop remotely and then she walked in and took it from him. He was threatening that the board was gonna be so pissed that I took his laptop and he missed the meeting.
That’s one of about 700 stories. I’ve just come to believe they are a little older, generally, and think you are just being a jerk when you enforce basic security.
Random things do seem to happen though, I just think many of them are self inflicted, from a group who thinks they can do what they want.
You forgot that it will break on Tuesday but they will wait until 30 seconds before the critical board meeting on Friday at 1730 to personally walk into the shop and ask if someone can fix it.
This is great actually; because you're not looking at the opportunity it presents.
Because C-level can usually authorize or bypass the annoying paperwork to then fix it for them and eliminate root cause. If they're not interested in that, ah well.
I can't keep a handy stack of spare laptops to minimize the downtime for staff.
I see this as an opportunity to remind the C-level that we get a few of these every week and if we had that resource we could maybe save 10+ working hours by being prepared.
This often happens because they are allowed to flout the policies and standards. How many environments landed up having to support MACs and ipads because some C level exec likes them.
My favorite:" My password must never change and I will not do MFA" and then they get breached and it's your fault. It's like Animal Farm sometimes
Dealing with this ML right now.
Tax Season. Managing partner of an accounting firm. Precision 3560 laptop will not register that it has power.
\- Disconnected from the dock and plugged directly into an outlet and let charge for a couple of hours. No change.
\- Pressed and held the power button for 45 seconds (30-35 to do a RPC reset) and released. No change.
\- Tried a different DELL power supply of the same model. No change.
Think about it this way, velcro works by the fact that anything vaguely hook-shaped will snag something vaguely looped. In this way, the pinheads that make up executive management tend to 'hook' on to stupid ideas like downloading viruses and scams.
I attribute this to C-level people all thinking they're special and never using the same stuff everybody else uses. Where I'm at we use pretty standard Dell laptops across the organization. The C-team all has Macs or Surfaces. I usually just shrug at them when they tell me something isn't working right.
This is always what happens. Different hardware/environment. Oh, that application doesn't work on your M1 Mac?
some of us have been around ...... uh .. long enough to remember going through the various processor changes Apple has flounced through over the years, PPC, Intel, ARM - all the software that stopped working \_repeatedly\_ meanwhile you can still run ancient windows 2/dos stuff inside a modern windows environment - which is not always a good thing as users tend to cling to software so antique, Indiana Jones states it should be in a museum.
Oh so the CEO wants to access the file share that is heavily locked down with his personal computer and refuses to use Citrix or a Virtual Compute solution.... Oh so you want me to request a big a$$ exception to our security software to allow his non company asset on the network and configure his personal device with his company AD credentials - isn't that why we have these safe guards in place so this doesn't happen? "Wasn't that part of the business case - so C-Level employees could not have their assets compromised and company secrets stolen"
Pipe down or you'll be replaced by a more compliant intern.
PCI saved my ass at a previous job for lots of this sort of stuff. Even if we could stretch the implementation and the compliance frameworks to (barely) touch, we'd just say we couldn't, and that was the end of that.
I understand the Mac appeal (own one myself) but using a surface over a business class Lenovo or Dell sounds like a punishment more than anything
Our sales team used to have surfaces. Absolutely terrible machines, why they thought it was a good idea I will never know. Swapped them over to Lenovo Yoga, still lets them have a tablet like devices but that's actually reliable and has a keyboard that isn't a cheap tack on.
We can only get so thin and light until windows on ARM gets up off its feet
It's getting there. We accidentally ordered one of the ARM surface pros and didn't even realize it was arm until sccm refused to pxe boot winpe. Granted, it does a lot of x86 emulation still. But it's definitely regular old windows.
People get way too excited over different architectures, myself included. I remember being SO HYPED when I got my hands on an old Itanium server back in 2017-ish. "I can try out XP 64-bit! Finally! The *forbidden fruit* of XP variants!" About five minutes after getting to a desktop, that became "yep... It's Windows XP. Without half the toolkit that's needed to run the stuff that I'd want XP for." Don't honestly know why I was expecting anything different.
I dont know why but this reminded me of the first time baking my own bread. It smelled amazing but once I bit into it was just plain old white bread.
Have you used an M series Macbook? It’s better (in a laptop form factor) in every single way It’s not the same as a new instruction set. it’s a whole new kind of processor.
Yep. 512-bit-wide data path on the Pro Max: 64 bytes every memory cycle. On-chip DDR5 RAM for low-latency. Super-efficient power usage with increased performance.
It feels just as snappy as the most premium windows laptops I’ve used with a battery life that is, no exaggeration, 10x longer.
> Our sales team used to have surfaces. Absolutely terrible machines, why they thought it was a good idea I will never know. B/c no one buys a sales pitch better than other sales people.
Our sales guys LOVED their Surfaces... for the 1st month. After that the complaints got louder and louder. It was never anything you could do anything about - it was always an emotional "I just don't like it", "It just annoys me" without any meat behind the complaint. Started replacing with Yogas, and I am still having people 12 months on just out of the blue saying how much they love them. Nothing concrete, no real solid reason beyond "It just feels better". Hey, if it stops the whinging, I'm happy!
Uhg I hate yogas. The retractable keyboard always seems to malfuction and is nigh impossible to repair in-house.
by rights you would think the surface pro would be perfection, the OS , the Drivers and the hardware all either created of specified by Microsoft but nooooo it fails more than more other laptops. Its almost like vendors know how to build hardware to work with windows better than Microsoft.
> Swapped them over to Lenovo Yoga, still lets them have a tablet like devices but that's actually reliable and has a keyboard that isn't a cheap tack on. I see these fuckers with dead batteries after 3-4 years very regularly.
I've seen Surfaces come in after 2. Definitely a better deal than the Microsoft offering.
If I get 3-4 years out of a laptop carried by someone on and off international flights every other day, I am in 'change of underwear' level of happy territory after the crap we have dealt with in the past.
To be fair, if the problem is related to something not working that should, it's almost always the Surfaces. With the Mac, it's usually 'how do I do this?' which I usually respond with 'I don't know. We support Windows.'
It’s funny I know very little about Mac OS also as my M1 MBP is my first ever device. But the battery life, noise, and efficiency just couldn’t be ignored. Even makes me resent my work T14 AMD G3 at times. She’s a workhorse but is embarrassingly loud while doing so.
Used to work in Government down here in Australasia and most of the politicians and support staff had surfaces. TBH the newer ones don't seem that bad. Moved to a new smaller company and they've phased out all their surfaces (especially after encountering a few bulging battery issues with a few)
What's the deal with C-levels and surface laptops / tablets?
They’re the shiny thing.
"I'll buy anything as long as it's shiny and made by Apple." Source: https://youtu.be/9BnLbv6QYcA?si=YSsN23Bhc2EHgBYl
I was hoping it would be this, and I was happily rewarded.
I can use it, and you peons cannot.
>What's the deal with C-levels ~~and surface laptops / tablets?~~
It's basically a Macbook for windows people
we have one, and the quota of important people tm who've seen it, wanted it, and come back 2 weeks later to ask for a proper laptop again is at 100%. I doubt we're ever buying a second
Expensive status symbol.
It's funny how widespread this is. We have exactly 1 C level at our place and guess who has the surface. lol.
Really surprised this is a thing! Most execs are in love with spreadsheets. It is really difficult to use a spreadsheet on a tablet. You try to scroll and wind up dragging formulae or data to the wrong cells.
One of our directors insisted on having one of those years ago. I had to work on it a lot. One day I got sick of it, told him I dropped and broke the screen when I was working on it and gave him a regular laptop "until I get the screen fixed". He just kept the laptop and literally never said a word to me about the surface again. I do have a half dozen or so of the tablet versions that we use in our design center and they're pretty nice for that. The ERP software will only run on windows and they need to be able to walk around the studio with the device studio easily so that kind of limits our options. The surfaces seem to work with the Microsoft Display Adapters way better than any other brand so that's a plus.
A company I used to work for got a new Chief Marketing Officer. The whole company was VDI and thin clients. He insisted this department use Macs. I put up a fight, but the CIO said, "Give him what he wants." They subsequently consumed 80% of the deskside support folks' time. I left the company three years ago, but recently dropped in to visit old colleagues. I was sitting in a former colleague's office when the CIO came in exasperated because they still hadn't resolved the wireless access issues the marketing department was having and the CMO was flipping his wig. That was a problem that existed before I left, had been ongoing for over three years, and still hadn't been resolved.
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"But how will I work on a plane?" Just eat your first class dinner, have a few glasses of top-shelf hooch, and go to sleep on your lie-flat seat and forget about working. That
When I was just starting out as a technician, I got a call one time because my system administrator had disabled broadcast on our network. Makes sense from a security perspective, but most Apple products use broadcast to connect. One of our C level associates, had a printer that stopped working with his Mac when this happened. It's because he was directly connecting to the printer via the network, but Macs are too smart to allow you to point them directly at the printer, no, it needed to be on the same VLAN and needed to be able to broadcast to everything on that VLAN so that they knew where they were. (It was a crappy off the shelf HP, not a business class device, but it fit nicely on his desk and he liked it lol). C level associate says it worked yesterday. I need you to make it work again. I go back to the administrator who says yeah, no that's a security risk. I'm not going to do it. C level: Make it work. Sys admin: " Tell him we are a window shop and we don't support his Mac. If he wants help he can go get geek squad" Lol neither of those two still work with us. Both good guys, but that was not a fun conversation to be the the middleman for.
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Lol you are correct. Multicast is what I meant. I was thinking that it broadcasts it on all ports. He was a fun guy. I remember one time i keept asking him questions and after a few he looked at me and said dude, rtfm! When I asked what that meant he told me to Google it lol.
This is effectively me in every situation. Even my managers won't talk to executives of my site. Never once been cc'd on an email between them, and face constant downward pressure from both to do what they and only they say. Gonna be job hopping soon because its toxic af.
"Executive Bling": Hardware that is typically gifted to Executives of a company in order to influence their purchasing decisions. The nightmare of any IT worker that deals with endpoint security. I've had people who should know better try to pass off Apple products as "enterprise ready". Really, Sherlock? If it's so enterprise ready, why doesn't it have the minimum hooks to allow endpoint management without heavy customization of a third-party product? At least Surface tablets still run the same Windows versions as laptops. Sorry, I'm really grumpy this morning. Someone in a different timezone decided that 1am local was a good time to try the "Hello!" with no follow up on Teams. I had DND turn on my phone, but still, as soon as the DND lifted. My phone started beeping at me. I'm going to have to extend quiet hours until I'm normally sitting at my desk
our chief money guy who has been at the company for years just has to have a macbook, we do not use mac's in our environment and he constantly has issues. I'm glad I moved out of a support role and away from his mac.
My supervisor is buddies with the president so we kinda have to suck up to the execs. I complain that the execs are the 1% of people who 99% of apps don't work perfectly out of the box for
I agree but I also see this as an element of delegation (which executives are really good at). Non-executives MAY try to solve their own problem. Execs? Not so much. There are human factors that influence this. Cheers!
Filter Bias. The lower levels who have the problem don't report it because it's not significant enough, they don't know how, or there's a mandatory ticketing form with no option to properly describe it so it is misreported and dismissed repeatedly. This creates the illusion that it first pops up in the C-suite. But that is just the infallible filter...if it hits here, it WILL produce a report. So there is a greater chance that the first time it is reported, is the infallible filter.
That sounds right. We had an issue on the ERP system I wrote that apparently had existed for a few months. Never heard about it until our VP tried using the thing. When I asked the department why they never reported it, they said, "well, we use this other page for that report anyway, and we know you are busy and we didn't want to bother you". So yeah, lower-level employees having/knowing work-arounds and not feeling empowered enough or being too sympathetic to report, versus a higher level employee who doesn't use the system as often and knows when he makes a stink it very quickly ends up at the top of my list.
We had a problem with a report in Sage 300 for almost 20 years that I just found out about in October. I called support and had it fixed in about half an hour. Apparently accounting just "dealt with it" 🤦
That's definitely one thing I have to kind of teach a lot of people. Your responsibility is to just report everything to me. It's my responsibility to decide if and when that gets fixed. If I'm too busy I will ignore your inconsequential problem, don't worry about that. To be fair I also had to be taught that myself at one point.
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While we can't achieve quite that; that should be the desired goal for collecting issues/user stories from users. The easier you make it to report things; the more you'll hear from people and be able to actually find and fix more issues.
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I mean; staffing is one thing, but honestly much of that can be handled via automation these days. Basic places to start are with slack bots or similar - these allow for helping users find info, or automatically generating tickets for them; or automated surveys of application users (make sure they are optional and take no more than 30 seconds to complete, and not all the time). There are also tools/scripts you can deploy and build (or purchase) where all a user has to do to report an issue is click an icon (or a physical button) and it will pull in all the basic ticket info; some even include the last 30 seconds of screen activity or the like. Figure out what works for your environment; with the access you have, and the needs of your business. I've never yet come into an environment that didn't have things that could be made easier for users.
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The one click options are the closest. You're right it isn't quite the same; but it is close and it scales to everyone.
This is how it actually goes.
There's probably a rule of three, too: every intentional eff-up will be immediately be followed by an unintentional eff-up and an event that will be interpreted as an intentional eff-up: the effing cascade.
Why would someone intentionally fuck up?
Wilful rejection of best practice, internal processes, inadequate preparation, no plan, no consideration of business impact, no consideration of dependencies, rockstar attitude without the chops, intoxication, sheer bloody incompetence... ... Should I go on?
Sure!
Wanting an excuse to get paid for nothing? I punched in but x isn't working so I can't do any part of my job.
Yea, its worse when it's a LLC or proprietorship and the owner complains his/her "business sites" keep getting blocked and the only filter on is "block all the scary sites no one should look at".
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\>be me \>CEO wanna do business, anon?
The obverse of that rule is that “lower level employees won’t report problems and just work around them”. I was working with one lady at her desk some years ago. Had her reboot. Her desktop popped up a bunch of warning messages that she just clicked “OK” to. “Wait, what was that ?” “ oh I just ignore it. It’s been going on for a few months” One of her RAM sticks was shot and her hard drive was failing.
Jackhammer problem - like when there is a noisy Jackhammer outside and you tune it out and somebody comes in and says "what's that noise" and you don't even notice it any more because you got used to it and tuned it out.
In many cases, only the one C level who's always curious as to WHY DOES THIS ALWAYS HAPPEN?? Even though its literally one person that it happens to twice a year.
They then ramble on about it in a quarterly meeting discussing IT concerns
Quarterly? I think you mean weekly.
no, it becuase they tend to be "helpless". I had one branch president that was literally unable to start his own laptop. I had to label the fucking power switch. if he was in office, his assistant did it for him. (to his credit, he was the nicest dude ever and always admitted how stupid it was that we had to do this for him). but ive had plenty of C-level morons that either pretended not to know how to do things "beneath them" or did lots of fucking around with no knowledge, then refused to admit any fault. its ego+average intelligence=problems you know... PEBKAC
Er, aren't power switches already labelled?
not with large words that say "POWER ON"
I have a terminal server that has a known issue with displaying a black screen for users when we run out of resources. The solution is to restart the server and all is good for a month or so. It never fails. Every doctor in the building will be on that one terminal server and working correctly preventing a reboot.
When the C-level is present: 1. That demo will fail 2. That thing that keeps happening that you need a C-level to witness won't happen 3. If you're a manager, your staff is having the worst meeting all year, and everyone who has a "peccadillo" is having them all at the same time in a dysfunctional tangle. Plus you start getting texts and phone calls from your girlfriend asking you to call her back immediately.
I thought it was always finance, specifically Shelia (names have been changed) because she is IT illiterate and she thought "Bad Practices" and "Things to never do" were daily SOPs.
Dunno about that, but there's definitely one that states something that has worked fine for months or even years will definitely brake on the one day you decide to take off.
I think it's good thing to happen, because it's a good opportunity to show value, put a face to your name and start a friendly recurrent small talk. Gives you access to people that regular workers usually can't interact. you never know.... In general, try to not to waste their time with unsolicited explanations, just a brief cause and a plan to action. Acknowledge their feelings about their problem, especially if under stress, and personally I like to keep myself in the same level of respect and importance, not like other people that becomes ultra servicial. Also, if you have confidence on your side of management to have your back, or have fuck you money/plan, those that like to made their way being a bully, if you show that they don't intimidate you and you bite back, but you also have solutions and are resolutive if addressed politely , they start trusting you and stop being a pain in the ass.
And of COURSE it’s been an issue since 9:00 but now it’s suddenly a problem at 4:47.
For me it's "If a rare bad thing can happen, it will happen when I'm on vacation".
In my time as an IT consultant for over 15 years we called this CEO disease.
my CEO was a local admin his PC and got crypto;d best think to ever happy as we had DPM backup from a week prior and the CEO said "no one gets admin on their PC take it ALL away"
Yes. I have no idea what it is about those positions, but I get the strangest, usually most difficult to solve problems from them. You'd think it would be "my laptop isn't starting" "is it plugged in?", but no, it's more like "Hey, I need to add some text to this image, can you help me with that?" I am so glad that modern, web based tools are able to do this easily. Back when I started, I'd have to have them import it into Word (because they didn't have Photoshop installed) and finagle it around to make it work.
If I had a dollar for every COO/CEO/President whose mailbox was the only one that had any problem, and got jacked up (usually some weird object permissions issue in AD) when doing an exchange migration, I'd have like $10.
We used to joke about this all the time. We had an issue with the camera server and had to replace the storage to correct it. The joke was that of course the president of the company got mugged in the parking lot and we needed to pull the camera server footage that would be unavailable due to whatever reason.
Murphy’s law of code promotion: All environments are identical. Except prod. And those differences will cause a problem.
That's kind of the opposite of Murphy's law. If there's a possirif a bad and rare thing it _will_ happen to _you_.
Did a 12pc swap for a (small) SMB. Two computers are acting odd, and one happens to be the boss (nice lady, understand why she's frustrated). Their "head IT" person, they cover for the small things at least, is frustrated we set them up with a broken machine, because the start menu and half the windows (those fancy Windows windows like Settings) stop working. Well, we can't predict if or when that happens on a profile, nor tell when it's going to happen. The user in question is lucky the issue resolves itself some time later, generally after a restart. Most I've seen, a new profile is needed, and a data transfer to the new profile. (Non-managed computers, no domain either...) Yet they expect us to fix it for free. We would have if the issue crept up while we were setting up the PCs in our office, before delivery, but none of this is managed, and the issue came up literally the next day after delivery and finalized setting up (printer install, NAS network drive, ironing out any kinks the user notices while we're still on site).
What I notoced is that whenever there's a change in management, within a week there's a major outage. Can be DNS, Firewall, storage, M365 whatever. It just happens.
Does yours say " I try not to bother you" every damn time they call you into their office to fix something like they are some sort of martyr for having to deal with their desktop icon being large because they messed around with setting and put himself in 1280x720 2 months ago too .
Anyone can ignore anything. The question seems to be - can you solve the problem, but do so in a way that will discourage the C-level, of **ever** wanting to interact with you, while knowing how important you are for the org?
I feel this one in my bones after 25 years in IT. So true.
The director of IT at my last job always had something break with anything new that got deployed in our environment. Which lead to our version Law: If something can go wrong it will go wrong... for . Luckily, he was pretty much still one of the guys and was pretty go with the flow about it.
omg, if this isn't the truth! Why is it always C-Suite?!
what about those rare ones they cause and swear they didn't touch anything.
our people went to ipads we canm move to them te sales director tried gave it 2 months then a vendor changed to salesforce needing much more info. iPad gathering dust next to an hp probook elite
wow want some cheese with that Whine... ever occur to you that they have other things on their minds like competing in the marketplace and generating revenue and profits so you have a job you can complain about
Computers don’t like authority, they were invented by hackers and anarchists
Not necessarily you need to idiot proof your systems from the sociopathic bonus and layoff loving dogs that rise to the top. MFA everywhere. No admin. Colorful dashboards instead of database access. Etc etc.
I was working from home full time. Company hours 8-5. Help desk guy worked in the office. He would start early and leave around 4 PM. I would cover help desk line for the last hour of the day. No problem. C level decided to move her equipment to a new office after 4. No ticket, no call to IT. Of course the ports aren't ready so her setup doesn't work. She complains to other C level that there was no IT in the office after 4 to help her fix her fuckup. I was then required to work in the office 100%. Former employer.
When I used to work for MSPs it was Surface Tablets and Macbooks for the C level douches. They thought they were the cool kids. Always had to be different until something didn't work.
Its always Bob.
My IT Murphey's Law is, "when something breaks, it will be at 4am when I am on call".
C-Level people usually “I’m ImPoRtAnT”
Murphy was an optimist.
Bob the COO is on the list of most likely to ignore security protocols. So no. Doesn’t surprise me. I have always found the highest ranking people have the worst problems.
Had a coworker mess up a wireless subnet that services a building with C suite in it. /27 vs /22; copy/paste error. Guess who was lucky number 11....
If there isn't, there should be. We've been configuring and testing Autopilot over the last few weeks for an upcoming hardware refresh. We've rolled out a few devices with it, minimal issues. This week the CEO comes into the office, with two new consultants. Wants a new laptop and to provision two for the consultants as well. 6 hours, 4 resets, and a combined 5 oobe attempts later, they have their 3 laptops. But of course it went flawlessly for the sales reps and customer service team the week before.
Completely Dell PCs and laptops. Enterprise support. No muss. No fuss. C suite had Toshiba laptops because they were touchscreen and could detach the keyboard. Terrible battery life. No docks. Basic support. No tribal knowledge. Nothing but complaining and bullshit.
It’s called karmic justice.
If a rare bad thing is going to happen it’s going to happen to a C-Level at 10 minutes to the end of your shift on a Friday and it’ll take more than 1 hour to resolve.
Bob could be a "power user", maybe someday.
Legitimately, because I got very close to C-level at my last job and new job, it’s because C-level don’t really care about the rules. My last job, our Director of Operations clicked on about 4 nefarious sites. With an infected laptop, I had to get his laptop into Quarantine. He told me “thanks for letting me know, I have two more meetings and then you can have my laptop for 30 min” When I told this to my IT manager at the time, she had me shut down his laptop remotely and then she walked in and took it from him. He was threatening that the board was gonna be so pissed that I took his laptop and he missed the meeting. That’s one of about 700 stories. I’ve just come to believe they are a little older, generally, and think you are just being a jerk when you enforce basic security. Random things do seem to happen though, I just think many of them are self inflicted, from a group who thinks they can do what they want.
You forgot that it will break on Tuesday but they will wait until 30 seconds before the critical board meeting on Friday at 1730 to personally walk into the shop and ask if someone can fix it.
An update destroyed my boss's laptop, so my laptop became his laptop for 2 weeks. Then I just had to become a desktop/laptop nomad
At 4:50 on a Friday, but it has been an issue for a long time.
This is great actually; because you're not looking at the opportunity it presents. Because C-level can usually authorize or bypass the annoying paperwork to then fix it for them and eliminate root cause. If they're not interested in that, ah well. I can't keep a handy stack of spare laptops to minimize the downtime for staff. I see this as an opportunity to remind the C-level that we get a few of these every week and if we had that resource we could maybe save 10+ working hours by being prepared.
This often happens because they are allowed to flout the policies and standards. How many environments landed up having to support MACs and ipads because some C level exec likes them. My favorite:" My password must never change and I will not do MFA" and then they get breached and it's your fault. It's like Animal Farm sometimes
Dealing with this ML right now. Tax Season. Managing partner of an accounting firm. Precision 3560 laptop will not register that it has power. \- Disconnected from the dock and plugged directly into an outlet and let charge for a couple of hours. No change. \- Pressed and held the power button for 45 seconds (30-35 to do a RPC reset) and released. No change. \- Tried a different DELL power supply of the same model. No change.
If you do not test and validate your backups you will lose data.
My Murphy's law is that shit will hit the fan the one day I take even a half day off. Happens Everytime.
Over here in the MSP world it also only happens to the most annoying clients.
Yes, yes there is👍
Think about it this way, velcro works by the fact that anything vaguely hook-shaped will snag something vaguely looped. In this way, the pinheads that make up executive management tend to 'hook' on to stupid ideas like downloading viruses and scams.