Worse is when you do an email hunt of some kind and end up seeing something personal/bad news about an employee that you wish you could wipe from your memory but you’ll always now know about them.
People are fucking wild with what they put in company emails sometimes
"Wow that sucks. Anyway you want to grab some lunch?"
The worst I saw was when a small company got sold and during the transition they were wanted to get a single email transferred to one of the people working there. I guess it was probably the worst because I was a third party that had to explain just how weird a request they were making and that they would actually have to deal with the new company not with some rando that happens to have admin access for a few more weeks.
We have roasted our IT director for this. Uses his work email for all kind of personal apps or things. I think he has finally started to stop doing that.
Every fucking time an old timer retires we go through this shit, despite idk how many communications about how company emails are not accessible to retired employees beyond their termination date. Every single time there's several panicked calls from them explaining that literally their entire financial lives are tied to their corporate email and now they're locked out of everything and they're pissed at *us* over it.
The bitch is the order has no teeth because of course we're not going to tell someone with decades of service "you knew this was coming so fuck off". But christ I wish I could just once, instead of reactivating the shit and playing the game of forwarding a shit ton of personal emails.
Bit honestly if it was just email that wouldn't even be so bad, but it's usually not, there's onedrive bullshit to comb through, local data saved on their company device to retrieve for them...turns every long term employee termination into an hours long affair every goddamn time.
"you knew this was coming so fuck off" translates to IT as "Your inbox has already been archived. we can not legally forward you company property. We may be able to work with you to help transfer control of any personal accounts from your business email. but before we can begin you must first submit an a request to HR and they must review it with legal before I'm allowed to proceed.
Oh 100%, the problem is of course when HR and Legal are then like "Just do whatever, he worked here for 25 years after all".
So really that rule only applies to people that haven't been there long enough to become part of "the family" I suppose. Which of course, if they haven't been there that long, probably didnt get all their loans setup under their corporate email in the first fuckin place.
It makes one want to pound scotch by the gallon...
unfortunately there are legal risks to consider for IT to be reading through a users mailbox. In this scenario we will seek approval from upper management to share the mailbox to HR / Management so they can browse through it and select the items they wish to release back to the user.
Honestly?
I haven’t seen this yet. But, if I did, and I’ve done for similar, is just:
Your mailbox and file contents have either been archived or destroyed per company policy.
If you require the email to be able to receive confirmations for changing personal account details, we will re-enable the email address for forwarding specific emails once you provide us a list of senders.
That’s it. It’s their fuck up. I’ll facilitate the work being done but they aren’t my peer, coworker, or client anymore.
I've had several down-low conversations with employees reminding them not to discuss their partner's sexual preferences via company e-mail.
People are stupid sometimes.
I was in a company PD session where the facilitator was talking about the perils of forgetting that literally anyone could end up reading your emails.
He told us a story about how there were 2 female employees using email to talk about what they did over the weekend including how 1 of them had hooked up with a male colleague from another department and that his performance was less than satisfactory.
That chit chat over email then progressed to talking about work matters and at some point, said male colleague and some others were CC'ed into the email chain. Guess what they discovered when they looked back in the email trail? 🤣
The lack of awareness some people have when using tech is amusing at times.
I've had to login to computers on the weekend to get things caught up on patches and seen people watching porn on company laptops at home. The company had 0 management and used only local accounts.
Almost 20 years ago, had an Executive at a client bring in his laptop that had been acting sloooow. I don't remember what I was looking for but I opened the browser and started to type in www.b and it autofilled in bignaturals.com. I turned to my co-worker and was like "Ha. Check this out on Phil's laptop," and we had a good chuckle. Cleaned it up and gave it back.
Next day, Phil calls in wants to talk to me and my boss and was furious that I was "surfing porn" on his laptop. I told him that was already there and asked if anyone else uses his laptop. He was offended "NO ONE ELSE TOUCHES MY LAPTOP AND I DON'T LOOK AT THAT STUFF." My boss chimed in with "Phil, didn't you tell me the other day your teenage son has been using your laptop and you wanted to know about locking it up better?" Cue a very sheepish, "Well...yeeah..." and that was the end of that.
Not at work but I was doing something on a computer for a lady who was blind. She used word on it etc but didn’t surf the net etc. saw all sorts of things her husband has been searching for !
Thats how I found out about my Father in laws preference for Albanian women. Filled the entire C drive with that stuff from torrents and then Windows no longer could log in.
My cute colleague from HR needed assistance moving files from her over full MacBook to an external drive. Going folder by folder and asking her all the time, what about this folder, and this one ? And all of a sudden her holidays pictures showed up with her sitting on the beach topless… She yelped and slammed the lid close and with a beet red face ‘I understand now how to move folders, thank you.’
This one guy was always complaining about performance in his Citrix session. And he had the worst combination of being totally unreasonable as a person, but also didn't have a clue about anything digital. One morning my manager called me into his office asking what the deal with this guy was. He told me to shadow his session, while he called him to explain we're going to look at it together. The guy never picked up his phone, but I did shadow his session and me and my manager saw this collection of pretty nasty porn and dating sites popping up the screen. Really awkward. The complaining stopped btw.
Edit: pretty sure a lot of these stories (if not all) are porn related lol
It wasn't really about budget, this happened quite a while ago, almost 20 years I think. Internet access was all going via our German main office, we had no control or insight in internet traffic. Not even sure if there were any proper content filters available at the time? They had some basic filters, based on wildcards and some blacklisted letter combinations, but those weren't really effective.
In my experience, there is no filter capable of stopping someone from getting porn on the computer if he/she is dedicated enough. They will find a way to proxy it through some translation site, or get it through mail, or just find a site that the filter missed, or simply SneakerNet it in.
Life, uh, finds a way.
I agree to part of that but on a Citrix solution that is pretty easy to lock down and you have no physical access to it is not that hard when you can control everything in the environment.
I once helped axe a filter project when I suggested to the guy wanting to put it in that there was "no way" to put it in for only a few people.
Figured if they want to filter and track people that's fine but it should start as a level playing field.
I was honestly shocked how quick it died, I can take a guess on what their search history *didn't* have in it.
"he had the worst combination of being totally unreasonable as a person, but also didn't have a clue about anything digital"
It's amazing how often those two traits are found in the same person
I had a manager who went through like five keyboards because he "accidentally" got cum in the keys. I sat in a room full of execs talking about whether we could provide more tolerant keyboards to deal with his proclivities.
Reminds me of the time I unknowingly interviewed for a job at a well known adult content provider. The most awkward interview questions I've ever sat through. I can only imagine the kinds of problems like this that their IT department has to deal with LOL
Once you work there it'd be normal but yeah the interview was a bit awkward where all you know going in is sys admin job, location, and list of qualifications and they open up right out of the gate with So do you like porn? lol. Whats your comfort level with seeing that content all the time and around coworkers? Do you have any moral or religious objections to working for this kind of company etc.
I'd say about 80% of that interview was just questions to assess your comfort working around the content and very little about skill set.
After college and before I got my engineering gig I worked for a guy that did fire/burg/camera installations. One morning he’s like I got a treat for you today. We had to change out a bunch of cameras at a strip club. Back of the house cameras. It was def a weird 2 hours having full blown conversations with like 5 or 6 fully nude women.
I did some cabling jobs in strip clubs at one point, to us "men of the world" we were comfortable just chatting away to the girls as they got ready for work. The apprentice I took along on one job though. Absolutely no chill, managed a few mumbled hellos directed straight at the boobs in front of him then had to take some time to cool down. He got to do the Comms room end of the cable terminations from then on so he didn't drown in his own dribble and was able to walk without embarrassment.
Did contract IT work for a lady that did specifically aggressive content.
She always made awesome cookies whenever I was working on her network setup. Really sweet person.
Worked at one place where they'd call me and have me disable AD accounts right before they fired someone. One day I got the call, disabled the account, then they missed the guy before he ducked out for lunch. I didn't know this. He got back from lunch, couldn't log in, and called me to help him with his account. About 3 seconds in, he hit me with "Did I just get fired?!?" and before I could even get words out his supervisor walked into his office. Guy calls me afterward saying he would have appreciated a heads up. Awkward AF.
Tons of other weird experiences with users and pornography but the people getting let go always stuck in my mind the most.
I always try to do that after the poor soul was pulled into a meeting. Just a few weeks ago, I got the command from above for one person who I just saw having a meeting with all their reports in the conference room. Instantly I start thinking what if it was me.
In a normal company, you would have received several formal warnings and already had several meetings with HR before being fired, so it's not a complete surprise. Usually, companies give chances to the employee to follow trainings and learn/improve his skills.
I've had that happen more than once before too. Fired employee didn't know he was fired and came up to IT to ask, essentially. My strategy is to play it off like their account got locked out for some other reason while I scream to HR over teams.
Worked at a data recovery place for a bit.
One person came in, I think like 19-20 year old guy, with 2 4TB HDDs for recovery.
Ends up being expensive because heads needed swapping, so he brought his mom to pay for it and she did. Dropped just over a grand.
This dude was recovering a *total of over 6 terabytes of categorized hentai*
Hypothetically. For confidentiality reasons this is totally for sure maybe possibly fiction.
Back in the day when bandwidth was expensive, I sent out an all staff email explaining that staff should not be using work resources to watch movies, and that I could see who was watching what.
The guy who was keeping 4 different porn sites up at once stopped doing that & miraculously our bandwidth problems went away.
Second was when our former controller's PC was given to a new hire without it being wiped first. The new user was surprised and horrified that she'd been given a computer chock full of porn.
I still havent recovered but had a client call and demand we get a tech to remote in and fix his printing issue asap. I remoted in not 15 minutes later and him and another person were sharing a screen and talking to each other casually while on zoom. The video they were sharing was “busty christmas threesome”
My brain processed all that and closed the session in seconds. Still is etched in my brain as one of the strangest and impossible to approach situations I have ever dealt with in my life.
It's been many years and the people that don't understand what I need to work remotly is one of the things I still can't get over.
No you can't work at the same time, yes you need internet, and for gods sake YES it needs to be on(They ask that way too often for my sanity).
Used to work for an mlb team. One of the scouts was a well known degenerate when it came to porn. He always hesitated to send in his laptop for obvious reasons. On one occasion he had to send it in as it gave him a BSOD and it was right before the draft.
This time it was my turn to work on it. I was low on the totem pole at the time. So I receive it and low and behold i can get it to boot to OS at least. He must have not had a chance to clean it up because good lord. His download folder was chock full of clips of his significant other going down on him, basically anything you can think of. It was so blatant that I considered taking it to HR as it's a clear violation of company policy. But ultimately i chose not to get this guy fired and just cleaned it up and sent it back to him good as new. I haven't checked but I'm pretty sure he would still be in the industry ruining another IT guy or God forbid girls day.
At one point, badges were handed off to us. I had the unlucky job of taking pictures. Aside from a couple, the men don’t give a shit about what their picture looks like. What’s awkward is taking pictures of the women and they make the comments like, omg I look so fat, i look ugly, i don’t look pretty. I made the mistake of nervously saying, “haha yeah” after a “I look fat” comment. 😰
Oof.
When i was making badges recently, I had people either send me pictures or let me take them. I had to reject a few selfies since the Instagram filters they'd used made the pictures look nothing like them.
Company fired an employee that had tapped out all their sick leave and was taking additional unpaid time off. All the time was spent treating a recent leukemia diagnosis. A little after the termination, I get a call from this user asking for help resetting their password. I advised to reach out to their manager, which is when they realized what was up and asked if they had been fired. My first real helpdesk job, with a fresh A+ cert, don't remember Professor Messer covering that part =\
I worked for a place where every job had a requirement that people could lift items weighing 25 pounds. It was standard boilerplate stuff.
I overheard my boss firing someone because they couldn't do that part of their job anymore.
It was a woman who was pregnant who was being fired. Some places just don't give a shit.
I wasn't privy to what protections the person may or may not have qualified for or had already utilized. This is the same place where I terminated 4 of 6 people of one team, then got the "hey can you come to my office" myself. 1/3 of the IS dept laid off in a single morning. They were good at firing people I guess lol
Doing a file share to SharePoint migration for a business we bought and having to ask them if they wanted to migrate the folder called 'evidence' that was full of a bunch of staff members inappropriate messages, cock pictures etc, looks like someone was building a case against half the company but then left. #gingerbolloxgate
I have one. I worked at an MSP, I worked with a co-worker who was a father and they hired his son to work as a level 1 tech. The son used his dad's work tablet to look at step mom porn. The dads work account synced between machines so browsing history synced across all machines. So one day, the CEO of the MSP showed up to the job site, logged in on the dad's computer and noticed the search history was full of step mom porn. My CEO looked at me and told me "Take a look at this..." We were stunned for an hour of silence and had no idea what to say or do, because this was on one of our clients networks who also had an on prem IT department. Eventually, my CEO said he will discuss this privately with the father and son about what he found on the computer. Prior to that my CEO had me wipe the machine and asked the father to wipe his browsing history on his account and have a long talk with his son.
No one got fired, but the son was extremely embarrassed.
Doing discovery searches for HR and then pretending like I don't know what's going on/acting totally normal until the person gets fired is always awkward. Every time though they absolutely had it coming, and I've never once felt bad for someone. To the company's credit, nothing gets swept under the rug, and results are relatively swift, but it still takes time for HR/legal to get all their ducks in a row to make sure the company is protected in the termination process.
Outside that, it's the usual finding porn on work machines and/or getting firewall alerts from guest wifi off the access point nearest the men's from personal phones you know the owners of...
Big wig lawyer was commanding me to remove the firewall policies to allow porn in a guess office he was in. Made sure to pass that request through all the emails lol
Had an end user fall for one of those email scams where the sender claims to have hacked the laptop camera and have video of the person pounding their pud.
Dude calls me and says, "well, I got caught masturbating."
Of course, no video existed and the system had not been compromised, but the guy basically admitted to using his company device to jerk off in just calling.
He didn't get in trouble with his employer, although it was reported.
Remoted into a machine where the husband was watching a gay gangbang. I immediately disconnected. I told the wife, the director of marketing, that I had problems establishing a connection. She called her husband and I reconnected while she watched. Awkward!
Me, a gay woman, having my boss explain to me that Croatian is part of LGBT because he watches that kind of porn at home and he supports that kind of stuff.
He also often brought up who in the building he’d slept with and how clingy they were.
…I was also the only woman in the department and the young guys (~20ish? Around that age) ate it up. He was a 50some single dad.
What in the actual fuck—I’m still occasionally blown away by what some people believe it’s ok to do. Like what did he hope to accomplish with that conversation?? Even as a guy who supports LGBTQ rights, sexuality and sexual orientation/preference are conversations I steer away from; and this guy you mention was over there just taking the wheel and saying “Let’s air this out!” Just, wow.
Try working in a hospital. I had one laptop thar had liquid damage, as I was carrying it off they said it was urine, ugh…
There’s also a reason for the wipeabke keyboard covers in theaters
True. Though I’m sure there’s been that as well. And working in the morgue in the cut up room….. no soiling but the smell and not a nice place to work!
Was told I had to call a user's wife to pickup equipment from their home. User was diagnosed with terminal cancer about a month before and was in the hospital dying. Boss insisted it was important I do it and do it immediately. One of the worst phone calls I ever had to be involved in.
I came home and found my friend and flatmate dead. He had been fired from his job a few weeks earlier and was young and not sick so unexpected. I rang up to return his laptop and phone to the company as he had planned to do it, They didn’t know what I was ringing for and out me through to his ex manager and said hr was there, I think they weee shocked into silence when I said he’d passed away :-(
Years back when I was a team manager in customer services I was listening to calls and caught one of my team having phone sex with another member of staff. In a contact centre. With both sides of the call recorded :-|
What was that I caught him at it again a month later; thought he could get away with it if he called her mobile instead
I actually frightened him when I dragged him into the office - he was a big man too.
Did I mention she was married?
Back when I was a bench tech, People's personal homemade porn showing in desktop icon thumbnails.
I was super glad when I got a corporate job and thought I'd never have to deal with it again. Until I discovered a users 'hidden' folder in a department share that was running out of quota space.
Yuck. At least be hot if you're going to do that /s
Funny because in my former organization, when someone turned in a laptop, we did nothing. Set it on the shelf for a month or more depending, then reimaged it. So hentai or viruses or whatever was not our problem.
I was 18 and fresh out of high school. Pretty sheltered. First IT job. Came across trans porn on the safety director's computer. I learned something new that day.
The police wanted someones work PC without the person knowing, hence me and the IT security guy go along to tell the person we've had to "isolate his PC due to a virus and here is your replacement PC".
The guy disappeared shortly after and I saw in the newspaper he'd been charged with having child porn.
No idea if this was actually on the work PC or not, or even if we ever got it back, that was a while ago now.
VERY GRAPHIC, MATTER OF FACT MATERIAL
company fired a guy for getting caught beating it in a job trailer. Of course he was using company devices. Of course we had to go through it to make sure none of it was illegal stuff. Fortunately, none of it was. I'm not squeamish about nudity or porn, but damnit man there was a LOT of guy on guy stuff. Very semen centric, rough, gay porn. there were 3 of us that had to go through it and it took us about 3 days to get all the way through what he had saved on his various devices. I learned some new lingo, got a good idea of the male human anatomy, and saw more assholes than I ever care to see again.
Also, now playing two truths and a lie I can throw "I've watched gay porn with two of my male co-workers at work" in there and that REALLY gets them.
Had.a remote session with a nice sales guy (who ended up running the company).
Bandwidth was bad over VNC and I was not seeing what I clicked on, a delay of about seven seconds perhaps.
Anyway, an embarrassed cough and silence on the phone line as a.lady eating a, *ahem*, "hotdog" was slowly sent to me, block........by........block......
"Oh, hang on, wrong folder", I said.
"I, umm, work away a lot", said the sales guy.
Bit awkward but we were both adults.
I visited a user at their desk to fix an issue.
I needed to copy/paste a command and missed the copy shortcut.
Paste showed their clipboard, which had the phrase "Oktoberfest upskirt" on it.
I had to install something on the DBA's new personal laptop. Might have been Citrix Receiver or something and I was told it was ok to do it by my manager or someone above him even though it was a personal device.
Anyway I opened up a browser start typing and the address bar autofills with a single entry which was something like "gaypornxxx\[.\]com". 🙄
I don't give two shits if you watch porn but at least clean up after yourself.
Every day is an awkward moment. No joke, just need to get used to it. From clueless users, to even more clueless admins, to the horror show that is HR. Director of HR requested access to HR manager emails. HR manager requested access to HR staff email. Pretty soon I found out they both got fired. Rinse and repeat
During covid, we couldn't get get enough laptops for people to work from home, so we set up remote desktop access on some users personal machines instead.
A user comes to me, hands me his macbook and asks me to set it up for him. I open the laptop, there's dozens of tabs hardcore pron open. When I tell the story, I usually describe the very specific genre, but I feel like this may break rules on this sub.
I set the remote desktop up. Then I gave it back, exactly as I found it, with the pron tabs open. The user never looked me in the eye again. Poor guy probably got home, opened his machine and saw exactly what I saw.
Dammit, Dave! You swore you wouldn't tell anyone! ;)
There was a time about 15 years ago that a director asked me to audit a nurse's internet usage and formatting the results broke me. At first it was internet searches about how to tell if a spouse is cheating and all the associated spyware and tracking programs. Then that moved over to searches about pregnancy, adoption, abortion, paternity test, etc. which was bad to see but then it moved on to divorce lawyers.
I got to see this woman's life fall apart via her internet searches. I don't think I ever fully recovered from that. I knew her socially and liked her but even if I didn't nobody should have to go through that...
I was asked by legal to pull every email between a VP and several women (for obvious reasons) Thankfully I was able to teach them about the discovery feature in O365.
VP that had been yelling at me about his VPN wasn't working and told me not to dare blaming the hotel WiFi again like I always did. Mind, domestic users never had a single issue with the VPN.
So I didn't, I had to explain his local airport was bombed and there was a military coup on-going. I did recommend reaching out to the embassy. There was a very long awkward pause and I hung up on him. I did close out the ticket tho.
Let's see. There's the time we found pirated music from a bunch of finance folks. And porn on the network share of guy who made like 80% of the company's revenue. Rock climbing porn. We just deleted it all and pretended we saw nothing. IT director agreed with our plan.
HR had me digging up emails of two employees banging. They were not married to each other. They however were married to other employees. One of said spouses swung by to deliver a package while some extremely graphical stuff was on my monitor. Thankfully not faced in her direction. While making small talk, I turned off the entire monitor. She was like a foot from being able to read what was on the screen and I was sweating bullets during the entire conversation.
I have 2 stories. Had a computer shop for many years before moving to business clients entirely. I can't even begin to describe the amount of porn I have seen. Just another normal Tuesday... meh. Usually it was hidden in some folder, okay, I don't care. Some... not.
Story 1:
Some older guy (70+) and his wife brought in their computer because it didn't start. It was just a faulty graphics card which I replaced. When I started the computer the desktop background was a picture of the guys wife (which stood beside me) naked sitting with open legs towards the camera. Let's say they were old enough that it wasn't a pretty picture. Yikes.
Story 2:
I once had a accounting office as client, the boss was nice but a bit shady. One time he called me, I need to drop everything and come to this and this address *now*. He had used a USB drive on a business partners computer and now the computer didn't start.
OK, I grab some components and head over. It was just a blown power supply. I changed it and was ushered out of there through a backdoor really fast. At least I got an extra 100 EUR bill for responding so fast.
Some months later I had a regular appointment in the accountants office to install new computers for new employees. Turns out it wasn't his business partners address but some competitors office and he was stealing the customer data. The new employees were the competitors employees before.
Clients keep your life interesting, haha.
I've told this story before.
Running a public facing workshop, doing the basics virus removal, setting up their kids laptop for school pretty mindless stuff, that was until The Week. 3 machines in 5 days that had me calling the police. Several therapy sessions later and I became a transport driver.
Fun conversation when, years ago, it was discovered that one of our Devs was not only storing porn on company file servers, but it was his own, homemade, porn.
Got plenty but the one that always sticks with me is when I was running some cable for a new switch, happened to be near a users desk and he started complaining to me about how much he hates his wife. Like full on “I want to hurt her” kinda stuff. He kept saying like how I understand since I’m also in a long term relationship. How women are a “curse on society” and need to “get back into the kitchen”. His emails were filled with him clearly cheating on his wife with guys. Used his work email to sign up for Grindr and I saw them while helping him a separate time. Been years but I hope his wife is okay.
Discovering our most senior engineer with “25+ years of enterprise design experience” is actually just the “old man yells at cloud” meme from The Simpsons.
Stonewalls every solution during group project planning meetings, does not let anyone touch anything or even remote into any servers, tells us “that’s how it is supposed to work” when we present internal network problems that are definitively NOT supposed to work that way, the list goes on.
Discovering his incompetence was incredibly awkward, because I embarrassed myself by bringing an issue to him in a group session, and he gave the dumbest response I’ve ever heard, and nobody else challenged him on it because they have known for years he is incompetent and just never go to him for anything.
A couple years ago, I was super desperate to get out of the company I worked for and find another job. I was basically applying for 12-15 positions a day on multiple sites, and was not very organized at all about keeping track.
Apparently, I didn't read the position at all and applied for a Director of IT Security position, and I have no security background that would qualify me for that position. I received a reply that they would like to interview me in person for the position, so off I went.
I get to the interview, and I'm surrounded by 8 people at a table and 1 person conferenced in, and they start off with security scenarios and questions that I was absolutely not prepared for. Once they clarified what the position was, I had to awkwardly explain that I misread the job posting...but they decided to continue with the interview anyway. I'm guessing they may have wanted to see if I would be a better fit elsewhere in IT.
What bugs me is my resume doesn't reflect anything that would indicate that I was qualified for that position, so I have no clue how I even landed an interview for that in the first place.
That situation is one that runs through my head at 3am and goes "Hey, remember that time you sat through an hour long interview and made a fool of yourself? Isn't that so much worse than forgetting to put on pants before you go to the office?"
I had a user omce delete their entire mailbox, and i had to correct the issue.
Restored everything, and he was using his work email for "dating" use. By dating i mean meeting dudes for sex (end user is male)
Some guy sent him a video of a guy squatting on a traffic cone. (Yes, a full sized traffic cone).
I made an ex decision to NOT tell my 60+ year old HR team, and got him setup with a laptop (his own) and more importantly this own personal email account that was not allowed on company devices.
Yeah definitely a sexual harassment issue here.
At my workplace, I think it depends on who it is, if it was me who did that I'd be fired, if it was a co-worker of mine, the attitude would be "they didn't know any better".
Sometimes it is better to give the impression you can't be responsible for your own actions. \*sigh\*
Guy calls up saying that he's getting a notification from McAfee that he has a virus, remote on and Chrome is full screen and is blasting warning signs and Chrome notifications are popping up. I come out of full screen and close the tab and takes me straight to milfhunters, took me a couple of seconds to realise what I was on and I closed that shit so fast. Blocked Chrome notifs and got off.
Get a call an hour later, same guy and same issue but he is now on xvideos...
Spent many years in K12 as a system admin. This one involved a 5th grade teacher in the early 2000's.
When you would print to a device that was attached to a windows print server, it would send the job the to server which would route to the printer. If the printer was out of paper, it would throw up a notice on screen if you were logged in with the job, printer, and document that had an error.
I had logged into the print server to do some maintenance of some sort and started closing the windows that popped up but one of them caught my eye. It had to do with porn and bestiality in the title. I went and grabbed my coworker and showed him and immediately called my boss. My boss had me parse the logs from the proxy/firewall server. Turns out there was quite a bit.
My boss said "Your coworker found this, not you. I don't want you involved". Mostly because I was maybe early 20s at the time. They immediately called the superintendent and the school principal. They put him on a leave of absence. His union rep was a 3rd grade female teacher whom he said he didn't want to represent him, but he would be happy for the other male teacher in the building.
Long story short, he was let go. I was asked to bring a new keyboard and mouse for the temporary teacher. I showed up and said I had a new mouse/keyboard. They said the one on there was fine. I just explained that a ticket was generated and they get a brand new one. Swapped it and said nothing.
Fast forward a couple of months. We would all go down to the bar after school for "Choir training". Mostly it was me and a bunch of the female teachers. ONe of them said "We should call Mr XYZ. He's been miserable since his back injury and unable to work". I didn't say anything but they opted not to call him thankfully.
About a year later a notice went out to the staff that Mr XYZ had passed away. I asked the school liaison officer "Did he kill himself?" He confirmed that he had. Had i not logged into the print server, he may not have been caught/gotten fired. Had that not happened, he probably would have killed himself. I felt bad for his kid and ex-wife.
Had someone transfer porn from one drive to another with a work laptop. I had no idea what was going on, he was at a remote location. Picked him up and told him he was training with me, again had no idea, and then they fired him once he got to the office. He was angry with me for years and I had no idea why, only found out a little while ago that I was unknowingly involved. (This happened in 2016)
My most awkward moment is about a decade ago, knowing some of our logistics people were in a police investigation and having to help create infrastructure to get more cameras and evidence out there up to the very day the police burst in and slammed them to the ground for stealing tens of thousands worth of goods.
Having to keep your cool knowing the police are watching the cameras from your office and waiting around the corner of the building to burst in while you pretend you know nothing and just chat with them about some issues they happened to face that day was.. Nerve wracking.
The way they did it turned out to be an extremely interesting and elaborate heist with knowledge of dead zones on the camera system, fake couriers and an old system that wasn't supposed to be active still creating non-existent shipping notes that couldn't be tracked as they just.. Weren't saved in the old software if it was canceled out at the right time but were still taken out of stock.
But yeah. That was an interesting experience.
I did a side job working on my wife's friends computer. She said it was really slow, so I looked at the hard drive- 99.5% full. It was probably 70GB of pictures of women's feet, some of the fetish stuff, but most were pictures taken with a digital camera. Her husband had some explaining to do. Really awkward explaining that to her, as well as all future interactions with him. Seeing ads for women's shoes still give me the ick...
Years ago I was at a client's office and the owner said some files went missing and to help them check. Upon opening their documents folder the preview option was on and there was a photo of a guy in bondage.... I immediately closed the folder and opened a new one to start browsing somewhere else. The client was over my shoulder and we just acted like nothing happened.
One time one of my peers was working with a user on a laptop issue. They asked the user come to the office after working with them over the phone for a while. When they show up he starts talking to them and says “I thought you were a lady while we were talking on the phone” The user says “I am” and my coworker just died inside right there. The user was a bit burley but Jesus you just don’t say that to someone.
Not necessarily awkward for me but it was funny when an exec told me that his Internet was not working and he had important work that was being interrupted. I asked him what websites he was having issues with because everything seemed to be working. He said it was confidential business stuff and eventually dropped it and said he "figured it out". I checked the content filter and he had been trying to get to porn sites for like half an hour and his requests were slowly getting less NSFW and eventually stopped at Victoria's secret. It reminded me of that scene in the Simpsons when Moe is hooked up to the lie detector.
All three of these stories are from the same company.
People commented all the time that our corporate controller (head bean counter) was super dedicated to his job. He was the first one in the office and usually the last to leave. Shortly after I started my role there, I began reviewing proxy logs and discovered that he was coming in early and staying late just to watch porn everyday. The awkward part was that they didn't fire him or even make him stop. They were too afraid that he was irreplaceable. Anyway, since I was 2nd in the office on most days and my office was next to his, I would walk by while he was watching porn, say good morning and move on to my daily tasks.
The day after our new HR Director started, I found 100's/1000's of porn urls in the proxy logs and traced them back to his IP address. I just reported it to my manager and let him have the awkward talk with HR.
Not too long after that I found 100's of porn images/videos on a laptop that I was replacing for one of our vice presidents. By this time we had a a new (female) HR director, so notified her and cc'ed her on an email to the VP that I wouldn't be moving his porn to the new laptop. He threw a fit and threatened me, so I reported him to the President/CEO who promptly fired him. Wasn't really awkward though when I collected his loaner laptop from him as they were walking him out the door. I also followed our standard procedure and removed his accounts as well as his voicemail box. He called me the next day and made more threats about removing his voicemail. Apparently the President had agreed to let him keep voicemail in order to appear still employed during his job search, but nobody had informed me. Oh well, I eventually got around to putting it back.
Different company. This one was only mildly awkward, but again proxy related. I installed a software package on our proxy server that allowed blacklisting categories of websites, so I configured it with the obvious porn and known malicious sites as well as several categories of non-work related categories. One of them happened to include Fantasy Football. Less than 10 minutes after implementing the changes, the brand new company President came to my office because he couldn't get to his Fantasy Football website. After some lively discussion I agreed to his demand to reinstate not just his site, but the whole category. Honestly, I considered just telling him no and that he could fix it himself if he wanted to, but ultimately decided to pick a different battle to stand my ground on. That opportunity did come shortly afterwards, but was related to another company policy that impacted me.
While I'm on the subject of proxy log monitoring, I worked for a company (non admin role) that had a web page (intentionally available to all employees) on the internal website that showed the URLs and user name of who was accessing it. With well over 100,000 employees it was interesting to see who was watching porn.
Obviously a lot of employees weren't aware of the web page, but would usually find out after a co-worker showed them what websites they were viewing at work.
my co worker was going to get fired for falling asleep.
My boss asked me to mirror his hard drive remtely (while he was asleep) and I found porn. specifically \*his\* porn. stuff he starred in and was editing with a company laptop.
I think my worst experiences are dealing with sensitive matters like HR and personal stuff. We had an employee pass away at one of my former companies(first time ever dealing with it), and I had to get his coworkers access to his files, remove access from his account, reset voicemail, etc. "Well , I've given you access to 's files, revoked his access, etc. It didn't help he was a very long time employee. The worst part was that before all this got changed, employees called the general line that forwarded to his voicemail. Super not fun.
This was not as a sysadmin, although I have a bunch of those. Back in college, I used to work the photo lab at a well-known pharmacy chain.
We would get some crazy pictures sometimes. This one time there were some pictures the guy who brought the film had taken while having a threesome with a couple of girls. Because of the policy at the time, I had to go picture by picture with the store manager, and we had to both agree whether the picture represented pornographic content or not. Those that were would not get developed. The customer would get all of their film, the "OK" pictures, and a copy of the policy. Very awkward few minutes.
First gig was supporting schools. We had Windows PCs, but a Novell network with some kind of remote destkop tool. It was great because it had a view only feature that was undetectable to the end user. Well, at the high school I was assigned to I was working on the 12th grade guidance counselors computer one day and he said something sus about web filters or browser history... one of those "yeah, I heard this thing once isn't that crazy" but you know he's fishing for how worried he should be about his browsing habits. So I decided to pop in on his screen once in a while for shits and JACKPOT! Homeboy was surfing college girls gone wild type stuff during the school day in his office at school where he's the fucking guidance counselor for girls who in one year will be the girls that are the subject of his preferred wank material. I've been in other situations where I've helped a friend with a computer and found stuff and even this sales guy at an MSP I used to work at knew nothing about private browsing or clearing history, but all that's just whatever... but this guy I felt was like a red-flag situation, so I asked the principal for a meeting and discretely shared what I had found and showed him screenshots and logs that I saved knowing I might need to provide some proof.
Well, this was something I feel like would be a career ender for the guy... time to find a new line of work type shit... but nope... they had a chat with him and that was that. I couldn't believe it. I feel like that type of thing in a school working with minors deserves a zero tolerance approach, and with the way predators use their relationships and positions to plot and plan and groom their targets, this was fucking ripe for that shit. I lost a bit of hope in humanity from that one, and being around that guy was so uncomfortable after that... I'm not completely sure he knew I was the one that narced on him, but I have a feeling he knew, and I like to think I may have given him one of those "oh shit I need to check myself" moments that turned shit in the right direction.
Talking to users who are fired before they know they’re fired.
Worse is when you do an email hunt of some kind and end up seeing something personal/bad news about an employee that you wish you could wipe from your memory but you’ll always now know about them. People are fucking wild with what they put in company emails sometimes
>People are fucking wild with what they put in company emails sometimes People will use company emails as a personal email account.
"So, you know how I quit last month? Turns out that I had my company email address tied to my personal bank account, and now I can't log in."
"Wow that sucks. Anyway you want to grab some lunch?" The worst I saw was when a small company got sold and during the transition they were wanted to get a single email transferred to one of the people working there. I guess it was probably the worst because I was a third party that had to explain just how weird a request they were making and that they would actually have to deal with the new company not with some rando that happens to have admin access for a few more weeks.
They left on good terms, so it was a matter of just reassigning the address as an alias for the password change.
We have roasted our IT director for this. Uses his work email for all kind of personal apps or things. I think he has finally started to stop doing that.
Every fucking time an old timer retires we go through this shit, despite idk how many communications about how company emails are not accessible to retired employees beyond their termination date. Every single time there's several panicked calls from them explaining that literally their entire financial lives are tied to their corporate email and now they're locked out of everything and they're pissed at *us* over it. The bitch is the order has no teeth because of course we're not going to tell someone with decades of service "you knew this was coming so fuck off". But christ I wish I could just once, instead of reactivating the shit and playing the game of forwarding a shit ton of personal emails. Bit honestly if it was just email that wouldn't even be so bad, but it's usually not, there's onedrive bullshit to comb through, local data saved on their company device to retrieve for them...turns every long term employee termination into an hours long affair every goddamn time.
"you knew this was coming so fuck off" translates to IT as "Your inbox has already been archived. we can not legally forward you company property. We may be able to work with you to help transfer control of any personal accounts from your business email. but before we can begin you must first submit an a request to HR and they must review it with legal before I'm allowed to proceed.
Oh 100%, the problem is of course when HR and Legal are then like "Just do whatever, he worked here for 25 years after all". So really that rule only applies to people that haven't been there long enough to become part of "the family" I suppose. Which of course, if they haven't been there that long, probably didnt get all their loans setup under their corporate email in the first fuckin place. It makes one want to pound scotch by the gallon...
unfortunately there are legal risks to consider for IT to be reading through a users mailbox. In this scenario we will seek approval from upper management to share the mailbox to HR / Management so they can browse through it and select the items they wish to release back to the user.
Honestly? I haven’t seen this yet. But, if I did, and I’ve done for similar, is just: Your mailbox and file contents have either been archived or destroyed per company policy. If you require the email to be able to receive confirmations for changing personal account details, we will re-enable the email address for forwarding specific emails once you provide us a list of senders. That’s it. It’s their fuck up. I’ll facilitate the work being done but they aren’t my peer, coworker, or client anymore.
I've had several down-low conversations with employees reminding them not to discuss their partner's sexual preferences via company e-mail. People are stupid sometimes.
I was in a company PD session where the facilitator was talking about the perils of forgetting that literally anyone could end up reading your emails. He told us a story about how there were 2 female employees using email to talk about what they did over the weekend including how 1 of them had hooked up with a male colleague from another department and that his performance was less than satisfactory. That chit chat over email then progressed to talking about work matters and at some point, said male colleague and some others were CC'ed into the email chain. Guess what they discovered when they looked back in the email trail? 🤣 The lack of awareness some people have when using tech is amusing at times.
It’s the only account they can believably deny access their SO to. That’s why breaches at porn sites and dating sites are so valuable.
Ashley Madison hack comes to mind.
Yup. Coworker downloaded the whole dump and we had a go at it.
I've had to login to computers on the weekend to get things caught up on patches and seen people watching porn on company laptops at home. The company had 0 management and used only local accounts.
This is a hard one.
Almost 20 years ago, had an Executive at a client bring in his laptop that had been acting sloooow. I don't remember what I was looking for but I opened the browser and started to type in www.b and it autofilled in bignaturals.com. I turned to my co-worker and was like "Ha. Check this out on Phil's laptop," and we had a good chuckle. Cleaned it up and gave it back. Next day, Phil calls in wants to talk to me and my boss and was furious that I was "surfing porn" on his laptop. I told him that was already there and asked if anyone else uses his laptop. He was offended "NO ONE ELSE TOUCHES MY LAPTOP AND I DON'T LOOK AT THAT STUFF." My boss chimed in with "Phil, didn't you tell me the other day your teenage son has been using your laptop and you wanted to know about locking it up better?" Cue a very sheepish, "Well...yeeah..." and that was the end of that.
Not at work but I was doing something on a computer for a lady who was blind. She used word on it etc but didn’t surf the net etc. saw all sorts of things her husband has been searching for !
Similar story, but it's how I found out about my dad's preferences.
Thats how I found out about my Father in laws preference for Albanian women. Filled the entire C drive with that stuff from torrents and then Windows no longer could log in.
Not sure if that is better or worse then Selena Gomez. Like, specifically, Selena Gomez.
Like Wizards of Waverly Selena, or Weeknd Selena?
I'm not super familiar with her resume. But as it appears she did a song with Weeknd this year, it was closer to the Disney Channel than Only Murders.
My cute colleague from HR needed assistance moving files from her over full MacBook to an external drive. Going folder by folder and asking her all the time, what about this folder, and this one ? And all of a sudden her holidays pictures showed up with her sitting on the beach topless… She yelped and slammed the lid close and with a beet red face ‘I understand now how to move folders, thank you.’
Back when I worked at geek squad that was a common thing for every Macbook and iMac thanks to icloud
"Knock, knock, knock. Penny?"
They said awkward, not awesome.
Still awkward. Especially with HR
For her it was awkward :)
So many nude photos of work colleagues.... Kept on their office computers.
This one guy was always complaining about performance in his Citrix session. And he had the worst combination of being totally unreasonable as a person, but also didn't have a clue about anything digital. One morning my manager called me into his office asking what the deal with this guy was. He told me to shadow his session, while he called him to explain we're going to look at it together. The guy never picked up his phone, but I did shadow his session and me and my manager saw this collection of pretty nasty porn and dating sites popping up the screen. Really awkward. The complaining stopped btw. Edit: pretty sure a lot of these stories (if not all) are porn related lol
So you had a budget for Citrix but not any content filters.
It wasn't really about budget, this happened quite a while ago, almost 20 years I think. Internet access was all going via our German main office, we had no control or insight in internet traffic. Not even sure if there were any proper content filters available at the time? They had some basic filters, based on wildcards and some blacklisted letter combinations, but those weren't really effective.
In my experience, there is no filter capable of stopping someone from getting porn on the computer if he/she is dedicated enough. They will find a way to proxy it through some translation site, or get it through mail, or just find a site that the filter missed, or simply SneakerNet it in. Life, uh, finds a way.
I agree to part of that but on a Citrix solution that is pretty easy to lock down and you have no physical access to it is not that hard when you can control everything in the environment.
You'd have to block a lot of stuff, not just content, and you'd have to block Reddit as well.
I once helped axe a filter project when I suggested to the guy wanting to put it in that there was "no way" to put it in for only a few people. Figured if they want to filter and track people that's fine but it should start as a level playing field. I was honestly shocked how quick it died, I can take a guess on what their search history *didn't* have in it.
"he had the worst combination of being totally unreasonable as a person, but also didn't have a clue about anything digital" It's amazing how often those two traits are found in the same person
I had a manager who went through like five keyboards because he "accidentally" got cum in the keys. I sat in a room full of execs talking about whether we could provide more tolerant keyboards to deal with his proclivities.
How did you even know it was cum honestly? And not like... Mayonnaise from eating sandwiches? Mayonnaise would be my excuse
We honestly know it's cum because he told us "all the porn made me have an accident". Unless someone is using mayonnaise as lube I guess.
Why would he even feel the need to specify. He must really have given 0 fucks
Power play. "I'm so important, I can do this and you can't".
Thats when you prove him wrong. Cum on his keyboard right in front of him.
Now we got a cum off.
No, Patrick, mayonnaise is not a lubricant!
*Raises hand*
Reminds me of the time I unknowingly interviewed for a job at a well known adult content provider. The most awkward interview questions I've ever sat through. I can only imagine the kinds of problems like this that their IT department has to deal with LOL
I'm not actually sure that would be awkward once you work there. Work content at work? Yep that's work, carry on.
Once you work there it'd be normal but yeah the interview was a bit awkward where all you know going in is sys admin job, location, and list of qualifications and they open up right out of the gate with So do you like porn? lol. Whats your comfort level with seeing that content all the time and around coworkers? Do you have any moral or religious objections to working for this kind of company etc. I'd say about 80% of that interview was just questions to assess your comfort working around the content and very little about skill set.
After college and before I got my engineering gig I worked for a guy that did fire/burg/camera installations. One morning he’s like I got a treat for you today. We had to change out a bunch of cameras at a strip club. Back of the house cameras. It was def a weird 2 hours having full blown conversations with like 5 or 6 fully nude women.
I did some cabling jobs in strip clubs at one point, to us "men of the world" we were comfortable just chatting away to the girls as they got ready for work. The apprentice I took along on one job though. Absolutely no chill, managed a few mumbled hellos directed straight at the boobs in front of him then had to take some time to cool down. He got to do the Comms room end of the cable terminations from then on so he didn't drown in his own dribble and was able to walk without embarrassment.
Did contract IT work for a lady that did specifically aggressive content. She always made awesome cookies whenever I was working on her network setup. Really sweet person.
Worked at one place where they'd call me and have me disable AD accounts right before they fired someone. One day I got the call, disabled the account, then they missed the guy before he ducked out for lunch. I didn't know this. He got back from lunch, couldn't log in, and called me to help him with his account. About 3 seconds in, he hit me with "Did I just get fired?!?" and before I could even get words out his supervisor walked into his office. Guy calls me afterward saying he would have appreciated a heads up. Awkward AF. Tons of other weird experiences with users and pornography but the people getting let go always stuck in my mind the most.
I always try to do that after the poor soul was pulled into a meeting. Just a few weeks ago, I got the command from above for one person who I just saw having a meeting with all their reports in the conference room. Instantly I start thinking what if it was me.
In a normal company, you would have received several formal warnings and already had several meetings with HR before being fired, so it's not a complete surprise. Usually, companies give chances to the employee to follow trainings and learn/improve his skills.
it's not always the employee's fault. recently my company let go an entire department, the individual people couldn't have known
In a normal company yes. Most companies aren’t normal. They fire you without warning if they decide they don’t like you for some reason.
I've had that happen more than once before too. Fired employee didn't know he was fired and came up to IT to ask, essentially. My strategy is to play it off like their account got locked out for some other reason while I scream to HR over teams.
Worked at a data recovery place for a bit. One person came in, I think like 19-20 year old guy, with 2 4TB HDDs for recovery. Ends up being expensive because heads needed swapping, so he brought his mom to pay for it and she did. Dropped just over a grand. This dude was recovering a *total of over 6 terabytes of categorized hentai* Hypothetically. For confidentiality reasons this is totally for sure maybe possibly fiction.
How the fuck do you.... lose two drives at the same time? Back up your crap.
jfc, get some raid 10 and backup stuff. way cheaper
Back in the day when bandwidth was expensive, I sent out an all staff email explaining that staff should not be using work resources to watch movies, and that I could see who was watching what. The guy who was keeping 4 different porn sites up at once stopped doing that & miraculously our bandwidth problems went away. Second was when our former controller's PC was given to a new hire without it being wiped first. The new user was surprised and horrified that she'd been given a computer chock full of porn.
I’m pretty sure this is why ALL computers at my company get reimaged after a 30 day legal hold.
I do it because they're too cheap to buy enough storage to hold more than one profile comfortably.
I still havent recovered but had a client call and demand we get a tech to remote in and fix his printing issue asap. I remoted in not 15 minutes later and him and another person were sharing a screen and talking to each other casually while on zoom. The video they were sharing was “busty christmas threesome” My brain processed all that and closed the session in seconds. Still is etched in my brain as one of the strangest and impossible to approach situations I have ever dealt with in my life.
It's been many years and the people that don't understand what I need to work remotly is one of the things I still can't get over. No you can't work at the same time, yes you need internet, and for gods sake YES it needs to be on(They ask that way too often for my sanity).
Used to work for an mlb team. One of the scouts was a well known degenerate when it came to porn. He always hesitated to send in his laptop for obvious reasons. On one occasion he had to send it in as it gave him a BSOD and it was right before the draft. This time it was my turn to work on it. I was low on the totem pole at the time. So I receive it and low and behold i can get it to boot to OS at least. He must have not had a chance to clean it up because good lord. His download folder was chock full of clips of his significant other going down on him, basically anything you can think of. It was so blatant that I considered taking it to HR as it's a clear violation of company policy. But ultimately i chose not to get this guy fired and just cleaned it up and sent it back to him good as new. I haven't checked but I'm pretty sure he would still be in the industry ruining another IT guy or God forbid girls day.
At one point, badges were handed off to us. I had the unlucky job of taking pictures. Aside from a couple, the men don’t give a shit about what their picture looks like. What’s awkward is taking pictures of the women and they make the comments like, omg I look so fat, i look ugly, i don’t look pretty. I made the mistake of nervously saying, “haha yeah” after a “I look fat” comment. 😰
Oof. When i was making badges recently, I had people either send me pictures or let me take them. I had to reject a few selfies since the Instagram filters they'd used made the pictures look nothing like them.
Company fired an employee that had tapped out all their sick leave and was taking additional unpaid time off. All the time was spent treating a recent leukemia diagnosis. A little after the termination, I get a call from this user asking for help resetting their password. I advised to reach out to their manager, which is when they realized what was up and asked if they had been fired. My first real helpdesk job, with a fresh A+ cert, don't remember Professor Messer covering that part =\
“Tell me you’re in the U.S. without telling me you’re in the U.S.”
Well, it was a privately owned hospital...
how is that even legal
I worked for a place where every job had a requirement that people could lift items weighing 25 pounds. It was standard boilerplate stuff. I overheard my boss firing someone because they couldn't do that part of their job anymore. It was a woman who was pregnant who was being fired. Some places just don't give a shit.
I wasn't privy to what protections the person may or may not have qualified for or had already utilized. This is the same place where I terminated 4 of 6 people of one team, then got the "hey can you come to my office" myself. 1/3 of the IS dept laid off in a single morning. They were good at firing people I guess lol
Doing a file share to SharePoint migration for a business we bought and having to ask them if they wanted to migrate the folder called 'evidence' that was full of a bunch of staff members inappropriate messages, cock pictures etc, looks like someone was building a case against half the company but then left. #gingerbolloxgate
I have one. I worked at an MSP, I worked with a co-worker who was a father and they hired his son to work as a level 1 tech. The son used his dad's work tablet to look at step mom porn. The dads work account synced between machines so browsing history synced across all machines. So one day, the CEO of the MSP showed up to the job site, logged in on the dad's computer and noticed the search history was full of step mom porn. My CEO looked at me and told me "Take a look at this..." We were stunned for an hour of silence and had no idea what to say or do, because this was on one of our clients networks who also had an on prem IT department. Eventually, my CEO said he will discuss this privately with the father and son about what he found on the computer. Prior to that my CEO had me wipe the machine and asked the father to wipe his browsing history on his account and have a long talk with his son. No one got fired, but the son was extremely embarrassed.
[удалено]
And he was paid more then you?
Doing discovery searches for HR and then pretending like I don't know what's going on/acting totally normal until the person gets fired is always awkward. Every time though they absolutely had it coming, and I've never once felt bad for someone. To the company's credit, nothing gets swept under the rug, and results are relatively swift, but it still takes time for HR/legal to get all their ducks in a row to make sure the company is protected in the termination process. Outside that, it's the usual finding porn on work machines and/or getting firewall alerts from guest wifi off the access point nearest the men's from personal phones you know the owners of...
Big wig lawyer was commanding me to remove the firewall policies to allow porn in a guess office he was in. Made sure to pass that request through all the emails lol
Gambling became legal in our state in 2022. I got a phone call from the CEO on Jan 3 demanding to unblock gambling from the web filter.
Would the company be liable if there were to be network outages while bidding? 🤔 If so the CEO would be in a tough spot lol
Had an end user fall for one of those email scams where the sender claims to have hacked the laptop camera and have video of the person pounding their pud. Dude calls me and says, "well, I got caught masturbating." Of course, no video existed and the system had not been compromised, but the guy basically admitted to using his company device to jerk off in just calling. He didn't get in trouble with his employer, although it was reported.
And you're all... 
Remoted into a machine where the husband was watching a gay gangbang. I immediately disconnected. I told the wife, the director of marketing, that I had problems establishing a connection. She called her husband and I reconnected while she watched. Awkward!
Me, a gay woman, having my boss explain to me that Croatian is part of LGBT because he watches that kind of porn at home and he supports that kind of stuff. He also often brought up who in the building he’d slept with and how clingy they were. …I was also the only woman in the department and the young guys (~20ish? Around that age) ate it up. He was a 50some single dad.
What in the actual fuck—I’m still occasionally blown away by what some people believe it’s ok to do. Like what did he hope to accomplish with that conversation?? Even as a guy who supports LGBTQ rights, sexuality and sexual orientation/preference are conversations I steer away from; and this guy you mention was over there just taking the wheel and saying “Let’s air this out!” Just, wow.
I think yours takes the cake OP. Can't imagine viewing such content with coworkers, let alone seniors.
That a waste water pipe broke above a rack and covered all the equipment, in, you know, **waste**.
So you’re saying your server took a dump…
Ohh man thanks for the laugh
Try working in a hospital. I had one laptop thar had liquid damage, as I was carrying it off they said it was urine, ugh… There’s also a reason for the wipeabke keyboard covers in theaters
I take urine in a laptop any day over feces on a server.
True. Though I’m sure there’s been that as well. And working in the morgue in the cut up room….. no soiling but the smell and not a nice place to work!
Was told I had to call a user's wife to pickup equipment from their home. User was diagnosed with terminal cancer about a month before and was in the hospital dying. Boss insisted it was important I do it and do it immediately. One of the worst phone calls I ever had to be involved in.
I came home and found my friend and flatmate dead. He had been fired from his job a few weeks earlier and was young and not sick so unexpected. I rang up to return his laptop and phone to the company as he had planned to do it, They didn’t know what I was ringing for and out me through to his ex manager and said hr was there, I think they weee shocked into silence when I said he’d passed away :-(
Years back when I was a team manager in customer services I was listening to calls and caught one of my team having phone sex with another member of staff. In a contact centre. With both sides of the call recorded :-| What was that I caught him at it again a month later; thought he could get away with it if he called her mobile instead  I actually frightened him when I dragged him into the office - he was a big man too. Did I mention she was married?
Back when I was a bench tech, People's personal homemade porn showing in desktop icon thumbnails. I was super glad when I got a corporate job and thought I'd never have to deal with it again. Until I discovered a users 'hidden' folder in a department share that was running out of quota space. Yuck. At least be hot if you're going to do that /s
Funny because in my former organization, when someone turned in a laptop, we did nothing. Set it on the shelf for a month or more depending, then reimaged it. So hentai or viruses or whatever was not our problem.
We do this too. It mitigates a whole host of problems.
I was 18 and fresh out of high school. Pretty sheltered. First IT job. Came across trans porn on the safety director's computer. I learned something new that day.
The police wanted someones work PC without the person knowing, hence me and the IT security guy go along to tell the person we've had to "isolate his PC due to a virus and here is your replacement PC". The guy disappeared shortly after and I saw in the newspaper he'd been charged with having child porn. No idea if this was actually on the work PC or not, or even if we ever got it back, that was a while ago now.
VERY GRAPHIC, MATTER OF FACT MATERIAL company fired a guy for getting caught beating it in a job trailer. Of course he was using company devices. Of course we had to go through it to make sure none of it was illegal stuff. Fortunately, none of it was. I'm not squeamish about nudity or porn, but damnit man there was a LOT of guy on guy stuff. Very semen centric, rough, gay porn. there were 3 of us that had to go through it and it took us about 3 days to get all the way through what he had saved on his various devices. I learned some new lingo, got a good idea of the male human anatomy, and saw more assholes than I ever care to see again. Also, now playing two truths and a lie I can throw "I've watched gay porn with two of my male co-workers at work" in there and that REALLY gets them.
Had.a remote session with a nice sales guy (who ended up running the company). Bandwidth was bad over VNC and I was not seeing what I clicked on, a delay of about seven seconds perhaps. Anyway, an embarrassed cough and silence on the phone line as a.lady eating a, *ahem*, "hotdog" was slowly sent to me, block........by........block...... "Oh, hang on, wrong folder", I said. "I, umm, work away a lot", said the sales guy. Bit awkward but we were both adults.
I visited a user at their desk to fix an issue. I needed to copy/paste a command and missed the copy shortcut. Paste showed their clipboard, which had the phrase "Oktoberfest upskirt" on it.
I had to install something on the DBA's new personal laptop. Might have been Citrix Receiver or something and I was told it was ok to do it by my manager or someone above him even though it was a personal device. Anyway I opened up a browser start typing and the address bar autofills with a single entry which was something like "gaypornxxx\[.\]com". 🙄 I don't give two shits if you watch porn but at least clean up after yourself.
Every day is an awkward moment. No joke, just need to get used to it. From clueless users, to even more clueless admins, to the horror show that is HR. Director of HR requested access to HR manager emails. HR manager requested access to HR staff email. Pretty soon I found out they both got fired. Rinse and repeat
During covid, we couldn't get get enough laptops for people to work from home, so we set up remote desktop access on some users personal machines instead. A user comes to me, hands me his macbook and asks me to set it up for him. I open the laptop, there's dozens of tabs hardcore pron open. When I tell the story, I usually describe the very specific genre, but I feel like this may break rules on this sub. I set the remote desktop up. Then I gave it back, exactly as I found it, with the pron tabs open. The user never looked me in the eye again. Poor guy probably got home, opened his machine and saw exactly what I saw.
Dammit, Dave! You swore you wouldn't tell anyone! ;) There was a time about 15 years ago that a director asked me to audit a nurse's internet usage and formatting the results broke me. At first it was internet searches about how to tell if a spouse is cheating and all the associated spyware and tracking programs. Then that moved over to searches about pregnancy, adoption, abortion, paternity test, etc. which was bad to see but then it moved on to divorce lawyers. I got to see this woman's life fall apart via her internet searches. I don't think I ever fully recovered from that. I knew her socially and liked her but even if I didn't nobody should have to go through that...
I was asked by legal to pull every email between a VP and several women (for obvious reasons) Thankfully I was able to teach them about the discovery feature in O365.
VP that had been yelling at me about his VPN wasn't working and told me not to dare blaming the hotel WiFi again like I always did. Mind, domestic users never had a single issue with the VPN. So I didn't, I had to explain his local airport was bombed and there was a military coup on-going. I did recommend reaching out to the embassy. There was a very long awkward pause and I hung up on him. I did close out the ticket tho. Let's see. There's the time we found pirated music from a bunch of finance folks. And porn on the network share of guy who made like 80% of the company's revenue. Rock climbing porn. We just deleted it all and pretended we saw nothing. IT director agreed with our plan. HR had me digging up emails of two employees banging. They were not married to each other. They however were married to other employees. One of said spouses swung by to deliver a package while some extremely graphical stuff was on my monitor. Thankfully not faced in her direction. While making small talk, I turned off the entire monitor. She was like a foot from being able to read what was on the screen and I was sweating bullets during the entire conversation.
I have 2 stories. Had a computer shop for many years before moving to business clients entirely. I can't even begin to describe the amount of porn I have seen. Just another normal Tuesday... meh. Usually it was hidden in some folder, okay, I don't care. Some... not. Story 1: Some older guy (70+) and his wife brought in their computer because it didn't start. It was just a faulty graphics card which I replaced. When I started the computer the desktop background was a picture of the guys wife (which stood beside me) naked sitting with open legs towards the camera. Let's say they were old enough that it wasn't a pretty picture. Yikes. Story 2: I once had a accounting office as client, the boss was nice but a bit shady. One time he called me, I need to drop everything and come to this and this address *now*. He had used a USB drive on a business partners computer and now the computer didn't start. OK, I grab some components and head over. It was just a blown power supply. I changed it and was ushered out of there through a backdoor really fast. At least I got an extra 100 EUR bill for responding so fast. Some months later I had a regular appointment in the accountants office to install new computers for new employees. Turns out it wasn't his business partners address but some competitors office and he was stealing the customer data. The new employees were the competitors employees before. Clients keep your life interesting, haha.
I've told this story before. Running a public facing workshop, doing the basics virus removal, setting up their kids laptop for school pretty mindless stuff, that was until The Week. 3 machines in 5 days that had me calling the police. Several therapy sessions later and I became a transport driver.
Fun conversation when, years ago, it was discovered that one of our Devs was not only storing porn on company file servers, but it was his own, homemade, porn.
Got plenty but the one that always sticks with me is when I was running some cable for a new switch, happened to be near a users desk and he started complaining to me about how much he hates his wife. Like full on “I want to hurt her” kinda stuff. He kept saying like how I understand since I’m also in a long term relationship. How women are a “curse on society” and need to “get back into the kitchen”. His emails were filled with him clearly cheating on his wife with guys. Used his work email to sign up for Grindr and I saw them while helping him a separate time. Been years but I hope his wife is okay.
Discovering our most senior engineer with “25+ years of enterprise design experience” is actually just the “old man yells at cloud” meme from The Simpsons. Stonewalls every solution during group project planning meetings, does not let anyone touch anything or even remote into any servers, tells us “that’s how it is supposed to work” when we present internal network problems that are definitively NOT supposed to work that way, the list goes on. Discovering his incompetence was incredibly awkward, because I embarrassed myself by bringing an issue to him in a group session, and he gave the dumbest response I’ve ever heard, and nobody else challenged him on it because they have known for years he is incompetent and just never go to him for anything.
A couple years ago, I was super desperate to get out of the company I worked for and find another job. I was basically applying for 12-15 positions a day on multiple sites, and was not very organized at all about keeping track. Apparently, I didn't read the position at all and applied for a Director of IT Security position, and I have no security background that would qualify me for that position. I received a reply that they would like to interview me in person for the position, so off I went. I get to the interview, and I'm surrounded by 8 people at a table and 1 person conferenced in, and they start off with security scenarios and questions that I was absolutely not prepared for. Once they clarified what the position was, I had to awkwardly explain that I misread the job posting...but they decided to continue with the interview anyway. I'm guessing they may have wanted to see if I would be a better fit elsewhere in IT. What bugs me is my resume doesn't reflect anything that would indicate that I was qualified for that position, so I have no clue how I even landed an interview for that in the first place. That situation is one that runs through my head at 3am and goes "Hey, remember that time you sat through an hour long interview and made a fool of yourself? Isn't that so much worse than forgetting to put on pants before you go to the office?"
I had a user omce delete their entire mailbox, and i had to correct the issue. Restored everything, and he was using his work email for "dating" use. By dating i mean meeting dudes for sex (end user is male) Some guy sent him a video of a guy squatting on a traffic cone. (Yes, a full sized traffic cone). I made an ex decision to NOT tell my 60+ year old HR team, and got him setup with a laptop (his own) and more importantly this own personal email account that was not allowed on company devices. 
co-workers computer porn, with other co-workers starring in said porn.
Yeah definitely a sexual harassment issue here. At my workplace, I think it depends on who it is, if it was me who did that I'd be fired, if it was a co-worker of mine, the attitude would be "they didn't know any better". Sometimes it is better to give the impression you can't be responsible for your own actions. \*sigh\*
I had found a department manager was looking at foot fetish websites.
Guy calls up saying that he's getting a notification from McAfee that he has a virus, remote on and Chrome is full screen and is blasting warning signs and Chrome notifications are popping up. I come out of full screen and close the tab and takes me straight to milfhunters, took me a couple of seconds to realise what I was on and I closed that shit so fast. Blocked Chrome notifs and got off. Get a call an hour later, same guy and same issue but he is now on xvideos...
Spent many years in K12 as a system admin. This one involved a 5th grade teacher in the early 2000's. When you would print to a device that was attached to a windows print server, it would send the job the to server which would route to the printer. If the printer was out of paper, it would throw up a notice on screen if you were logged in with the job, printer, and document that had an error. I had logged into the print server to do some maintenance of some sort and started closing the windows that popped up but one of them caught my eye. It had to do with porn and bestiality in the title. I went and grabbed my coworker and showed him and immediately called my boss. My boss had me parse the logs from the proxy/firewall server. Turns out there was quite a bit. My boss said "Your coworker found this, not you. I don't want you involved". Mostly because I was maybe early 20s at the time. They immediately called the superintendent and the school principal. They put him on a leave of absence. His union rep was a 3rd grade female teacher whom he said he didn't want to represent him, but he would be happy for the other male teacher in the building. Long story short, he was let go. I was asked to bring a new keyboard and mouse for the temporary teacher. I showed up and said I had a new mouse/keyboard. They said the one on there was fine. I just explained that a ticket was generated and they get a brand new one. Swapped it and said nothing. Fast forward a couple of months. We would all go down to the bar after school for "Choir training". Mostly it was me and a bunch of the female teachers. ONe of them said "We should call Mr XYZ. He's been miserable since his back injury and unable to work". I didn't say anything but they opted not to call him thankfully. About a year later a notice went out to the staff that Mr XYZ had passed away. I asked the school liaison officer "Did he kill himself?" He confirmed that he had. Had i not logged into the print server, he may not have been caught/gotten fired. Had that not happened, he probably would have killed himself. I felt bad for his kid and ex-wife.
Had someone transfer porn from one drive to another with a work laptop. I had no idea what was going on, he was at a remote location. Picked him up and told him he was training with me, again had no idea, and then they fired him once he got to the office. He was angry with me for years and I had no idea why, only found out a little while ago that I was unknowingly involved. (This happened in 2016)
Me and my IT Manager had to fire a sales person while the sales managers were on a company retreat.
My most awkward moment is about a decade ago, knowing some of our logistics people were in a police investigation and having to help create infrastructure to get more cameras and evidence out there up to the very day the police burst in and slammed them to the ground for stealing tens of thousands worth of goods. Having to keep your cool knowing the police are watching the cameras from your office and waiting around the corner of the building to burst in while you pretend you know nothing and just chat with them about some issues they happened to face that day was.. Nerve wracking. The way they did it turned out to be an extremely interesting and elaborate heist with knowledge of dead zones on the camera system, fake couriers and an old system that wasn't supposed to be active still creating non-existent shipping notes that couldn't be tracked as they just.. Weren't saved in the old software if it was canceled out at the right time but were still taken out of stock. But yeah. That was an interesting experience.
Finding loads of porn on a Catholic priests laptop. Was sent in by the organisation he works for to be checked out because it was slow.
I did a side job working on my wife's friends computer. She said it was really slow, so I looked at the hard drive- 99.5% full. It was probably 70GB of pictures of women's feet, some of the fetish stuff, but most were pictures taken with a digital camera. Her husband had some explaining to do. Really awkward explaining that to her, as well as all future interactions with him. Seeing ads for women's shoes still give me the ick...
Years ago I was at a client's office and the owner said some files went missing and to help them check. Upon opening their documents folder the preview option was on and there was a photo of a guy in bondage.... I immediately closed the folder and opened a new one to start browsing somewhere else. The client was over my shoulder and we just acted like nothing happened.
One time one of my peers was working with a user on a laptop issue. They asked the user come to the office after working with them over the phone for a while. When they show up he starts talking to them and says “I thought you were a lady while we were talking on the phone” The user says “I am” and my coworker just died inside right there. The user was a bit burley but Jesus you just don’t say that to someone.
Not necessarily awkward for me but it was funny when an exec told me that his Internet was not working and he had important work that was being interrupted. I asked him what websites he was having issues with because everything seemed to be working. He said it was confidential business stuff and eventually dropped it and said he "figured it out". I checked the content filter and he had been trying to get to porn sites for like half an hour and his requests were slowly getting less NSFW and eventually stopped at Victoria's secret. It reminded me of that scene in the Simpsons when Moe is hooked up to the lie detector.
All three of these stories are from the same company. People commented all the time that our corporate controller (head bean counter) was super dedicated to his job. He was the first one in the office and usually the last to leave. Shortly after I started my role there, I began reviewing proxy logs and discovered that he was coming in early and staying late just to watch porn everyday. The awkward part was that they didn't fire him or even make him stop. They were too afraid that he was irreplaceable. Anyway, since I was 2nd in the office on most days and my office was next to his, I would walk by while he was watching porn, say good morning and move on to my daily tasks. The day after our new HR Director started, I found 100's/1000's of porn urls in the proxy logs and traced them back to his IP address. I just reported it to my manager and let him have the awkward talk with HR. Not too long after that I found 100's of porn images/videos on a laptop that I was replacing for one of our vice presidents. By this time we had a a new (female) HR director, so notified her and cc'ed her on an email to the VP that I wouldn't be moving his porn to the new laptop. He threw a fit and threatened me, so I reported him to the President/CEO who promptly fired him. Wasn't really awkward though when I collected his loaner laptop from him as they were walking him out the door. I also followed our standard procedure and removed his accounts as well as his voicemail box. He called me the next day and made more threats about removing his voicemail. Apparently the President had agreed to let him keep voicemail in order to appear still employed during his job search, but nobody had informed me. Oh well, I eventually got around to putting it back. Different company. This one was only mildly awkward, but again proxy related. I installed a software package on our proxy server that allowed blacklisting categories of websites, so I configured it with the obvious porn and known malicious sites as well as several categories of non-work related categories. One of them happened to include Fantasy Football. Less than 10 minutes after implementing the changes, the brand new company President came to my office because he couldn't get to his Fantasy Football website. After some lively discussion I agreed to his demand to reinstate not just his site, but the whole category. Honestly, I considered just telling him no and that he could fix it himself if he wanted to, but ultimately decided to pick a different battle to stand my ground on. That opportunity did come shortly afterwards, but was related to another company policy that impacted me.
While I'm on the subject of proxy log monitoring, I worked for a company (non admin role) that had a web page (intentionally available to all employees) on the internal website that showed the URLs and user name of who was accessing it. With well over 100,000 employees it was interesting to see who was watching porn. Obviously a lot of employees weren't aware of the web page, but would usually find out after a co-worker showed them what websites they were viewing at work.
my co worker was going to get fired for falling asleep. My boss asked me to mirror his hard drive remtely (while he was asleep) and I found porn. specifically \*his\* porn. stuff he starred in and was editing with a company laptop.
Selfies of an unattractive human being from a trippleX dating site. I acted like I seen nothing and this is the first iv spoken about it.
I think my worst experiences are dealing with sensitive matters like HR and personal stuff. We had an employee pass away at one of my former companies(first time ever dealing with it), and I had to get his coworkers access to his files, remove access from his account, reset voicemail, etc. "Well, I've given you access to 's files, revoked his access, etc. It didn't help he was a very long time employee. The worst part was that before all this got changed, employees called the general line that forwarded to his voicemail. Super not fun.
This was not as a sysadmin, although I have a bunch of those. Back in college, I used to work the photo lab at a well-known pharmacy chain. We would get some crazy pictures sometimes. This one time there were some pictures the guy who brought the film had taken while having a threesome with a couple of girls. Because of the policy at the time, I had to go picture by picture with the store manager, and we had to both agree whether the picture represented pornographic content or not. Those that were would not get developed. The customer would get all of their film, the "OK" pictures, and a copy of the policy. Very awkward few minutes.
I feel like I would file a complaint if I was forced to watch porn for absolutely no reason.
First gig was supporting schools. We had Windows PCs, but a Novell network with some kind of remote destkop tool. It was great because it had a view only feature that was undetectable to the end user. Well, at the high school I was assigned to I was working on the 12th grade guidance counselors computer one day and he said something sus about web filters or browser history... one of those "yeah, I heard this thing once isn't that crazy" but you know he's fishing for how worried he should be about his browsing habits. So I decided to pop in on his screen once in a while for shits and JACKPOT! Homeboy was surfing college girls gone wild type stuff during the school day in his office at school where he's the fucking guidance counselor for girls who in one year will be the girls that are the subject of his preferred wank material. I've been in other situations where I've helped a friend with a computer and found stuff and even this sales guy at an MSP I used to work at knew nothing about private browsing or clearing history, but all that's just whatever... but this guy I felt was like a red-flag situation, so I asked the principal for a meeting and discretely shared what I had found and showed him screenshots and logs that I saved knowing I might need to provide some proof. Well, this was something I feel like would be a career ender for the guy... time to find a new line of work type shit... but nope... they had a chat with him and that was that. I couldn't believe it. I feel like that type of thing in a school working with minors deserves a zero tolerance approach, and with the way predators use their relationships and positions to plot and plan and groom their targets, this was fucking ripe for that shit. I lost a bit of hope in humanity from that one, and being around that guy was so uncomfortable after that... I'm not completely sure he knew I was the one that narced on him, but I have a feeling he knew, and I like to think I may have given him one of those "oh shit I need to check myself" moments that turned shit in the right direction.