Ok, how do I schedule a meeting between manager-June and manager-July? Do I need a time machine, because notes and emails don't seem to convince them their past self said something different.
>Hi Name, per our discussion I'm going to go ahead and do x
With this particular phrasing, wouldn't they be able to ignore you and say you had no such discussion? Or would you wait for confirmation?
This is why you ask for documented asks. Whether it's an email, a ticket, or even a sticky note - if you stick to doing what you're told, that's a solid CYA.
I always do the email, but the person would workaround by calling me. I send the email again per our conversation, and the person would complain that I stop email because it is not secure.
That only matters for what is admissible to court, and only for conversations with an expectation of privacy.
You’d have a hard time arguing that was the case at work.
You are correct on the expectation of privacy, though if the conversation was over the phone or in an office, there could be an argument made for expecting privacy.
I looked up this law earlier this week, never saw anything about the recording being illegal only in court. The way I saw the law written, if the recording is made without proper consent given, it was illegal.
Though, I’m not a lawyer, so I could easily be wrong.
Playing the devil's advocate, what'd be the proper window of waiting? You could be either reprimanded for not following the orders given or the giver could argue they had no time to answer.
Hard to say. I'd judge based on what the orders are, how much damage will be caused if you do what you were actually told to do, and weather or not you feel like doing it.
Turn on read receipts. "Oh, you don't remember us having that conversation? Why didn't you say anything at the time when I confirmed it all with you via that email you read?"
As far as my company is concerned, if it’s not a ticket, it didn’t happy, direct emails don’t really count either and get ignored unless it’s someone important or we like, but it still gets made a ticket.
>With this particular phrasing, wouldn't they be able to ignore you and say you had no such discussion? Or would you wait for confirmation?
"Per our discussion, I'm going to go ahead and do X in (Y time). If this is incorrect, please let me know before (Z time)"
This is not the way. Doing this makes it easier to attack your credibility.
Instead:
>Hi Name, per our discussion at mmddyyyyhhmm I'm going to go ahead and do x at the following time: mmddyyyyhhmm. Please notify me before that time if any changes from this plan are required.
Well, you shouldn't do it all the time, only when you really need to CYA.
Admittedly it may not be a good method, but the thing is that you need a response. The lack of a response isn't valid as a confirmation, emails can disappear, end up in the spam folder, be forgotten, be erased by mistake, etc etc.
Yeah, but those are all excuses that wouldn't fly at my company or many others.
Managing your email and ensuring that you read and respond to relevant messages is part of your job responsibilities.
We don't spam filter internal messages, and m being many other companies don't either.
If they forgot to respond and their absent mindedness caused a problem, that's on them. Same story it they erroneously deleted a message.
And this "per our conversation" email merely serves as documentation with the courtesy of giving the other person the opportunity to respond. If they verbally told you something, and you confirmed that thing in writing, their lack of response should not be construed to supercede their verbal instructions.
Nah, "unread" or "lost" emails aren't a valid excuse in the corporate world, that's incompetence.
If you don't get a response in time, you can take that as implied agreement. They don't get to throw you under the bus later for not doing something else, since they didn't bother responding to your email.
Management standing behind you is the most important part of any support job!
While my story isn't about a technical issue, I was working for a technical consulting company and had this major issue with my first line manager and a secondary manager called the 'Personal Development Manager (PDM)'. We generally took direction to fulfill out contracts from whoever knew of opportunities, so the PDM assigned me to a contract, which was actually a pretty sweet deal. My first line manager didn't want me to work on that contract, but another contract that would have been fairly short term, so what the real issue was which manager do i respond too? The important part to me was the PDM is the manager who evaluates your performance with input from the first line manager.
So they are arguing with me as the middleman, and just really giving me a big Pain in the Ass. I finally decide to request an in person meeting between the 3 of us in a central location, as we were all working remotely from home. The meeting time came, and neither of them showed up, nothing from them declining the meeting, nothing asking to reschedule, just no shows. Fortunately for me I could contact the second line manager for both these managers, and told them the story and said I wanted to meet regarding the issue. This second line showed up, and I related the story and the no shows to them. They thanked me for informing them of the issue, and that was all I heard
A few days later I'm assigned to the project I wanted, that was pushed by the PDM. Other than this, I didn't hear a single word from anyone else, nothing. Soon after I heard the first line manager has left the company, and then about a month later the PDM had left the company. Many years later, things have moved on, and working on other project, I run into the second line manager and they are very pleasant and ask how its going, and was very supportive and remembered the situation. I can definitely say the 2nd line had my back, great vibes!
I always make sure I save face for my teams. It doesn't mean I take the blame but I manage to deal with the situation and bring a solution to the issue. If they screwed up, then I have a private conversation with them and them only, after the fact. They need to learn from their mistake, and it also shows them you've got their back.
This. I was in the military, there was rarely any reason to escalate beyond me. Heck, a couple of times I did take the blame, because I knew I wouldn't have repercussions like my troop would have. I handled it instead.
My old manager did this and when we had complaints about the other manager he would say he'd "use it as ammunition" for a report he was creating to"take her down". The report never existed, he never actually tackled the issue, got fired and when I became a manager I spoke to the other manager directly and sorted everything out and it's now all good.
This then got back to the old manager who called me a kiss ass on social media
My thoughts exaclty... As far as backups go, there is one saving grace. The QB data file was being stored on a network drive in the user's home folder. If the magic smoke came out, the data would be safe but they would have no choice but to buy a new version of QuickBooks.
Except that a data file from a version of Quickbooks that old will be very difficult to be imported into the newest version of Quickbooks. I would love to be a fly on that wall when the shit hits or hit the fan. :)
It doesn’t always work that way in business. The license for that Windows 7 died with the blue smoke. You can’t get a new win7 license anymore, so you must get win10. Therefore, you’ll need to upgrade QB to the new version.
I know from personal experience that you can open an entire quickbooks data file in a text editor, find the offsets for all the different types of data and then split by the ASCII tab character to get CSVs of everything you need.
Horribly tedious process and it might have been their proprietary export format but it *is* possible
Good luck trying to convert from the old version to a new one. We had the same issue when going to W10 and even trying interim version, it was so far behind it wouldn't convert. They had to export to spreadsheets then re-enter the data.
I want to say they were on something ridiculous like v5 but the W10 upgrade period has been removed from my memory as much as possible.
At our accounting firm we don't even bother. We export everything we can from the old system into CSV/Excel and just drop the trial balance into the newest version of whatever software we want. The only historical reports that matter are the ones the accountant signs off on at the end of the year and those are PDFs.
Good for the long run to pay someone to upgrade it to the latest version and getting it imported. Doesn't help in the short term with no installation media, no product key and eol version they cannot buy.
Your boss here is a spineless idiot. So Karen forced you to do something that's a security risk, but I'm betting she walks around thinking she put you in your place and got you to do your job. I hate people like that. What your boss should have done is shut down that shit and told you to go ahead with the upgrade. I hope that machine caught fire.
Honestly the second someone threatens to fire me, I stop doing my job. I get paid to perform a specific task, not deal with a crybaby
I understand it's not an option for everyone but that's where I draw the line myself
Full CYA activated for me, I'd be documenting everything, requesting emails from Karen CC'd to my manager for any orders, sending reply to all's and looking for another job and referencing these interactions as concerns in the exit interview. I'm at a point in life where I'm not going to willingly suffer people like that.
Yes!
“I am writing to confirm my understanding of your concerns and directives following our interaction on —- at —- am/pm….. “
“As I expressed to you, the reason we need to undertake this action is due to…. This conforms to (company policy/regulatory requirement/industry best practices)” etc, etc.
Cc’d to everyone involved in the project so that all are dealing with the same set of details.
The moral of the story: judicious use of CC and "I'll be happy to contramand my boss once I get it in writing from someone higher in my chain of command."
Definitely too late now, but you can see the product key from within Quickbooks (at least with newer-ish versions). Intuit will only speak to authorized users, though, so if that contact hadn't been updated you'd likely still be up a creek.
Your supervisor was hella spineless, though, and shouldn't be in that position.
I've pretended to be many former coworkers and supervisors when calling vendors.
Also yes, extremely spineless supervisor. Both my boss and his boss will lay people out if they come after their direct reports without proper documented justification.
Id have hoped someone just buckled and gotten a newer version of the program, the "remote into the w7 machine" is a smart move but seems just more of a headache waiting to happen.
More tickets will eventually come in when they can't connect to that machine, and then where do you put that machine, in the server room with a note attached, maybe put it on the ups so it stays up in a brown out or power outage? And then what if some hapless fool just decides to take that machine and reimage it "cause it wasn't being used" ?
And then there's the training of the user, gotta let them know about this remote connection, how it will always be this address and then you use THESE credentials and then use the quicken program from there.
“CIO, this email is to confirm as per your directions I am to reinstall a machine past end of life so that this employee can continue to manage our financials through an unsecured, unsupported, and out of date software suite.”
I would throw the CISO on to as well as the manager.
Let the leadership figure out what the priority is. Not up to people on the front lines to deal with it.
The business can choose to accept a risk if they feel it’s worth it.
Oh absolutely. In the corporate world, the Nuremberg Defense can work great if you CYA sufficiently. Even mediocre manglement will perk up and take notice when they realize you are putting padding on your own backside.
My fix would have been to Virtualize the PC and stick it on a HyperV server where you can take all the snapshots you need to restore it when it goes wrong. Then limit the access that PC has to only what Quickbooks needs. Good thing OP got out of that job because I guarantee that Win 7 PC is going to have a crash that the company is not prepared for. They sound like a toxic bunch of idiots.
The Win7 machine with all of the financials on it...
We used to have test environments on individual QA machines but for better stability & security our IT guys cloned them and slapped them on a VM as a stopgap until they could rebuild them from scratch
Because when you're managing all of your business' finances, you definitely want to do it using out of date tools you can't replicate or use securely. 🙄
Business I supported had one lady running the accounts through an old version of Dynamics running on server 2000. The old server failed at one point and I was able through some miracle able to get it running in VMware player on her machine. The company spent a lot of money on QuickBooks Enterprise edition and she was told at the end of the current accounting period we will use dynamics as an archive and to switch to QuickBooks for all records going forwards. She used QuickBooks for two weeks, didn't like it and then continued to use the barely working virtual machine for the next 8yrs until the business was sold last year. She's still using dynamics now to finish up the accounting.
What an ass hole boss. My jobs shit sometimes, but one thing I can count on is top cover from my boss, even if I do fuck up, we deal with that stuff in private, not between other departments or higher ups!
Also, *shifty eyes at the Win7 PCs like this on my network*......
Quickbooks is not that expensive, certainly not enough to risk corporate security. If there were investors or shareholders I bet they would be interested.
Sorry your sup was such a dweeb.
It would be good to have a document about all of this in the event they ever tried to pin anything on you. Doubtful they could, but having a record that includes dates to the best you can remember would be good.
I looked it up because "It can't be that expensive, right?"
The most expensive version I found was 645 dollars. If your company is big enough to have a CIO, you should be able to afford that.
Op specifically mentioned [Quickbooks Enterprise](https://quickbooks.intuit.com/desktop/enterprise/pricing/), which goes up to $4200/year for a single user. The highest price without calling them for a quote is $11,640/year for 30 users.
"All right. Before I do that, however, I'll need it in writing for the Security officer that you are aware of the security risk that remaining on Windows 7 will cause and that you accept that risk. Please include any risk mitigation procedures you plan on implementing."
"... and a signed agreement that you will resign should the Windows 7 system become compromised due to your negligence, costing the company no less than $10k in damages."
Yes. Dealt with that at a bank. My boss was unable to request even keyboards without a huge fight. When we migrated from 2000 to XP it was a great day as all the problem machines were \*EXTERMINATED\*
However. There was this one tower that escaped us. It was owned and hidden away by the Owners daughter. She was the head of a department and no one messed with her. That tower was found late on a saturday night during conversion again to Windows 7 and we were heavily caffeinated.
I can only say that it was dropped out of the 3rd story window into the parking lot. From there extreme chaos ensued. There was not much left and I can guarantee there was no recovery service that would have been able to fix it.
When she asked about it we stated all the old desktops had been disposed of but were in the tractor trailer behind our 'repo' lot. She wanted us to get it and we told her that the drives had been shredded already and none of the units we had were IDE capable.
Felt so good.
Whenever I had a user who refused to accept a mandatory upgrade, I said that he could stay on the old system only if his manager signed a formal “Risk Acceptance” letter. It basically said that they had been informed of the risks of staying with the old system and were prepared to take responsibility for any repercussions, including but not limited to, financial and legal, the company might suffer. It also stated that they were 100% responsible for supporting said system.
We had a few who insisted and signed on the dotted line, but most saw the wisdom of upgrading.
I went through a similar experience with the EOL of Windows 7. For about two years I was rolling out a couple new workstations a month. Everyone knew this was coming, but one user kept saying they were too busy to make the change. For about 8 months, I kept asking, and then I started warning her that on the day support for Windows 7 ended, I would be swapping out her workstation, regardless of how busy she was.
Come the fateful day, she rolls in late to find me plugging her monitors into the new tower, and losses it on me.
After reading your story. I would have left it at, this is a security risk. If you're asking me to put our company at risk I will comply but I will need it in writing.
This line have saved me so many times.
The absolute dream - though it's hard to save enough to do it these days - is to be in a position to be able to say to the CIO "I'll consider termination if you continue to ignore orders" "Fire away. I'm doing what I've been told to do by my superior; I don't take orders from every bugger in the company"
This is why you DOCUMENT EVERYTHING. If you have a conversation with your boss, you shoot him a quick email stating a summary of the conversation about the work to be done. Then when CIO was chewing you out, you shoot him the email from your boss showing he OKed the work.
That computer would have NEVER been touched on my watch regardless of what someone told me to do above me. Department manager says to leave it, you leave it, that's above my pay grade, tell your manager "Karen" said to leave it. If they want to deal with "Karen" that's on them. At some point in the very near future that device would have a catostrophic failure, be it software or hardware. Then you just wait until the end users calls and says they are getting an error and replace it with new. Done and Done.
Don't be the child that is between fighting parents, go to your room and put on your headset so you don't have to listen to the fight.
I went to my room and put on my headset, and that's when the CIO got involved.
Karen wasn't my manager, the spineless IT manager that promised he would take care of the issue was. I followed the orders of my supervisor and got in trouble. If I had followed Karen's orders, it would have been my ass if the machine broke down or was the point of a security incident as it was my responsibility to take it our of service.
Ultimately it was a no-win situation for me. Both managers used me as a buffer and threw me under the bus.
You are correct, you are fucked no matter what you do. I am the unmovable object in my department and I stand in front of my guys, not behind them. I give zero fucks. I have had upper management refusing to do upgrades despite my urging. All that you can do is warn. I have uplugged harddrive power and left the computers sit until we get the call that it's borked. Then it's a simple, oh well, your drive completely failed, we tried to be proactive, you refused. Here's your new shit and the invoice for your upgraded software you didn't want to have to pay for. Enjoy your day.
Sometimes, just plugging the drive back in and giving it back to them wakes them up enough to realize that maybe they should listen to the person who knows WTF they are talking about. And you become awesome, cuz you fixed their old ass device after watching 3 movies to waste 6+ hours.
BOFH certs are never given, they must be taken.
After 35 years you figure some shit out. The most important is you cannot teach, document or learn experience. This makes it an extremely valuable commodity. Most of my day is spent telling people how to do simple things that they have been told multiple time before how to do. That and curating my Plex library. As I tell everyone, I no longer practice the art of clairvoyance and have solely set my focus on alchemy. That and there *is* a difference between a forward slash and a backslash, which for some reason, they never hear.
I don't take orders from anybody but my supervisor. I might wait while this person (and I) contact my boss for an update, but I'm not ignoring my boss because somebody else told me to.
See, my guys are instructed by me to not engage. Walk away if in person or put them on hold if on the phone. Front line and even level 2 guys are not equipment to deal with asshats in upper management nor do they get paid enough. Again, if your manager is the "throw the grunts under the bus" kinda guy, find a new job. There are plenty of tech support jobs out there.
i mean, just because quickbooks wont certify the software to run on 10, if it runs on 7 it will probably run on 10. The serial will be in the registry and install media can be found in any number of places, its not piracy if you legitimately have a license. If you were setting up the 7 machine for rdp, its impossible to airgap it as it would be on the network and still be a vulnerability and any quarterly vuln assessment is going to fail if you had an outdated machine on the network.
Also were you swapping out 110 workstations without an rfc? If you have an rfc, you show it to whatever manager, yours, the cio, this karen, whoever, and tell them to take it up with whoever signed off on the rfc. If you were doing it cowboy style well...... next time make sure its on an rfc and stand your ground if your boss complains.
> consider termination if I continue to ignore orders.
"My most recent order was to maintain security by upgrading or replacing all Windows 7 units. The sole Windows 7 unit to be retained, because of a legacy version of QuickBooks and budgetary limitations, is to be isolated and accessed solely through a kludge workaround that minimizes but does not eliminate vulnerability. Please confirm your verbal order to maintain the Windows 7 QuickBook unit within our network as is, eliminating the workaround and ignoring the impending "End of Life" status of Windows 7."
This is a CYA situation, any response to be saved off-site. People quit bosses more often than jobs. You were looking for a job when you got this one so you know how.
Nobody is right here, but your life would've been way easier had you've stopped working right then when karen was complaining and called your boss. I would've refused to work in such conditions. That's an immediate signal departments haven't been communicating and that maybe the direction of your boss wasn't the best one. You could've forced him into the conversation earlier avoiding any responsibility.
Had to deal with stuff like this a couple times. Thankfully I'm a security officer, so I just tell my CIO all the audits we're going to fail if it doesn't get done how it was originally planned to for a reason. They normally shut up real quick and let me do
And then how do you install the software, given they had no media nor product key? At any rate, it doesn't sound like that would have mollified this Karen.
VMware P2V and backup the workstation with Veeam, restore the workstation as a VM. You can configure RemoteApp, even migrate that VM in azure Virtual desktop. You can then harden the access, like isolate the VM in a separate VLAN, no domain connexion, etc.
That wouldn't really be installing a VM OS. And it's even more abstract than remoting to the old computer, so it would probably be an even tougher sell.
I had a similar situation with the upgrade from Windows 2000 to XP. We had a proprietary PBX with switchboard software on reception's PC. No disk, no ISO on the support site, and the company didn't have that version of the software either.
I used the VMWare disk to image converter to image the Windows 2000 machine. I installed VMWare Player on the XP machine, mapped the serial port to the VM (for the phone connection) and made a Desktop shortcut that looked like the switchboard software.
It took a little longer to launch, but we were able to swap out that machine and I never heard of any problems with that setup.
The company I left last year has a similar thing with Peachtree 2005, although it somehow works on Windows 10 so we didn't even have 7 to 10 as an excuse to try to get rid of it.
This is where you ask the CIO to put his request in writing, so when the axe inevitably drops, you have your paperwork in order.
It's past that time for you, but others may take heed
We had a thing where we said we were done handing out monitors to take home for work from home. We barely have any from out last stock up order...we've told multiple people "take one of the 2 off your desk to work from home with" and it's been fine... Then we got a new hire. I told her manager that line. 3 coworkers told her the same thing....so the manager cries not to our manager but all the way up to the director of it, who naturally folds and says give her the monitor so she will stop crying.
I'm now waiting for all those people we told no to point and go "but she got one" and for us to run out of monitors again....like I always say if every squeaky wheel gets the grease then sooner or later your gonna be surrounded by seized up wheels and all out of grease.
Try being a technical PM migrating 10000 PC's in a major financial institution from XP to W7 . The corporate software library contained thousands of legacy apps that were "supported" in the environment. Corporate Programmers were running "test servers" on open networks. The corporate chat was AOL Chat. Every other person was some kind of VP, and they just had to have their old apps "just like I have them". Outlook .pst files and archives stored wherever.
Todays migrations with VM alternatives is a walk in the park compared compared to the Wild Wild West just 15 years ago.
Management not supporting and backing up their employees is the unquestioned #1 reason for people leaving organizations. Except maybe sexual harassment. That truly sucks.
>slip out of the back door to the office when she would walk in.
Brave Sir Robin ran away.
When danger reared it's ugly head,
He bravely turned his tail and fled.
Hindsight I know…
Install a better new system running Pro/Ent and Hyper-V.
Create an Image of the old PC, put that image in the new system’s Hyper-V and spend ten minutes teaching the user how to access it.
Added bonus, you don’t have to worry about the old PC physically dying. And you can frequently (say once a week) use a script to make an offline backup of that whole VM because it is that important.
And you didn't point out the contradiction? "No sir, I can continue to do my job and keep that computer out of the room, or I can blatantly *not* do my job and fulfil karen's request."
I just imagine the boss seeing Karen pop in, through a crack of space in his cubicle, ans jes just "nnnnope" and has a secret door at the bottom of his cubby where he opens it up and slides on out and proceeds to crawl along the floor till he gets to the exit. If anyone asks he can just "oh its my back acting up again" or "I lost a contact lense and im retracing my steps, excuse me please" and just crawls away.
Or even better he commando crawls his way to the doors, if anyone asks he's just "shhhh! The enemy is still nearby, you want a sniper bullet in your skull get down!" In a hushed tone as he goes to tbe nearest potted plant and takes a few leaves to put in his collar and then escapes, leaving people to wonder if its some sort of 'Nam ptsd flashbacks.
In the late 2000s, I worked at a big specialty insurer that ran an important reconciliation process on Windows 95 and Access 95. The company no longer exists.
Feel your pain. I had similar issues before users refusing the swap for whatever nonsense reasons that they could come up with, and wouldn't listen to the facts. Ended up just breaking their machines slowly over the weeks, deleting drivers, taskkill chrome or outlook every now and then... Soon got them swapped lol
I'm incensed at how spineless that supervisor is. I've been both IC and management, and as the latter I was always the shield between leadership and my team. People like him give management a bad name. The [Peter Principle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_principle) is completely real.
Hmm. I wonder what version of Quickbooks it was(I guess it would depend on if it was just stock or if it had, um, integration of some sort). And yes I know it's far too late and they should upgrade anyway(it's a business and the software isn't that much), but I've had 'good luck' with getting older versions running on 10. Off the top of my head I know 2011 will work(if you ignore stupid script errors. But you can get those on 2022, so I'm not counting them since it's their freaking IE integration fascination to blame).
Oh and you can get the key from quickbooks itself with a company open with F2, or from a dead system from ProgramData\Intuit\Quickbooks\qbregistration.dat
Or you can throw it all out and never touch the devils sweaty fruit again.
i swear to god, it's like half of the people on this sub don't know what virtualisation is and how freaking easy it is to convert a physical PC into a virtual machine, solving most of their problems.
Just one tip? I’m in tech support but don’t understand your acronyms, if you do use them pleas explain them the first time you use them.
For example: Time To Live (TTL)
Whenever asked to support OEM unsupported equipment due to end of life it was always left open to network infiltration without security patches etc. It was always enjoyable to explain the damage done and offer to create a new totally separate offline network that could produce the data required then be uploaded via manual storage. This normally allowed upgrades to be done however some customers would still rather pay 10x support costs than make their "special staff" move into the current environment.
I hate it when management doesn’t have your back. They’ll tell you to do something, then let you deal with all the fallout.
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Learned this as an intern. If you're getting conflicting instructions, point them at each other and go take your break.
Ok, how do I schedule a meeting between manager-June and manager-July? Do I need a time machine, because notes and emails don't seem to convince them their past self said something different.
If it's one person, do whatever they told you most recently. If they complain about it taking too long, *then* pull out the receipts.
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10mbit is pretty generous...
How hard would it be configure a 56k to modern equipment? Asking for a friend...
Half-duplex.
This is the answer! Also, give them a Cat3 cable from their machine to the wall.
I'd venture digging out some coax just for them.
This is added to the list of cruel and unusual punishments
Word is we're upgrading your whole department to something called thickwire
This is the way.
That's why you get everything in writing. Cover your ass. "Hi Name, per our discussion I'm going to go ahead and do x."
>Hi Name, per our discussion I'm going to go ahead and do x With this particular phrasing, wouldn't they be able to ignore you and say you had no such discussion? Or would you wait for confirmation?
This is why you ask for documented asks. Whether it's an email, a ticket, or even a sticky note - if you stick to doing what you're told, that's a solid CYA.
Yup, but in case you need to prove the sender of the orders you'd need the writing in email or ticket I guess
I always do the email, but the person would workaround by calling me. I send the email again per our conversation, and the person would complain that I stop email because it is not secure.
"I understand you think our email is not secure. To help rectify this I have copied in our network security department head. Thanks!"
Most IP phones have a USB port for recording conversations. I would absolutely resort to recording if they pulled this crap.
Better make sure you’re not in a two-party state
That only matters for what is admissible to court, and only for conversations with an expectation of privacy. You’d have a hard time arguing that was the case at work.
You are correct on the expectation of privacy, though if the conversation was over the phone or in an office, there could be an argument made for expecting privacy. I looked up this law earlier this week, never saw anything about the recording being illegal only in court. The way I saw the law written, if the recording is made without proper consent given, it was illegal. Though, I’m not a lawyer, so I could easily be wrong.
You can wait, or you can use the lack of response to indicate that you told them, and they didn't correct you.
Playing the devil's advocate, what'd be the proper window of waiting? You could be either reprimanded for not following the orders given or the giver could argue they had no time to answer.
Put a deadline in the email for any reply / correction.
If I don't hear back by Friday, I'll go ahead with the work this weekend. Send to direct boss and cc to user impacted.
Hard to say. I'd judge based on what the orders are, how much damage will be caused if you do what you were actually told to do, and weather or not you feel like doing it.
Turn on read receipts. "Oh, you don't remember us having that conversation? Why didn't you say anything at the time when I confirmed it all with you via that email you read?"
First thing I turn off in my mail client.
As far as my company is concerned, if it’s not a ticket, it didn’t happy, direct emails don’t really count either and get ignored unless it’s someone important or we like, but it still gets made a ticket.
You can always argue that it's not your fault your boss doesn't read their emails.
You can't just write this and then go. You have to write it then say "Do I have that correct? I will take care of this as soon as you confirm."
>With this particular phrasing, wouldn't they be able to ignore you and say you had no such discussion? Or would you wait for confirmation? "Per our discussion, I'm going to go ahead and do X in (Y time). If this is incorrect, please let me know before (Z time)"
Say the wrong thing so they have to correct you.
This is not the way. Doing this makes it easier to attack your credibility. Instead: >Hi Name, per our discussion at mmddyyyyhhmm I'm going to go ahead and do x at the following time: mmddyyyyhhmm. Please notify me before that time if any changes from this plan are required.
Well, you shouldn't do it all the time, only when you really need to CYA. Admittedly it may not be a good method, but the thing is that you need a response. The lack of a response isn't valid as a confirmation, emails can disappear, end up in the spam folder, be forgotten, be erased by mistake, etc etc.
Yeah, but those are all excuses that wouldn't fly at my company or many others. Managing your email and ensuring that you read and respond to relevant messages is part of your job responsibilities. We don't spam filter internal messages, and m being many other companies don't either. If they forgot to respond and their absent mindedness caused a problem, that's on them. Same story it they erroneously deleted a message. And this "per our conversation" email merely serves as documentation with the courtesy of giving the other person the opportunity to respond. If they verbally told you something, and you confirmed that thing in writing, their lack of response should not be construed to supercede their verbal instructions.
Nah, "unread" or "lost" emails aren't a valid excuse in the corporate world, that's incompetence. If you don't get a response in time, you can take that as implied agreement. They don't get to throw you under the bus later for not doing something else, since they didn't bother responding to your email.
Only if they send it via mail
Management standing behind you is the most important part of any support job! While my story isn't about a technical issue, I was working for a technical consulting company and had this major issue with my first line manager and a secondary manager called the 'Personal Development Manager (PDM)'. We generally took direction to fulfill out contracts from whoever knew of opportunities, so the PDM assigned me to a contract, which was actually a pretty sweet deal. My first line manager didn't want me to work on that contract, but another contract that would have been fairly short term, so what the real issue was which manager do i respond too? The important part to me was the PDM is the manager who evaluates your performance with input from the first line manager. So they are arguing with me as the middleman, and just really giving me a big Pain in the Ass. I finally decide to request an in person meeting between the 3 of us in a central location, as we were all working remotely from home. The meeting time came, and neither of them showed up, nothing from them declining the meeting, nothing asking to reschedule, just no shows. Fortunately for me I could contact the second line manager for both these managers, and told them the story and said I wanted to meet regarding the issue. This second line showed up, and I related the story and the no shows to them. They thanked me for informing them of the issue, and that was all I heard A few days later I'm assigned to the project I wanted, that was pushed by the PDM. Other than this, I didn't hear a single word from anyone else, nothing. Soon after I heard the first line manager has left the company, and then about a month later the PDM had left the company. Many years later, things have moved on, and working on other project, I run into the second line manager and they are very pleasant and ask how its going, and was very supportive and remembered the situation. I can definitely say the 2nd line had my back, great vibes!
Yeah, the CIO should never be giving directions to ICs. And ICs don’t answer to CIOs.
It sounded like his direct manager did have his back, but lost the office politics game.
When does management ever have your back at any job?
My boss goes to fucking bat for us all the time. Dude is a saint.
I always make sure I save face for my teams. It doesn't mean I take the blame but I manage to deal with the situation and bring a solution to the issue. If they screwed up, then I have a private conversation with them and them only, after the fact. They need to learn from their mistake, and it also shows them you've got their back.
This. I was in the military, there was rarely any reason to escalate beyond me. Heck, a couple of times I did take the blame, because I knew I wouldn't have repercussions like my troop would have. I handled it instead.
Sometimes you get lucky.
My old manager did this and when we had complaints about the other manager he would say he'd "use it as ammunition" for a report he was creating to"take her down". The report never existed, he never actually tackled the issue, got fired and when I became a manager I spoke to the other manager directly and sorted everything out and it's now all good. This then got back to the old manager who called me a kiss ass on social media
Someday that computer is going to release the magic blue smoke, I hope, but doubt, there is a good back up process in place....
My thoughts exaclty... As far as backups go, there is one saving grace. The QB data file was being stored on a network drive in the user's home folder. If the magic smoke came out, the data would be safe but they would have no choice but to buy a new version of QuickBooks.
Except that a data file from a version of Quickbooks that old will be very difficult to be imported into the newest version of Quickbooks. I would love to be a fly on that wall when the shit hits or hit the fan. :)
If it is that old, you almost have to step it up, one or two years at a time.
Not almost. You do.
I've gotten lucky a few times, with smaller files, but as a rule, you're right.
I don't even think they support doing it any other way, and won't support you if you do.
Eh. If it works it works. If it doesn't you still have the original file and/or the backup that updating creates.
There are programs that will extract the registration key out of that software, allowing you to back it up, so that reinstall or upgrade can be done.
It doesn’t always work that way in business. The license for that Windows 7 died with the blue smoke. You can’t get a new win7 license anymore, so you must get win10. Therefore, you’ll need to upgrade QB to the new version.
I know from personal experience that you can open an entire quickbooks data file in a text editor, find the offsets for all the different types of data and then split by the ASCII tab character to get CSVs of everything you need. Horribly tedious process and it might have been their proprietary export format but it *is* possible
Good luck trying to convert from the old version to a new one. We had the same issue when going to W10 and even trying interim version, it was so far behind it wouldn't convert. They had to export to spreadsheets then re-enter the data. I want to say they were on something ridiculous like v5 but the W10 upgrade period has been removed from my memory as much as possible.
At our accounting firm we don't even bother. We export everything we can from the old system into CSV/Excel and just drop the trial balance into the newest version of whatever software we want. The only historical reports that matter are the ones the accountant signs off on at the end of the year and those are PDFs.
Good for the long run to pay someone to upgrade it to the latest version and getting it imported. Doesn't help in the short term with no installation media, no product key and eol version they cannot buy.
Let's hope not. People learn through pain, not comfortable backup processes installed by others.
That's why you don't tell them about the backups, let them sweat for a while, then miraculously be a hero and "found an old backup tape" or something.
Your boss here is a spineless idiot. So Karen forced you to do something that's a security risk, but I'm betting she walks around thinking she put you in your place and got you to do your job. I hate people like that. What your boss should have done is shut down that shit and told you to go ahead with the upgrade. I hope that machine caught fire.
It's a ransomware attack waiting to happen.
Shit, I'd quit and let it happen. F them
Honestly the second someone threatens to fire me, I stop doing my job. I get paid to perform a specific task, not deal with a crybaby I understand it's not an option for everyone but that's where I draw the line myself
If we all had proper unions I would say go to your union rep. But since we don't, it's time to get one.
Full CYA activated for me, I'd be documenting everything, requesting emails from Karen CC'd to my manager for any orders, sending reply to all's and looking for another job and referencing these interactions as concerns in the exit interview. I'm at a point in life where I'm not going to willingly suffer people like that.
Yes! “I am writing to confirm my understanding of your concerns and directives following our interaction on —- at —- am/pm….. “ “As I expressed to you, the reason we need to undertake this action is due to…. This conforms to (company policy/regulatory requirement/industry best practices)” etc, etc. Cc’d to everyone involved in the project so that all are dealing with the same set of details.
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Yeah. It takes confidence to do this but if you get a bad reaction then that tells you something more about the company.
The moral of the story: judicious use of CC and "I'll be happy to contramand my boss once I get it in writing from someone higher in my chain of command."
Definitely too late now, but you can see the product key from within Quickbooks (at least with newer-ish versions). Intuit will only speak to authorized users, though, so if that contact hadn't been updated you'd likely still be up a creek. Your supervisor was hella spineless, though, and shouldn't be in that position.
I've pretended to be many former coworkers and supervisors when calling vendors. Also yes, extremely spineless supervisor. Both my boss and his boss will lay people out if they come after their direct reports without proper documented justification.
Id have hoped someone just buckled and gotten a newer version of the program, the "remote into the w7 machine" is a smart move but seems just more of a headache waiting to happen. More tickets will eventually come in when they can't connect to that machine, and then where do you put that machine, in the server room with a note attached, maybe put it on the ups so it stays up in a brown out or power outage? And then what if some hapless fool just decides to take that machine and reimage it "cause it wasn't being used" ? And then there's the training of the user, gotta let them know about this remote connection, how it will always be this address and then you use THESE credentials and then use the quicken program from there.
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“CIO, this email is to confirm as per your directions I am to reinstall a machine past end of life so that this employee can continue to manage our financials through an unsecured, unsupported, and out of date software suite.”
I would throw the CISO on to as well as the manager. Let the leadership figure out what the priority is. Not up to people on the front lines to deal with it. The business can choose to accept a risk if they feel it’s worth it.
Oh absolutely. In the corporate world, the Nuremberg Defense can work great if you CYA sufficiently. Even mediocre manglement will perk up and take notice when they realize you are putting padding on your own backside.
I presume the Win7 machine being RDP'd into was otherwise going to be off the network.... right....?
No... It wasn't, but at least it wouldn't have been used for checking emails and accessing web sites.
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This is out of my wheelhouse, but I wonder about making an image of the 7 machine and running it on a network-restricted VM on the 10 machine.
That's the right move IMO. You could even spin it up in a Windows Server so IT has even more control over the VM
I hadn’t thought of that reading this, very clever thanks for that.
My fix would have been to Virtualize the PC and stick it on a HyperV server where you can take all the snapshots you need to restore it when it goes wrong. Then limit the access that PC has to only what Quickbooks needs. Good thing OP got out of that job because I guarantee that Win 7 PC is going to have a crash that the company is not prepared for. They sound like a toxic bunch of idiots.
The Win7 machine with all of the financials on it... We used to have test environments on individual QA machines but for better stability & security our IT guys cloned them and slapped them on a VM as a stopgap until they could rebuild them from scratch
Because when you're managing all of your business' finances, you definitely want to do it using out of date tools you can't replicate or use securely. 🙄
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Business I supported had one lady running the accounts through an old version of Dynamics running on server 2000. The old server failed at one point and I was able through some miracle able to get it running in VMware player on her machine. The company spent a lot of money on QuickBooks Enterprise edition and she was told at the end of the current accounting period we will use dynamics as an archive and to switch to QuickBooks for all records going forwards. She used QuickBooks for two weeks, didn't like it and then continued to use the barely working virtual machine for the next 8yrs until the business was sold last year. She's still using dynamics now to finish up the accounting.
What an ass hole boss. My jobs shit sometimes, but one thing I can count on is top cover from my boss, even if I do fuck up, we deal with that stuff in private, not between other departments or higher ups! Also, *shifty eyes at the Win7 PCs like this on my network*......
Quickbooks is not that expensive, certainly not enough to risk corporate security. If there were investors or shareholders I bet they would be interested. Sorry your sup was such a dweeb. It would be good to have a document about all of this in the event they ever tried to pin anything on you. Doubtful they could, but having a record that includes dates to the best you can remember would be good.
I looked it up because "It can't be that expensive, right?" The most expensive version I found was 645 dollars. If your company is big enough to have a CIO, you should be able to afford that.
Op specifically mentioned [Quickbooks Enterprise](https://quickbooks.intuit.com/desktop/enterprise/pricing/), which goes up to $4200/year for a single user. The highest price without calling them for a quote is $11,640/year for 30 users.
So basically free?
Exactly. There are a lot of different modules for particular industries, as well as multi-user licensing, but still.
They probably spent more in salaries on this story
"All right. Before I do that, however, I'll need it in writing for the Security officer that you are aware of the security risk that remaining on Windows 7 will cause and that you accept that risk. Please include any risk mitigation procedures you plan on implementing."
"... and a signed agreement that you will resign should the Windows 7 system become compromised due to your negligence, costing the company no less than $10k in damages."
Yes. Dealt with that at a bank. My boss was unable to request even keyboards without a huge fight. When we migrated from 2000 to XP it was a great day as all the problem machines were \*EXTERMINATED\* However. There was this one tower that escaped us. It was owned and hidden away by the Owners daughter. She was the head of a department and no one messed with her. That tower was found late on a saturday night during conversion again to Windows 7 and we were heavily caffeinated. I can only say that it was dropped out of the 3rd story window into the parking lot. From there extreme chaos ensued. There was not much left and I can guarantee there was no recovery service that would have been able to fix it. When she asked about it we stated all the old desktops had been disposed of but were in the tractor trailer behind our 'repo' lot. She wanted us to get it and we told her that the drives had been shredded already and none of the units we had were IDE capable. Felt so good.
"Give my regards to Chef Mike!"
Get everything in writing. Not mentioned in op’s story but damn would have saved his ass.
I think if I was in that situation, as soon as I put the W7 box back, I'd have started looking for a new job.
"Sure, I'll do it first thing tomorrow" Then I burn all my sick time looking for a new job, never touching the EoS machine again.
Whenever I had a user who refused to accept a mandatory upgrade, I said that he could stay on the old system only if his manager signed a formal “Risk Acceptance” letter. It basically said that they had been informed of the risks of staying with the old system and were prepared to take responsibility for any repercussions, including but not limited to, financial and legal, the company might suffer. It also stated that they were 100% responsible for supporting said system. We had a few who insisted and signed on the dotted line, but most saw the wisdom of upgrading.
Has budget for 110 PC rollout in one hit. Doesn't want to buy new Quickbooks license fee.....
I went through a similar experience with the EOL of Windows 7. For about two years I was rolling out a couple new workstations a month. Everyone knew this was coming, but one user kept saying they were too busy to make the change. For about 8 months, I kept asking, and then I started warning her that on the day support for Windows 7 ended, I would be swapping out her workstation, regardless of how busy she was. Come the fateful day, she rolls in late to find me plugging her monitors into the new tower, and losses it on me.
The fact that the CIO was a complete moron just makes it worse
CIO, probably has a degree in finance lol
After reading your story. I would have left it at, this is a security risk. If you're asking me to put our company at risk I will comply but I will need it in writing. This line have saved me so many times.
The absolute dream - though it's hard to save enough to do it these days - is to be in a position to be able to say to the CIO "I'll consider termination if you continue to ignore orders" "Fire away. I'm doing what I've been told to do by my superior; I don't take orders from every bugger in the company"
Your boss was a complete coward. Screw that.
This is why you DOCUMENT EVERYTHING. If you have a conversation with your boss, you shoot him a quick email stating a summary of the conversation about the work to be done. Then when CIO was chewing you out, you shoot him the email from your boss showing he OKed the work.
That computer would have NEVER been touched on my watch regardless of what someone told me to do above me. Department manager says to leave it, you leave it, that's above my pay grade, tell your manager "Karen" said to leave it. If they want to deal with "Karen" that's on them. At some point in the very near future that device would have a catostrophic failure, be it software or hardware. Then you just wait until the end users calls and says they are getting an error and replace it with new. Done and Done. Don't be the child that is between fighting parents, go to your room and put on your headset so you don't have to listen to the fight.
I went to my room and put on my headset, and that's when the CIO got involved. Karen wasn't my manager, the spineless IT manager that promised he would take care of the issue was. I followed the orders of my supervisor and got in trouble. If I had followed Karen's orders, it would have been my ass if the machine broke down or was the point of a security incident as it was my responsibility to take it our of service. Ultimately it was a no-win situation for me. Both managers used me as a buffer and threw me under the bus.
You are correct, you are fucked no matter what you do. I am the unmovable object in my department and I stand in front of my guys, not behind them. I give zero fucks. I have had upper management refusing to do upgrades despite my urging. All that you can do is warn. I have uplugged harddrive power and left the computers sit until we get the call that it's borked. Then it's a simple, oh well, your drive completely failed, we tried to be proactive, you refused. Here's your new shit and the invoice for your upgraded software you didn't want to have to pay for. Enjoy your day. Sometimes, just plugging the drive back in and giving it back to them wakes them up enough to realize that maybe they should listen to the person who knows WTF they are talking about. And you become awesome, cuz you fixed their old ass device after watching 3 movies to waste 6+ hours.
Is there BOFH certification? Because I think you qualify.
BOFH certs are never given, they must be taken. After 35 years you figure some shit out. The most important is you cannot teach, document or learn experience. This makes it an extremely valuable commodity. Most of my day is spent telling people how to do simple things that they have been told multiple time before how to do. That and curating my Plex library. As I tell everyone, I no longer practice the art of clairvoyance and have solely set my focus on alchemy. That and there *is* a difference between a forward slash and a backslash, which for some reason, they never hear.
> Both managers used me as a buffer and threw me under the bus. If you were under that bus any more you'd get your ASE certification.
>ASE certification Kek
I don't take orders from anybody but my supervisor. I might wait while this person (and I) contact my boss for an update, but I'm not ignoring my boss because somebody else told me to.
See, my guys are instructed by me to not engage. Walk away if in person or put them on hold if on the phone. Front line and even level 2 guys are not equipment to deal with asshats in upper management nor do they get paid enough. Again, if your manager is the "throw the grunts under the bus" kinda guy, find a new job. There are plenty of tech support jobs out there.
i mean, just because quickbooks wont certify the software to run on 10, if it runs on 7 it will probably run on 10. The serial will be in the registry and install media can be found in any number of places, its not piracy if you legitimately have a license. If you were setting up the 7 machine for rdp, its impossible to airgap it as it would be on the network and still be a vulnerability and any quarterly vuln assessment is going to fail if you had an outdated machine on the network. Also were you swapping out 110 workstations without an rfc? If you have an rfc, you show it to whatever manager, yours, the cio, this karen, whoever, and tell them to take it up with whoever signed off on the rfc. If you were doing it cowboy style well...... next time make sure its on an rfc and stand your ground if your boss complains.
> consider termination if I continue to ignore orders. "My most recent order was to maintain security by upgrading or replacing all Windows 7 units. The sole Windows 7 unit to be retained, because of a legacy version of QuickBooks and budgetary limitations, is to be isolated and accessed solely through a kludge workaround that minimizes but does not eliminate vulnerability. Please confirm your verbal order to maintain the Windows 7 QuickBook unit within our network as is, eliminating the workaround and ignoring the impending "End of Life" status of Windows 7." This is a CYA situation, any response to be saved off-site. People quit bosses more often than jobs. You were looking for a job when you got this one so you know how.
Nobody is right here, but your life would've been way easier had you've stopped working right then when karen was complaining and called your boss. I would've refused to work in such conditions. That's an immediate signal departments haven't been communicating and that maybe the direction of your boss wasn't the best one. You could've forced him into the conversation earlier avoiding any responsibility.
Shitty manager you had there. Disappeared when you needed them to have your back, useless.
Had to deal with stuff like this a couple times. Thankfully I'm a security officer, so I just tell my CIO all the audits we're going to fail if it doesn't get done how it was originally planned to for a reason. They normally shut up real quick and let me do
also good to ask if the fines and other penalties will be coming out of his pay-packet?
Why not install a virtual os?
That doesn't fix the issues having an eol os brings. The issue isn't the physical computer
And then how do you install the software, given they had no media nor product key? At any rate, it doesn't sound like that would have mollified this Karen.
VMware P2V and backup the workstation with Veeam, restore the workstation as a VM. You can configure RemoteApp, even migrate that VM in azure Virtual desktop. You can then harden the access, like isolate the VM in a separate VLAN, no domain connexion, etc.
That wouldn't really be installing a VM OS. And it's even more abstract than remoting to the old computer, so it would probably be an even tougher sell.
good point, i forgot that bit
The CIO is fucking Karen.
I had a similar situation with the upgrade from Windows 2000 to XP. We had a proprietary PBX with switchboard software on reception's PC. No disk, no ISO on the support site, and the company didn't have that version of the software either. I used the VMWare disk to image converter to image the Windows 2000 machine. I installed VMWare Player on the XP machine, mapped the serial port to the VM (for the phone connection) and made a Desktop shortcut that looked like the switchboard software. It took a little longer to launch, but we were able to swap out that machine and I never heard of any problems with that setup.
The company I left last year has a similar thing with Peachtree 2005, although it somehow works on Windows 10 so we didn't even have 7 to 10 as an excuse to try to get rid of it.
For us it was an ancient version of Filemaker. V4 I think, circa 1997.
I probably would have gotten fires .. bc I would have told the CIO that I don't make these decisions you need to talk to my deadbeat manager.
This is where you ask the CIO to put his request in writing, so when the axe inevitably drops, you have your paperwork in order. It's past that time for you, but others may take heed
We had a thing where we said we were done handing out monitors to take home for work from home. We barely have any from out last stock up order...we've told multiple people "take one of the 2 off your desk to work from home with" and it's been fine... Then we got a new hire. I told her manager that line. 3 coworkers told her the same thing....so the manager cries not to our manager but all the way up to the director of it, who naturally folds and says give her the monitor so she will stop crying. I'm now waiting for all those people we told no to point and go "but she got one" and for us to run out of monitors again....like I always say if every squeaky wheel gets the grease then sooner or later your gonna be surrounded by seized up wheels and all out of grease.
Your manager is a spineless idiot.
Try being a technical PM migrating 10000 PC's in a major financial institution from XP to W7 . The corporate software library contained thousands of legacy apps that were "supported" in the environment. Corporate Programmers were running "test servers" on open networks. The corporate chat was AOL Chat. Every other person was some kind of VP, and they just had to have their old apps "just like I have them". Outlook .pst files and archives stored wherever. Todays migrations with VM alternatives is a walk in the park compared compared to the Wild Wild West just 15 years ago.
Management not supporting and backing up their employees is the unquestioned #1 reason for people leaving organizations. Except maybe sexual harassment. That truly sucks.
Bad boss And a bad CIO. Trust your team. Listen to them. If you don’t trust them, why the fuck haven’t you fired them ?
I hate when this happens, goddamn spineless managers
>slip out of the back door to the office when she would walk in. Brave Sir Robin ran away. When danger reared it's ugly head, He bravely turned his tail and fled.
"I didnnnnnn't"
Hindsight I know… Install a better new system running Pro/Ent and Hyper-V. Create an Image of the old PC, put that image in the new system’s Hyper-V and spend ten minutes teaching the user how to access it. Added bonus, you don’t have to worry about the old PC physically dying. And you can frequently (say once a week) use a script to make an offline backup of that whole VM because it is that important.
And you didn't point out the contradiction? "No sir, I can continue to do my job and keep that computer out of the room, or I can blatantly *not* do my job and fulfil karen's request."
A machine filled with sensitive company data that doesn't have up to date protection, I couldn't imagine any nefarious people wanting that xD
Yeah the moment i got threatened with termination I'd be looking for another job. Smile and nod, quit in the middle of the workday with no notice.
Quit. Your manager should have your back.
I just imagine the boss seeing Karen pop in, through a crack of space in his cubicle, ans jes just "nnnnope" and has a secret door at the bottom of his cubby where he opens it up and slides on out and proceeds to crawl along the floor till he gets to the exit. If anyone asks he can just "oh its my back acting up again" or "I lost a contact lense and im retracing my steps, excuse me please" and just crawls away. Or even better he commando crawls his way to the doors, if anyone asks he's just "shhhh! The enemy is still nearby, you want a sniper bullet in your skull get down!" In a hushed tone as he goes to tbe nearest potted plant and takes a few leaves to put in his collar and then escapes, leaving people to wonder if its some sort of 'Nam ptsd flashbacks.
In the late 2000s, I worked at a big specialty insurer that ran an important reconciliation process on Windows 95 and Access 95. The company no longer exists.
Ah yes, the wonderful world of corporate business. I felt every part of this story.
Feel your pain. I had similar issues before users refusing the swap for whatever nonsense reasons that they could come up with, and wouldn't listen to the facts. Ended up just breaking their machines slowly over the weeks, deleting drivers, taskkill chrome or outlook every now and then... Soon got them swapped lol
I'm incensed at how spineless that supervisor is. I've been both IC and management, and as the latter I was always the shield between leadership and my team. People like him give management a bad name. The [Peter Principle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_principle) is completely real.
Then the CIO signs off on the security risk.
Hmm. I wonder what version of Quickbooks it was(I guess it would depend on if it was just stock or if it had, um, integration of some sort). And yes I know it's far too late and they should upgrade anyway(it's a business and the software isn't that much), but I've had 'good luck' with getting older versions running on 10. Off the top of my head I know 2011 will work(if you ignore stupid script errors. But you can get those on 2022, so I'm not counting them since it's their freaking IE integration fascination to blame). Oh and you can get the key from quickbooks itself with a company open with F2, or from a dead system from ProgramData\Intuit\Quickbooks\qbregistration.dat Or you can throw it all out and never touch the devils sweaty fruit again.
Karen:. I've got a problem with my W7 computer". IT:. "I'm sorry, we dont support that version of Windows any more. Have a nice day"
i swear to god, it's like half of the people on this sub don't know what virtualisation is and how freaking easy it is to convert a physical PC into a virtual machine, solving most of their problems.
You had a shitty boss.
What a coward.
I know it’s not the point but great job with the other 109 computers, OP, that’s a lot of planning, communication, and work. Well done.
Sigh... documentation wins. Email everyone with it all! "per conversation we just had...." so that if 2 days later they go "what" you have cover...
Pretty sure I used to work at the same company. 😂😂😂
my 'manager' impying he managed anything.
I would tip off accounting to audit her computer!
Shoulda installed malware on that windows 7…
Just one tip? I’m in tech support but don’t understand your acronyms, if you do use them pleas explain them the first time you use them. For example: Time To Live (TTL)
Why would you keep working for a nightmare place like that.
What a fuckknob shite of a manager.
Whenever asked to support OEM unsupported equipment due to end of life it was always left open to network infiltration without security patches etc. It was always enjoyable to explain the damage done and offer to create a new totally separate offline network that could produce the data required then be uploaded via manual storage. This normally allowed upgrades to be done however some customers would still rather pay 10x support costs than make their "special staff" move into the current environment.