Arrrrr!
That thar BOfH evidently be missin' out on International Talk Like a Pirate Day! Ye'd have thought he'd be makin' the scurvy dog boss walk t'plank for talkin' t'him like that!
"...And so you can just log in to my machine and look at it whenever you like?" our user asks indignantly. "Uh-huh," the PFY says, fixing the user's printer settings while he's talking. "And I don't have to give you permission or anything?" "I'd have assumed that was implied by ringing the helpdesk?" the PFY says. "Yes …
Another great BOFH and so true. The number of times in the past I've had users switch off their PC's when I jokingly remark about seeing everything they have been up to, when I've done a bit of servicedesk stuff :-)
Stupid idiots do not realise that this just makes us all be really interested in having a damned good poke around.
Mines the one with the MSTSC in the back pocket
...It never ceases to amaze me how every now and then an otherwise sane user suddenly starts believing that they, their email, and their personal files and instant messages would become so interesting for an administrator that they would forgo .......
This is so Bloody true.... Why is it that the (L)users never seems to get this? .... even after you´ve taken the time to patiently explain it to them while beating them around the head with a copy of the company IT Usage policy... preferably rapped around a brick!
As ever the BOFH Rules...
Role on next Friday!!!
I'm assuming that this superb BOFH is missing from the front page of the site's story feed for a good reason?
But hey - thumbs up to Simon, reminds me of tech support in a school... some amazing stuff was on user's machines, even though they tried to filter it.... Those where the days...
"...because then we start wondering what the hell it is you have that you don't want us to see. And before you know it the administrator concerned has passed you on to someone such as myself whose sole purpose is to keep you talking long enough to fire off a backup of the contents of your hard drive."
Classic.
Fix it, but don't touch it. Typical user BS. If I had to get up from my desk to fix every issue, they couldn't afford the mileage charges. When did things change where a user thinks that they have the right to privacy on a machine that they do not own?? If they only ken that we can also connect to their home machines. What morons.
... wait, since when was the BOFH anyone's friend? Ah yes, I remember. There was an episode in which that occurred... 2003, the BOFH-father. Yes. Alright, carry on!
Glad to see a new episode. And hey... it STARTS with user paranoia instead of having to CREATE it half-way through!
Seriously though, the advent of easy access remote control has made the life of anyone working in IT, especially support personnel, SO much easier and less stressful.
I sometimes think back to the bad old days of having to talk a user through repairing their own monitor, when I couldn't see what they could see, and was reliant on them telling me what was going on, which seldom, if ever, seemed to bear any relation to what was actually on the screen.
Simon, you should be knighted.
A while back I worked at a place where I was the sole SA.. I always told my users that I was monitoring everything... when in reality I couldn't give a flying fuck what they looked at, I was more interested in reading the reg and something awful!
But the fear kept them in check. Happy days!
I've had this precise conversation with hapless users- and one in particular, who was a dead ringer for a prototype Nathan Barley. He seemed most offended when I asked what made him imagine that anything he could do, say or know would be of sufficient interest for me to spend time poking through his email, or his machine. I also pointed out that the location of his porn stash was relatively common knowledge, such that you didn't need root-level access to find it anyway.
Suffice it to say that he performed a deeply splended mime that reminded me of a goldfish, leaving me free to take advantage of the freshly-brewed coffee that someone with an above room-temperature IQ had just prepared to get us through the morning.
(Paris, because maybe her data might occasionally be interesting)
Not on the front page? Surely any BOFH worth his salt would know how to type in "<CTRL> t http://www.theregister.co.uk/odds/bofh/" by now? Only takes me 6 seconds - which is noticeably quicker than moving the mouse up to Bookmarks and scrolling down the list...
I'm also the kind of person that quite often guesses Wikipedia URIs, rather than using the site's built-in search facility.
Meanwhile, if ye want t' abuse lusers whilst takin' advantage o' "International Speak Like a Sea dog Tide", but cannot master th' linguistic subtleties o' buccanneer-speak, then try headin' o'er t' this link: http://www.syddware.com/cgi-bin/pirate.pl
I realise that you're putting the BOFH story in a frekily huge box to the side of the main stories, AND in the BOFH section at the bottom of the page, but I have to say it made it harder to find.
The huge box looks like ad advert, so I of course, didn't pay it any attention.
The stuff at the bottom is so far down the page, and below the 'do not miss' banner that I actually forgot there was stuff that far down.
Can you please also leave the article appearing in the stories list as normal? Oh who am I kidding, I'll probably get used to it, but old habits die hard you know.