And the junior not only succeeded in his goal but got someone else to do it for him. I reckon he was a frickin genius.
He was unceremoniously fired shortly after the boss came back from holiday. Needless to say, he made people quite cross... Nah - there's nothing fun to do whatsoever these days!
Provide your report to the IT Manager and tell the business that you've done so. The IT Manager should be the one explaining any outage to the business, especially as it was due to a staff members mistake not a failure of the systems.
One thing i learned from experience is that if it looks important or above my knowledge level i do not touch it, i let it to the people that know wtf they are doing. The problem comes when the boss demands that you fix stuff you know nothing about while pointing out that you have an engineering degree and that you should know about EVERYTHING, what should one do? edit: I think people sometimes use the title of Engineer because they consider themselves very clever and able to devise ways of fixing stuff.
I have more or less done this - I have sent a report to the IT manager about the work I carried out and what the fault was, and I have told the rest of their business that it was an internal network fault that had a knock on effect. So far no one has come back asking for any more info. and it's nearly close of play for most places, but I think tomorrow will be the day of the fireworks.
IT Directors are usually the worst - most of the time they're just business people with no technical experience. I worked for a company where the combination of clueless IT Director and cost-cutting Financial Director meant that we almost got rid of our diesel backup generators because the FD thought it was costing too much money keeping them full of diesel...
Margon, I'm all anticipation. You must update us as to what happens. Also more generally, this thread is hilarious. I love tech support stories. And I just discovered TFTS, which is endlessly entertaining...
It's of no comfort at all that in the 16 years since I worked in a hospital IT department that the NHS policy on employing tech staff that take an interest in their field (clinicians have to stay up to date, why not the tech staff?). Where I worked, the IT director did not have a PC on his desk at all, and while they were happy to burn millions on an admin system based on the US model (that never actually went into production, so I heard), they would not spring for a monthly magazine sub for programmers at a cost of £30 a year. My own personal favourite IT screw up story, which is unverified but came from multiple sources through the grapevine, is the one about the person who had rights to submit the command "delete_box <jobname>" from a production autosys scheduler for a large UK company and did so instead of "delete_job <jobname>" but was too afraid to tell anyone what he had done & tried to hide it. For those that don't know autosys, delete_job just deletes a job definition. delete_box deletes everything in cascade under it as well. Bit of a difference. The company in question spent over a month unpicking the damage done, paying out compensation and apologising not only to all their own customers (hundreds of thousands of them) but to many others and having to issue public statements all over the place.
The story did not relate in detail. At the times I heard the story related the unpick operation was ongoing, the organisation was under fierce public criticism and I understood several heads rolled but not specifically that it was the chap who clicked the button, I suspect he was probably not getting paid even UK minimum wage (outsourced)
More than anything, shoot the systems administrator who decided not to implement any sort of backup...
Backups don't fix things outside your own environment, sadly. Without going into too much detail, hundreds (if not thousands) of other organisations were directly impacted. The problem was not about backups - timing is everything.
Well apparently just a slap on the wrists, as it's not their fault they didn't know :S NO, IT'S NOT ENTIRELY THEIR FAULT, BUT YOU COULD OF HIRED A BETTER PERSON.
It's pretty hard to fire someone these days, but that sounds like warning territory for me (it's Grade I stupidity...) (Must resist urge to correct grammar /troll)
