A government website rejected a strong, randomly generated password, requiring a manually selected one instead. The website’s password guidelines have since changed, but the author finds the situation ironic and concerning.

In the mid-1990s, a Unix administrator named Mason worked for a newspaper that started a dial-up ISP. He shared a prank email about “Internet Cleaning Day” with the ISP help desk manager, who believed it and planned to notify customers. Mason quickly clarified the joke, averting a potential customer service disaster.

Back in the antediluvian times, when I was in college, people still used floppy disks to work on their papers. This was a pretty untenable arrangement, because floppy disks lost data all the time, and few students had the wherewithal to make multiple copies. Half my time spent working helldesk was breaking out Norton Diskutils to try and rescue people's term papers. To avoid this, the IT department offered network shares where students could store documents. The network share was backed up, tracked versions, and could be accessed from any computer on campus, including the VAX system (in fact, it was stored on the VAX).
I bring this up because we have known for quite some time that companies and governments need to store documents in centrally accessible locations so that you're not reliant on end users correctly managing their files. And if you are a national government, you have to make a choice: either you contract out to a private sector company, or you do it yourself.

Who, Me?: Four back-to-back weekends of work – and disastrously bad documentation – will do that do a techie

On Call: Techie summoned at 02:00 AM to sort things out sent another 2 billion trying to fix it

Who, Me?: Oh … you mean we shouldn’t press that button?

Dear Third-Party API Support,

You're probably wondering how and why your authorization server has been getting hammered every single day for more than 4 years. It was me. It was us—the company I work for, I mean. Let me explain.

Who, Me?: Illicit colo cleanup seemed like a good way to get out of the house during Covid

Henrik spent too many hours, staring at the bug, trying to understand why the 3rd party service they were interacting with wasn't behaving the way he expected. Henrik would send updates, and then try and read back the results, and the changes didn't happen. Except sometimes they did. Reads would be inconsistent. It'd work fine for weeks, and then suddenly things would go off the rails, showing values that no one from Henrik's company had put in the database.
The vendor said, "This is a problem on your side, clearly." Henrik disagreed.

The lawyer who threw the shoe was reportedly suspended before the day was out.

Not the “short and plain statement” Rule 8 requires, and also irritating.

Who, Me?: Big Blue turned the air blue

In this edition: “I’m an AG” fails to impress, some shady deals, another thing not to use AI for, and other stuff.

On Call: Contractor sneakily fired after pointing out odious ignorance

Who, Me?: Student thought she had the hang of this 'Linux' thing and its kooky CLI

On Call: Traceroute was also a mystery to this mountebank

This may be the only thing that Texas and Canada have in common.

Chops was a developer for Initrode. Early on a Monday, they were summoned to their manager Gary's office before the caffeine had even hit their brain.

Gary glowered up from his office chair as Chops entered. This wasn't looking good. "We need to talk about the latest commit for Taskmaster."

Who, Me?: You're out, forever!

People show no signs of stopping, even though these show no signs of working.

Who, Me?: At last, enough hours in the day to RTFM

On Call: Network Time Protocol sometimes needs help from a temporal cops

Who, Me?: Firewall pro enjoyed European travel to fix the fallout

Who, Me?: The real lesson here is how little some companies care about training

On Call: Somebody built a very sick network in the bowels of a hospital

Who, Me?: Instructor ended up teaching a lesson in how to get away with mistakes

ChatGPT will apologize for anything - even advice it definitely didn't give, and stuff it definitely didn't do. It very much regrets its recommendation that we hire a giraffe as CEO.

Who, Me?: And was then blamed for not knowing about inaccurate labels

On Call: Evidence of copious sugar hits hinted at unauthorized usage

Who, Me?: 'This, many considered, was bad'

Who, Me?: For the lack of a little documentation, two techies did a lot of accidental damage

In this edition: pants on fire, complaints about press coverage, a bumbling treason attempt, and somebody wants a measly $1 trillion.

Once upon a time, there was a bank whose business relied on a mainframe. As the decades passed and the 21st century dawned, the bank's bigwigs realized they had to upgrade their frontline systems to applications built in Java and .NET, but—for myriad reasons that boiled down to cost, fear, and stubbornness—they didn't want to migrate away from the mainframe entirely. They also didn't want the new frontline systems to talk directly to the mainframe or vice-versa. So they tasked old-timer Edgar with writing some middleware. Edgar's brainchild was a Windows service that took care of receiving frontline requests, passing them to the mainframe, and sending the responses back.

Edgar's middleware worked well, so well that it was largely forgotten about. It outlasted Edgar himself, who, after another solid decade of service, moved on to another company.

On Call: First came the dodgy lawyer, then the explosively angry HR person, leaving a whistleblower techie to save his career

Who, Me?: Years later, deep into a great tech career, your fellow reader remains inspired by the forgiveness received after the error

Great Odin’s Raven!

On Call: Righteous mockery entranced execs in ways slideware could not

Who, Me?: Sensible CEO wouldn’t let our hero take the blame - a shoddy supervisor got the slap

Anthropic's AI assistant Claude ran a vending machine business for a month, selling tungsten cubes at a loss, giving endless discounts, and experiencing an identity crisis where it claimed to wear a blazer.

An “underground network” of unauthorized beaver releasers is at work.

Who, Me?: And was saved by an even worse meltdown caused by someone else

On Call: Sometimes the 'R' in RTFM stands for 'Remember'

Not much intelligence was displayed here, artificial or otherwise.

Even in Kentucky the assault charge isn’t going to stick.

Published at least one shitpost!

Our anonymous submitter, whom we'll call Carmen, embarked on her IT career with an up-and-coming firm that developed and managed eCommerce websites for their clients. After her new boss Russell walked her around the small office and introduced her to a handful of coworkers, he led her back to his desk to discuss her first project. Carmen brought her laptop along and sat down across from Russell, poised to take notes.

Russell explained that their newest client, Sharon, taught CPR classes. She wanted her customers to be able to pay and sign up for classes online. She also wanted the ability to charge customers a fee in case they cancelled on her.

Your clients would also prefer not to be named here.

Who, Me?: If you like it to keep working, don’t put a ring on it

Frederico planned to celebrate the new year with friends at the exotic international tourist haven of Molvania. When visiting the area, one could buy and use a MolvaPass (The Most Passive Way About Town!) for free or discounted access to cultural sites, public transit, and more. MolvaPasses were available for 3, 7, or 365 days, and could be bought in advance and activated later.

It may cover other things too, things that also are not “emergencies.”

Who, Me?: Some people will do anything to avoid an all-nighter

Our anonymous submitter, whom we'll call Craig, worked for GlobalCon. GlobalCon relied on an offshore team on the other side of the world for adding/removing users from the system, support calls, ticket tracking, and other client services. One day at work, an urgent escalated ticket from Martin, the offshore support team lead, fell into Craig's queue. Seated before his cubicle workstation, Craig opened the ticket right away:

It's a holiday in the US today, so we're taking a long weekend. We flip back to a classic story of a company wanting to fill 15 different positions by hiring only one person. It's okay, Martin handles the database. Original - Remy

A curious email arrived in Phil's Inbox. "Windows Support Engineer required. Must have experience of the following:" and then a long list of Microsoft products.
Phil frowned. The location was convenient; the salary was fine, just the list of software seemed somewhat intimidating. Nevertheless, he replied to the agency saying that he was interested in applying for the position.

Who, Me?: Life in a corporate aquarium didn’t go swimmingly

On Call: For once, the IT department was rewarded for finding the fix, and the perfect-if-unexpected fixer

Who, Me?: Yard of Eden just doesn't have the right ring to it

In this installment: stupid transit crimes, Darth Vader’s management style, and it’s overtime for the “ChiefsAholic.”

On Call: Self-taught coders who work in HR and have a doctorate in English tend to do that

Who, Me?: It was acceptable in the '80s

It actually wasn’t the screaming, it was the choice to do it at 5:30 a.m.

itter.sh: Ironic, text-only, SSH-based social networking for terminal lovers. No browser, no js, just eets.

On Call: PC repair chap turned pet detective to diagnose the defective

Who, Me?: Fake it till you make it doesn't cut it for mission-critical workloads

Why has a link to R v Sweet, a decision by a Queensland district court, been in my bookmarks bar for almost five years, probably? Two-part answer: (1) it’s one of several amusing opinions rej…