@Anonymous #1DFF
If it’s about stupid people making stupid decisions I am more than interested.
There was the tech who was fired for having had the bad luck to pick up the phone and get the call when a VP’s teenage son called up and asked for help setting up a Playstation 2. A VP had flown in with his son for a meeting, and left him to his own devices to wander what was supposed to be a secure building using the “do you people know who I am?” card. Service contract was for network support for business related purposes. The little shit had already yanked a bunch of cables out of a patch panel to plug it in, damaging a number of them in the process and making all the network drops for about a quarter of the building stop working. Tech documented the vandalism he admitted to, said that wasn’t in the support contract and we weren’t authorized to do that, then put in a service ticket to dispatch a tech to fix it. This offended the teenager.
The teenager’s actions, and the fact that he was allowed to access a secure facility, and do so unescorted and unsupervised, caused a scandal for his father. Our management, as you might expect showed what they were made of by blaming the guy who’d had the misfortune to be working that day and pick up the telephone for all of it, and sought to make an example of him. If you live in a “right to work” state, you probably already know they can do that.
They didn’t want to pay for unemployment, so they cut his hours to part-time only, took away his medical insurance–he was an older guy and had medical problems–scheduled him to work alternating nights and days, forced him to pay his own travel expenses for “sensitivity training,” and all the other clever things they are legally allowed to do when they want you to quit. He had a heart attack on the job after four months of this.
The moral of the story is that if you’re in an environment surrounded by stupid people making stupid decisions for which they are rewarded and empowered, and you’re getting blamed, punished, threatened, and held responsible for their actions, and constantly working overtime and getting verbally abused while you fix their messes… maybe the stupid decision that needs reconsideration is not getting a different job. I’d rather temp and work data-entry-monkey jobs for a dollar over minimum wage for the rest of my life than ever work the helldesk again.
@Officer Hotpants
@EverfreeEmergencies
That is…
profoundly stupid. That’s not even a lack of understanding of computers; that’s a lack of understanding of
every single device in your environment.
Imagine a society where that’s the norm and actually admitting to knowing anything about how anything works is “weird” and “creepy” and “abnormal” and results in marginalization and ostracization to the fringes of society. Imagine the Dunning-Kruger Effect, but on a civilizational scale. Imagine Idiocracy being a documentary. Imagine the Kipling poem “The Sons of Martha,” but with the heroism replaced by low-paying, low-status drudgery for the benefit of belligerent, vulgar mouth-breathers who won’t read the instructions. It’s here. We’re living it.