Is it ok to laugh...

…at seeing a server with the Microsoft Baseline Security Advisor installed on actively supported network comprised of dozen’s of Windows 2000 machines running SP3?

…at a vendor support tech that does this:

tech: what operating system are they running on the workstations? me: Windows 2000 tech: Professional? me: … does she want me to answer this?.. uhhh yeah.

later in the conversation in listening to a list of suggested “performance tips” for the client/server app: me: it lags for 10-15 seconds opening some screens of the app that are near instant on the server tech: Are you using DHCP? You should really be using static IP addressing me: ohhhkay tech: and make sure no other protocols are running on the network cards me: ohhkay

…at a grandfather, father, son rotation with offsite backup media policy in a site that the actual backup software has not even started to record a job to said tapes in two months…

…at walking into the basement of a small business consulting office to find the firewall to which multiple other techs and consultants had claimed the password was impossible to reset and the unit needed to be discarded to find a whitebox running FreeBSD

…at getting to explain the company name “Guru” to a potential client of which the three women at the top of the organization present in the meeting are obviously Indian born natives and claim when asking for the explanation to be familiar with the “real meaning of the name”

…at mere days after hours of 16GB limit disaster recovery defragmentation and user admonishing Symantec antivirus spontaneously forgetting all of it’s exclusions on an Exchange server and eating the Exchange logfiles causing the information store to dismount and become corrupt as soon as the nightly Store backup tried to flush the logs to find they don’t exist causing further hours of disaster recovery

…at any of the words used in a phrase between the words “blackberry” and “again” (isn’t working/froze/died/is lost, you name it) from an executive or a tech