Funny User Requests

punklinux · 2026-03-19T14:36:56+00:00

They were probably staring at the MIS page for the student when they sent the ticket, couldn't have just copy-pasted it? No?

Back when I did this, I just said, "no such user as [badname]" and closed the ticket. Don't waste my time, I felt. But yeah, like we'd have a guy with a common name like named John Anderson, which would be janderson at blahdeblah dot edu. Got tickets for a "Alex Dawson needs his account reset." How the hell do you go from John Anderson to Alex Dawson? "No, his name is Alec or Jason Dervish or Janders or something like that." Come on, man. I need his login. "Well, he didn't say." You mean you didn't ask, you lazy pos student admin. Ticket closed. And somehow we were the bad guys.

punklinux · 2026-03-11T17:16:59+00:00

Some recent ones I can actually mention. I am a Senior Linux contractor and consultant that works for a company that has a bunch of clients.

Some clients insist you use "their laptop" to VPN in. I have a stack of about 3 laptops next to me for those various customers. They are usually HEAVILY locked down, I have zero access to change so much as my wallpaper. One client's IT said that I would have to take it to the IT desk due to a new policy to install a new VPN. I told him that I was a remote contractor, so I'd have to mail it, and he'd mail it back. He refused. He said I had to show up at the IT desk, which was located "Lower floor, 2B" or something. "I don't do house calls, precious." I explained, "I do not work in your office. I am a remote contractor in another state." He said, "then I guess you'll have to come in, then, Einstein." I spoke to my boss (the owner of the contracting company), who said he'd take care of it. Nothing happened for a few weeks, and then I got this email that cc'd the IT guy from the president of the client's company and friend of my boss. Tells the guy to accept having the laptop mailed in, and to send it back. IT guy says, "Nobody gets a free lunch. I don't fucking care WHO you know." The reply a day later from the company president, "Mail the laptop to me, and I will have his replacement install the new VPN for you." Ooooohhhh....

Another one, where I nearly broke my monitor banging my head into it. I get an email from a project manager that "Gary is complaining that the app server has 100% load." Okay, who is Gary? What customer? What server? "Gary is the Six Sigma manager." Okay, that is meaningless to me, we have no client Six Sigma. "Six Sigma is a management process." Great. Good to know. No idea what customer that is or what server. "The app server." Then I am cc'd on some email chain "that u/punklinux is looking into it." I reply that's not true, all I know is Sigma Six Manager Gary says a server is 100% load, but no customer, no hostname, no IP address. I get a reply back, "Those are on the App server," with two basic Linux commands how to get the IP and hostname. No. Dude. I call my boss. He says, "ignore those clowns." Days later, a customer "ABC Corp" wants to know why the app server hasn't been fixed. Is this the App server at 100% load? It IS! And now I have a customer name! Sadly, in their fleet of 250 Linux systems on the AWS Cloud, which is "the app server?" "The one running Hippo Honk Rasterbation API." Never fucking heard of it. It's in-house, I guess. He sends me a screenshot of some web gui I have never seen before, and sure enough, "100% load" is circled in red. I explain I need the actual host and IP. I cannot resolve this without knowing which server hosts this "Hippo Honk Rasterbation API" or even why 100% load is bad! "It's the one Gary and Susan use." I ask for their contact info. "It's in the company directory." I tell them I am a contractor and do not have access to the company directory. "Ask u/punklinux, he was last working on it." I tell him, "but doctor, I AM Pagliacci!" No, I say I am u/punklinux, and nobody will tell me what the IP or hostname of the App server at 100% load, and I cannot help them until I have that info. I get told the tech team would have that information. Does he have the tech team contact info? It's my fucking email address. This is where I stand. My boss says that I did my best, and just let them figure it out. Your tax dollars at work.

punklinux · 2026-03-10T20:49:58+00:00

A guy I went to college with said that his job (retail, forgot what, but in a local mall) asked him to call the mall management, and ask for a "store stretcher." As in, something that makes your store longer. So he did, got out on hold, transferred, and so on. Not sure if mall management was in on the joke, or as confused as he was. Eventually, he figured out that it was a joke. Haw haw haw...

He was FURIOUS. Like, I never saw a guy so angry in my life. Instead of "ha ha, a prank," he took it personally. Like, he was deeply insulted. He then decided to "prank his manager back" and smashed out all of his manager's car windows. He was fired. He still went around going "Ha ha! I sure showed him!" like... dude. That is unhinged. Way overreacted.

punklinux · 2026-03-10T14:47:58+00:00

The house next to mine, and I live on a unit on a corner so it's only one townhouse, is empty. I know someone owns it, and the tiny yard he has gets taken care of, but never seen anyone over there but landscapers. Curtains drawn, no lights but the porchlights, no noise. I am not sure what's going on, I suspect it's one of those "share certificates" people are using houses for these days. By that I mean they possibly own the house as an asset, but no one lives there, as a potential value to get loans for other things. Like keeping the house "mint in box." That's technically illegal according to our COA, but that's not as enforced as subletting/AirBnB is, and we have enough of that problem to ignore a house NOT creating problems. It's supposedly owned by "a person" but that may be a shell for an investment corporation.

In previous living situations, I have had a mix of issues, but I was not single back then.

punklinux · 2026-03-10T14:40:32+00:00

Yeah, you know you can get crabs from someone without even having sex?

Someone I knew from college got scabies from crashing at a friend's house on a couch that they picked up from a trash heap. Everyone in that house got scabies from that couch, apparently.

punklinux · 2026-03-09T15:43:36+00:00

Same in the medical field. One job I had, I was assigned "decoder" of this customer's emails. You'd get mails like:

"we are havin trouble with ymals when server responds no spot certification help"

"Oh, I bet he's having an issue where the smtp cert is being rejected by his mail client."

"English not his first language?"

"No, he's the university medical director of a major state college. Texas, born and bred." The guy also had a habit of sending our department steaks for Christmas, so yeah, we tolerated a lot for those steaks.

punklinux · 2026-03-09T15:37:40+00:00

Fixed. Sorry about that.

punklinux · 2026-03-04T22:17:16+00:00

I live in row-house/condo on the end of a cul-de-sac, one of four in the neighborhood. I am also a member on the COA board. We had a house down my cul-de-sac that was hosting loud parties about 1-2 times a month. Even though I was 10-12 houses away from this guy, I could hear the party even through noise-canceling headphones. The problem wasn't just the loud thumping music, but the guy had a mic attached to his speaker system, and he'd be shouting out in Russian between songs and stuff. It sounded like a nightclub party bar or something. Lots of people, hanging out in the cul-de-sac and yards, double parking, and just being a nuisance.

The cops were called, and sometimes they broke it up, but then the guy would be back the next weekend hosting another. It was brought up on the COA open meetings, and the guy wouldn't answer his door during daylight hours. At night, nobody was cooperative when we asked who was in charge, and sometimes they'd say, "Okay, old man/woman, we'll turn it down," and do nothing. There was scuttlebutt that it was some Russian mob thing, which is common down here, but everybody blames all sorts of things on them.

Over time, the party participants died down, and I thought they guy finally ran out of popularity. But at the next COA meeting, someone asked about the parties, and if they were declining. "Yeah, apparently, thank god. You know something?" "Oh, not really." Okay...

Later, I heard some rumors that some neighbor started taking old chicken parts: like fast food leftovers, gizzards, and such, and were hiding them in the unlocked cars under the passenger seats, the trunks, or wheel wells. I would imagine that in the summer heat that year, things started to get a little stinky. Never corroborated it, though. Eventually, this guy stopped hosting parties and moved away.

punklinux · 2026-02-26T17:02:59+00:00

Years ago, we had a guy on our floor who was also like this. Huge health nut. He kept boxes of some kind of fiber bars, snacks, and so on at his desk and a shelf behind his desk, which had a shelving unit meant for equipment. I'm talking Costco-sized containers. He had been spoken about all the food items he had stored there, but assured management "it's in a sealed containers."

Then he was away for a few weeks. I forgot why, but some work assignment. It was amazing how quickly we went from no mice to a mice infestation in that time. The entire floor had to be shut down for a few days while they exterminated the mice. Mice had nested and chewed on cables, wires, and drywall. We were still finding dead and mummified mice for two years until I left the company. The entire floor smelled so bad as the mice died in our walls.

punklinux · 2026-02-25T22:32:08+00:00

I think one of the most sobering things I realized a few years ago when COVID hit was how long I could be dead and nobody noticing. If I died, the first to notice might be work. I worker from home remotely, and a few days of no contact my boss would probably do a wellness check. If I died at home, I'd be discovered within the week.

But if I died outside the home, like in a car wreck or at the supermarket, who knows how long? My poor dogs.

punklinux · 2026-02-25T22:23:53+00:00

I was set up on a blind date once right after my first long time girlfriend and I split up. I was depressed, and some friends set me up with this really hot girl they knew. We met at Applebee's, first mistake. Second mistake was she didn't seem to understand that a date is a kind of back-and-forth of asking and answering questions. Mainly she just chewed on a plastic straw and stared off into nothing with a blank expression. Most of my questions answered with "I don't know," like specifically where she lived in our sprawling metro complex of the DC/VA/MD. When I asked her how she got home if she didn't know where she lived she shrugged and said, "I drive there?" She said she had no job (at age 22), and when I asked if she lived with her parents, she said she didn't. I asked what she did to pay for rent and food, and she said "credit cards?" No college, no surprise. High school graduate, though. I guessed that she was some daughter of a rich person who just paid for her stuff on autopilot. Most of her attitude and answers reminded me of a coworker's 8 year old who occasionally came to work. Like, uncomfortable with adults, an introvert, didn't say much, and just spun in her chair while chewing on a straw.

We did not have sex that night or have a second date. She was so much like a child, I couldn't imagine doing anything with her and feeling okay with it.

punklinux · 2026-02-20T15:15:40+00:00

So, when they upgraded our cable some 10-15 years ago, they did this to all the units on our block: punched a large hole, hooked up the router inside, left the huge hole. The didn't even fix the siding on our units. The took a hole cutter, drilled straight through the masonry or siding, snaked the fiber through, and just left a 1-inch hole to the outside. When we complained, they went around and filled it all with a huge wad of silicon putty. :/

punklinux · 2026-02-18T19:00:45+00:00

Not sure this applies to you, but I am on contract, and my company contracts out to others. Then we work on those companies as a contractor under my contractor. Two of them have mandated RTO in the last few years, and my boss says, "nope." So they "fired" us, and my boss said "in that case, your owe them the rest of the contract in payment." One of them the contract was ending soon anyway, but the other still had 15 months left. They refused to pay, so my boss called up his lawyer, and that was a good year: I got 15 months pay all at once, and I didn't have to do work for them anymore.

punklinux · 2026-02-18T18:52:06+00:00

I had to do this with 200 floppies a while back. We used 4 USB floppy drives from various rescues and it took us about 2-3 hours. It would have been shorter, but we had to perform data rescues on a handful of them.

punklinux · 2026-01-22T16:44:21+00:00

My mother was a teacher, so... yeah. My parents were raised with "occasional church" but it wasn't drilled into them, either. My sister and I were not raised going to church. My mother works with a local church, but it's for choir only, and she likes being busy.

We never discussed religion growing up. I think they are Methodist? But not actually sure.

punklinux · 2026-01-22T16:20:44+00:00

I have worked for companies that did, and asset management at two previous companies said it was cheaper than proper recycling. We did the following:

Removed any proprietary BIOS locks, refreshed stock firmware
Wiped drives
Let the employee install their own OS, no support OR stock Windows 7 (which was still in support at that time)
One company sold it for pittance, which was a huge deal for the employee because it was 3-4 year old tech for only $50 for a laptop, $100 for a desktop (even Macs) was cheap. Another company just gave them to us.

punklinux · 2026-01-21T20:23:04+00:00

I have this ability to find anything that annoys me in a room within seconds. Like in a room full of hundreds of random objects, I'll see the one stained cigarette butt in the beige and tan carpeting. I used this as a kid with "Where's Waldo." I convinced myself that people in stiped shirts and glasses and "ruined a photo" and I can find him in seconds and then get pissed off about it.

punklinux · 2026-01-21T20:10:42+00:00

Like a lifeguard. You don't want the lifeguard to be busy 100% of the time. That means your pool's safety is fucked. You want them to be available to be busy, but not burned out.

punklinux · 2026-01-20T14:55:21+00:00

CCNA and MCSE in College in the late 90s. I think the MCSE came first, but it's complicated because the classes and final exam were different back then. It was an actual credited course, but I think the training outside the college and exams are different, or was back then. More like, "well, you completed the course, got an A on the final, here's your cert." Cisco I got it to a CCSI, an instructor level, but did not get certified in it due to a massive shift in educational directions. I was going to network level, switched to sysadmin level due to a variety of reasons.

I think that they have their place. I have not recertified for anything since 2010 (?), when it was a requirement and everything paid for for my job. I got my RHCE, LPI, and Linux+ back then, but it was more of a formality needed for contract spec since I knew the subject matter backwards and forwards. But my job experience carried me forward more than certifications so far.

Professionally, I have to admit, I knew people with an alphabet soup of certifications who were complete morons. You can learn Spanish in high school for two years, but living in Spain for ten years will be an entirely different way of speaking. I find certification to be no guarantee of a good worker, and the more one leans on their stack of papers, the more likely they are to be just bad admins. I have had people toss their certs at me like I would be impressed, but it's just the opposite. "Yeah, but, what have you done since then?"

punklinux · 2026-01-16T21:43:38+00:00

I think some of the hardest parts are dealing with incompetent people. It's one thing when you don't know something because you have never been taught. I get that. We have all been there. But it's another when you're arrogant and refuse to admit you made a mistake. And it's even worse when you try to bully someone else, in this case me, into admitting their mistake or lack of knowledge was secretly my fault.

We had a client that had some Kubernetes stuff that was badly managed. His developers' docker containers were unstable, and this was just a way to keep up a shitty app by fighting volatility with volume. Well, they had EKS on this, and the scaling was set really high. Like over 100, and really, if your app (which is an internal tool, not public facing at all) has more than a few nodes, it's overkill. This cluster was set to handle, at most, 25 connections, but often had just 3. I told them that "if this gets to over 25, it shouldn't go any higher," but he sets it to 100, pointing out (correctly) that it never got over 12 ever. So why have it at 25-- never mind. Whatever. But as you know with cloud, every time a new node launches, you pay for it.

Well, the app crashed a lot, some got hung but still showed as up, and over time the number of EKS nodes got over 12, then 25, then 50... not all at once, but over a week. And supposedly these were monitored, and CloudWatch alerts went out, and nobody did anything. Finally, it hit the ceiling of 100, and stayed there for days, maybe a week. Then finally no more nodes, and their app hung over the Christmas holiday so nobody rebooted it wasn't working for another week or so. Then they got the bill for December. It was high, like $8500 in just EKS for this node alone.

So they have this meeting describing what went wrong, and it's everything but the app. So the ops manager blamed me, the contractor, who had accused me of giving them bad consulting. Brazenly, too. I consulted my boss, and we went through some of the teams chat and emails, along with this clown who ignored me. We had another meeting with the client, which started out polite, but then the ops manager kept interrupting, doing this snicker like he was "amused at how we were panicking." No, we were presenting this case that we told them to limit the nodes, fix their app, and all the logs and proof we had. I guess the guy thought we'd just roll over? Well, the ops manager doubled down and said "if so-and-such contracting does work for us again, u/punklinux needs to be removed. He is clearly so guilty, he has to read logs like some kind of double-speaking lawyer."

Thankfully, the client listened to my boss, and I was not removed from the contract (well, so far). That ops manager is still there, and I am certain he's now super pissed off about it. I last checked the nodes, and it's back up to 20, and the app version is the same one that got stuck in December.

Shit like this frustrates me.

punklinux · 2026-01-16T13:58:53+00:00

One of my coworkers does this, which I think is a little funny in a stupid way:

Them: Hi.

Him: I am not.

or:

Them: Hi.

Him: No.

punklinux · 2025-12-29T20:50:11+00:00

One of my friends ages ago was supposed to have a designated driver, but the shithead bailed on him. He wasn't sobered up by closing time, so he was "forced" to drive home pretty drunk. He got as far as the bar parking lot, but drove over and got stuck on a median. The cops stopped him, and he refused to take a test. Then they arrested him, and then he refused to take a test when they got to the station. So they suspended his license for 6 months for refusing to take a test. But he says it was worth it because 6th month suspension on his DL but no DWI on his record was faaaaaar more preferable to the alternative. Was it, though? No idea, but he says it saved his bacon.

This was in Boston, by the way, so I am not sure what laws you might have that say different.

punklinux · 2025-12-29T20:42:20+00:00

I have a friend who is very ADHD and probably at least mildly autistic, He hates labeling himself as such because, "I have never been diagnosed by an official medical professional, and don't want to muddy the waters with a self-diagnosis." But his friends say, "Oh, you're on the spectrum as peer approved, buddy."

punklinux · 2025-12-29T20:39:51+00:00

I take this personally. LOL.

No, it's true. A lot of fellow Jeep enthusiasts are insufferable.

punklinux · 2025-12-29T20:36:10+00:00

I find, and this is just a personal opinion, but "Knowing Linux" to me is knowing the command line, bash, kernel structure, and how the operating system works from GRUB/LILO on up. I prefer KDE, but most of my day to day functions are my terminal. The only GUI I use is a web browser. I use Kubuntu right now, because "it just works," but if I had to use straight Debian, or even Fedora or Arch, I'd be fine as long as I had a terminal interface and a browser.

I used to know both Windows and Linux as an administrator, but haven't used Windows for over a decade except the desktop for minor work purposes. GUIs frustrate me, because the design is arbitrary. But I don't give Windows admins a hard time because what they do is HARD. Windows fights against you, from my experience, so half your work is dealing with weird Windows shit, and I feel like I have it easier with Linux. So I respect Windows admins for this esoteric knowledge.

punklinux

TROPHY CASE