Almost messed up
Posted by dannyd_96@reddit | sysadmin | View on Reddit | 50 comments
So I was assisting a user who was looking to obtain a previous version of a file on the server, and unfortunately, the data they needed was not in any of the versions I had pulled up. I proceeded to ask my colleagues, and they 'jokingly' said to tell the client to F OFF. This was while my mind was on putting in my time entry for the ticket, so while entering the time in a also end up typing 'told him to F OFF' and submitted.
Me and my colleagues horse around alot like this in our office and this is the first time where the consequences really could have come down on me. Thankfully, the ticket details in kaseya BMS only get emailed to users if it gets completed, whereas I cancelled it. Before I knew this I was shaking and ready to resign. Actually I still am right now and I may not forgive myself for a long time.
It didn't actually get sent out to anyone but I still can't shake the feeling and what it says about my character, even if it was supposedly unintentional and a joke if you can even call it that. This may say more about my work environment than anything else. Not sure why im even writing this and it may not belong in this sub, but needed to get it off my chest. BOY DO I FEEL LIKE A HORRIBLE PERSON
ENJOY ROASTING ME!!!
Sour_Diesel_Joe@reddit
I think you're fine man, I have joked around and put "that sucks, lemme know what happens" as a joke on tickets and users fuck with me back. Can't be 100% serious all the time. They know I got their back.
icxnamjah@reddit
You fixed it and it didn't go out, so no big deal. You will be way more aware of what you type now. Anyone on this subreddit understands dealing with irate users and the feelings it can create in us. We are all human too.
Terriblyboard@reddit
Almost doesnt count.
JAGForm@reddit
I prefer my father's saying - "Almost only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades"
JohnL101669@reddit
Ever type something in the wrong teams chat? Talk about embarrassing. In the end, what really tells me about your character is how bad you feel.
FantmIT@reddit
Shit happens, learn and move on. You've got this.
Squeaky_Pickles@reddit
Once, I didn't realize what chat I was in and accidentally complained (nicely) about my manager.... To my manager.
Spid3rdad@reddit
Keep being sensitive to doing the right thing. But also cut yourself some slack.
Yes you made a mistake. Yes it could have come back to haunt you (though thankfully it didn't). But you're also human, also we screw up sometimes.
I'm an IT manager and I've been in the business for about 30 years. Learn your lesson, but it could have been a lot worse. I'd scold my guy, and at worst write him up, but not fire him.
1a2b3c4d_1a2b3c4d@reddit
Stop goofing off and get serious about your career.
As a former IT Manager, I can tell you that, yes, you could have been quickly terminated over this act had the client or customer seen it and been offended.
networkn@reddit
Finally, someone talking about the gravity of the situation. Awesome the OP is aware of the error and this will prevent it happening again. Learning a lesson without consequences has iits benefits. I wouldn't have fired him but hed have been given a formal warning for sure. Not the most serious of offenses but certainly not behaviour I'd accept either.
1a2b3c4d_1a2b3c4d@reddit
As a former IT Manager, I would not have fired him either. But if a user saw that reply, got all upset, and ran crying to HR, things might have escalated out of my control.
All bets are off once you cross that boundary and start affecting the business. Other managers or directors not in my chain of command get involved. And sometimes they have an axe to grind, sometimes, they want blood, sometimes, they just want any opportunity to keep another manager down.
Management... can be a cutthroat dog-eat-dog world.
networkn@reddit
Yup exactly this. Good for the op for recognising the gravity of the situation.
amgtech86@reddit
Lol fun police is here
1a2b3c4d_1a2b3c4d@reddit
with the IT market as competitive as it is, you don't want to give a manager a reason to deny you a raise or promotion.
dannyd_96@reddit (OP)
Absolutely agree, it's good to have fun with colleagues at work but there is a limit and things can get out of control quickly. Clearly there are bad influences I need to keep distance from. In the moment I was like, yea let me actually type it in as a joke (stupid and certainly not a joke looking back at it) except I actually submitted it this time. Play stupid games win stupid prizes I guess. Still hating myself.
1a2b3c4d_1a2b3c4d@reddit
You don't need to hate yourself, you only need to learn from your mistakes before they hold you back.
ekushay@reddit
Former IT Manager is laying it out especially harsh. But anyone who's worked long enough in any industry would know that what you did is not that big of a deal in the grand scheme of things.
It's great you're feeling this lesson so deeply though, cuz you won't make this same mistake in the future. We're all just humans.
Th3SillySully@reddit
Having a fun work environment is a good thing, and these things can happen. But don’t resign just because you almost messed up. Take this as a learned lesson and grow from it. I had a co-worker do this, but you were able to catch it. Keep rocking and rolling in the IT world 🤘
HaacheeRS@reddit
What an a-hole
proud_traveler@reddit
Dude you are acting like you murdered a puppy.
Even if the user got the ticket, I doubt you'd have lost your job, maybe just a roasting from your boss.
It doesn't sound like you did anything malicious, and you obviously regret what happened, so just caulk it up to experiance, learn from it, move on and laugh about it at the Christmas party.
bluescreenfog@reddit
** Even if the user got the ticket, I doubt they would have even read the email
IT-broke-no-fix@reddit
"I put in a ticket for [x]"
"I saw, I responded to it :)"
"Oh, yeah I saw that email, I didn't look at it."
:)
uprightanimal@reddit
Customer user A was driving me crazy, so I put them on hold and expressed my frustrations to the room at large. I did NOT know my colleague sitting next to me was on the phone with user B from the same customer, discussing the same outage. My buddy definitely heard my rant, but I was never sure if his user B heard.
Never did that again, no matter how obnoxious the caller.
zaynborkaai@reddit
As the colleague who witnessed this masterpiece live, let me tell you—he didn’t “accidentally” type it. That “told him to F OFF” came from his soul. Fingers possessed. Eyes locked in. He hit Submit like it was a mic drop.
Ok_Following3570@reddit
I am the colleague. Goodjob!
Dependent_Ad5415@reddit
Hey don't be too hard on yourself. I've been in IT for 16 years, last 10 being in progressive leadership positions. I can tell you for a fact I have personally made MUCH bigger mistakes. Own the mistake and do you best to fix it. Its only going to come up if the user sees it and doesn't get the joke and escalates to your boss. I dont know your boss but I can say if this happened on one of my teams it would be a topic of discussion in a 1.1 but it would be a learning experience (the lesson is know your audience or keep it PC if you don't explicitly know your audience). If your boss takes it significantly further than that (especially if this is a first offense issue), I'd probably be looking for work elsewhere anyway because I suspect the environment is pretty toxic.
Select_Tangelo3848@reddit
Learn from your lapse of judgement / mistake and move on.. bigger mistakes can be made.
Had one of my developers once write an extensive try catch block and used the final catch as his test if he handled all possible exceptions... the only line in the final catch was a message box saying "FUCK!". He thought he had all of the exceptions covered but failed to replace that final catch with something friendlier. The only one he did not catch was an EXTREME edge case.. care to guess how long that edge case took to come up once the code rolled to production? As an aside... he was not let go for it and I work for a large conservative dinosaur type insurance company. Bright side was it exposed a hole in our code review process lol
zyeborm@reddit
Wait, are we not meant to tell lusers to fuck off from time to time?
Kooky-Command3536@reddit
How about a lady that was horribly offended when she was having issues with her password reset and I said "You must have fat-fingered it", She was extremely irate that I would call her fingers fat! 🤣
Moist_Feature_46@reddit
A fella in the previous company I worked at sent out a department wide email and instead of gentle reminder he wrote genital remainder.
NextOfHisName@reddit
Oh and the classic self roast
Dear user,
Blah blah blah
Kind retards,
IT department.
RFLC1996@reddit
Once had a user with a first name with 1 letter off "cnt" and opened my first even email to him with "Good Morning Cnt" He laughed it off atleast, i was bright red.
Illustrious-Chair350@reddit
I work in K12 and when I was setting up LAB A I typed labia in the script to name the computers, so it was labia-01 labia-02 etc.
Wouldn't have been a big deal but I had the computer name on a custom background, luckily another tech caught it before the school year started lol.
Grrl_geek@reddit
I work for local government, and there are 2 entries to our building. A few years ago, the chief of staff wrote an email where he meant to write, "general public" but forgot to put in the 2nd "L". Oh yeah, I saved that and (of course) pointed it out to our dept director 🤣🤣 . It's STILL funny!!! This email went out to the entire building and this person is known as being a perfectionist which, naturally, makes the whole thing WAAY more funny than it deserves.
sonom@reddit
I thought my mic was on mute while on a company wide call and everyone got greeted with a monstrous burp.
ohiocodernumerouno@reddit
they are never going to forget that file you lost lmao
RFLC1996@reddit
I once accidentally shut down every computer on site with a misclick, we all make mistakes.
b4k4ni@reddit
Never, ever enter anything like this into any ticket system, mail or whatever. ALWAYS write as if the customer or your boss will see this. Generally.
If you wanna go braindead with your colleagues and have some fun - it's fine. Joke etc. - you need some kind of release too.
But NEVER do this in writing. Even if its funny as fuck.
That was my policy all the time. There are so many possibilities that can happen, so a customer might see/read/hear it or it might be used against you from others ... it's not worth it.
If you have the right set of mind, this wouldn't have happened too.
trev2234@reddit
A friend at a marketing firm told me how the IT guy was sacked.
Someone misused the all users email by saying they had Take That tickets for that weekend. He replied to all with “I’d rather go felching”.
A lot of the senior executives didn’t know what that meant, and had to look it up. Anyway he was let go.
Apparently he was really good at the job, but hated marketing people so was probably glad to leave.
peteybombay@reddit
You are not a horrible person by any means. But, maybe take this as a lesson to keep it professional, especially in tickets that get saved, even if they are not emailed. That is the sort of thing that could land you in trouble if it happens in the wrong situation and there is not really any reason for it, other than goofing around.
It may seem harsh, but some places are harsh...imagine having to tell you significant other that you lost your job because you were "goofing around"?
When i was younger, I got a random email from a sales guy I did not know, so I emailed him a snide remark, somewhat offensive...within minutes he was calling me to tell me that he did not appreciate it and could have just as easily called my manager. My manager just laughed about it, but I was fortunate to have a good boss who told me to learn from it but not everybody is so lucky. It's better to be safe than sorry.
barleykiv@reddit
Come on, move on, nothing happened, that’s the most important, you learned something, great, just continue to improve yourself, show must go on
ManosVanBoom@reddit
Happy cake day!
IMplodeMeGrr@reddit
I once put a customer on mute so I could yell "your Mom!" at a coworker, except they were already on mute, and I basically unmuted and yelled your mom... customer heard it... didn't get fired, I got a scolding finger though from the manager.
DespacitoAU@reddit
Old Autotask PSA user back in my MSP days, you could put whatever your heart desired in the internal section of time entries, clients only saw the summary portion. Happy days
Alderin@reddit
Two simple rules that come from the old adage: "Never say or post anything you wouldn't want to see on the front page of the newspaper."
In general, modernized: "Never post, message, or say anything you wouldn't want going viral."
More specifically for ticket notes: "Assume everything you post will be permanently accessible, searchable, and shareable."
I hope it fades into the digital distance and doesn't bite you later. Good luck!
CowardyLurker@reddit
I would only be interested in roasting someone if they were intentionally being an ass. To me it sounds like you're feeling sorry for pretending to be an ass, for a few seconds that one time.
You're probably right to be worried though. There's no shortage of those miserable office goblins always ready for a chance to wield their imaginary organizational power to smite thee for thine unholy insubordination. Gross.
vogelke@reddit
When I was a Captain in the USAF, I would refer to a certain fellow officer as "beet-sucker" for reasons that escape me.
One day my office gets a call and the guy at the next desk answers. He listens for a second, says "hey beet-sucker", and hands me the phone. I figure it's my buddy so I grab it and say "Karl's massage parlor, we'll never rub you the wrong way."
I hear dead silence for about three full seconds, then muffled laughter. After apologizing to the caller and giving the finger to the guy at the next desk, I shoveled out my shorts and went on with my day.
Tymanthius@reddit
I just knew it was going to be a full bird or higher . . .
urjuhh@reddit
Filling the details about interaction is tedious... But sometimes it's rewarding.. Like when you find a solution to a problem that has occurred before. So keep that in mind, when you submit the info. And always always always be clear about the info: not "told client to f off" but "as per co-worker [name here], told client to f off" , or if you want to be polite: "... relocate to where sun doesn't shine"
TaSMaNiaC@reddit
"Sorry, replied to the wrong user. That was supposed to go to Bob who has some crumbs stuck under his F key"