Scare us to death...

I can only think of scarily stupid shit where I work. Like the fact our SMTP mailserver has certain filetypes banned on it from being sent out - one of which is .zips for reasons unknown.

All well and good, except the internal company intranet's front page has a "tip of the day!" box that suggests people make sure they send emails with docs as small as possible..

... by using WinZip.

"No, I will not fix your computer."

IT for humanities departments is aces. I really enjoyed trying to build a database on FileMaker 4 because the admin person for the department insisted they'd all got licenses for only that version - and didn't want to purchase any upgrades. Even though campus IT didn't support FileMaker 4 any longer. Yet they also wanted to make the db available to all department users - but didn't have an available server - and didn't want it published to the Web without access control - but you can't do that anyway with older FileMaker. After I gave up and produced a database on new FileMaker anyway and handed that off, they finally wondered aloud whether an upgrade might be a good idea, even though they'd just bought a new version! why, only four years ago!

My favourite call from a user was from someone who had been given command line access on the Unix server on which the database and applications resided. She phoned to say that she had accidentally typed 'rm *' when she had been meaning to type 'ls *'. Leaving aside the need for the star in that anyway, this is quite a big error. (For non-techies, ls lists all files in the directory; rm removes named files. The * is a wildcard, so rm * deletes everything in the directory.)

wow, what a chain of idiocy, that last one. right up the line! amazing!