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10.30.07
Halloween IT Horror Stories - Managers
 By
Steve Duplessie
This Halloween horror story is all about the IT manager who has never been in IT or the IT manager that was the best developer ever.
The IT Manager who has to have a "relationship" or "friendship" with all their employees, micromanagers, absentee management, and all sorts of managers in between, screaming manages, silent managers, scheming managers, and servant managers, we have seen them all, and all leave their own kind of horror stories behind them.
CIO Magazine has many stories about evil managers trying to do things to get into the technical groove.
Not realizing that the current Exchange team routinely allows the message store to run as high as 70 percent (whereupon they receive an auto-warning and begin to prune files), Mr. VP decides he's going to solve this problem all by himself and stick it to them at the next staff meeting. First, he prunes by date and nothing else, thus deleting a couple gigs' worth of e-mails folks still needed. Then he gains access to some senior executive e-mail stores and can't resist spending some time poking around where he shouldn't because they apparently didn't get into audit trails at this point in his Exchange curriculum. Naturally, this is a big red flag on the audit logs, which the real Exchange team peruses while trying to figure out what happened to those 2GB of missing e-mail. They were stumped for a bit because he was using someone else's credentials, but some social engineering caught him later that day. Source: CIO Magazine
While not too bad, the loss of e-mail is just one example of the non-technical manager who decides that they want to get their hands deep in the technical field.
The screaming boss is the most fun, because they are so easy to spin up and send off on a course of ripping down the hallway to the VP's office. Screamers do not last long, because they are so out of control of themselves, that they burn out, burn too many bridges, and generally make life miserable for everyone.
Scheming bosses can be fun too, the Machiavellian style of leadership never goes out of style with this kind of manager, thought you had perks like a lunch break and weekends? Well think again. While not strictly out of the movie "Office Space" new managers or old tech folks that have been promoted to managers have been known to do away with 4 10's, and other fun alternative schedules. The whole idea was to clean out folks who didn't want to work the regular hours or shifts.
Managers can be fun, from those that are technical wannabe's to all sorts of fun in between, manager horror stories will never go out of style. And just to leave off this Halloween Horror story on the right note:
New call center gets some large plasma screens to display statistics -- but the facilities department installs them on one side of a wall and the PC that controls them on the other. "I just spent 10 minutes on the phone with our facilities manager trying to change the IP address of the machine," grumbles a pilot fish there. "An IT manager was working the keyboard and mouse and the facilities manager was yelling 'left, left, left, down, down, down, more, more, more, OK, too far!' I had them on mute most of the time so I could bring in other people to have a laugh at the insanity. Eventually, I just suggested he grab a flat panel off one of the call center PCs and plug it into the PC to see what he was doing. His response: 'Oooooohhhhh, good idea...'" Source: Shark Tank
Comments
About
the Author:
Dan Morrill has been in the information security field for 18 years, both
civilian and military, and is currently working on his Doctor of Management.
Dan shares his insights on the important security issues of today through
his blog, Managing
Intellectual Property & IT Security, and is an active participant in the
ITtoolbox blogging community.
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