rSlash - r/Talesfromtechsupport Can You Fix It?

Episode Date: June 15, 2021

r/Talesfromtechsupport Are you ready for stupid end users and moronic bosses? In today's episode, a company thinks they can trick their team of IT workers into working free overtime in a state where free overtime is strictly illegal. The IT workers happily put in the hours, log how much time they work, and then wait for the perfect moment to file a group lawsuit against their employers and sue them for hundreds of thousands of dollars. Don't mess with the IT people! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to R-Slash, a podcast where I read the best posts from across Reddit. Today's subreddit is R-Slash Tales from Tech Support, where a group of IT workers sue their thieving bosses for probably millions of dollars. Our next Reddit post is from an appropriate jerk. I used to work for a particularly large internet service provider doing tech support. One day, the guy working next to me was dealing with a particularly rude business customer. Usually, we treated business customers like kings, but my co-worker was having a hard time even getting a word in. Eventually, my co-worker put up his hand to motion the supervisor come to the customer.

Right then, the owner of the company happened to be walking by with another one of the executives. I've met the owner a couple of times at company social events, and he's a really down to earth boss who actually cares about his employees. The owner asked my coworker what the issue was with his customer, and after my coworker explained, the boss took the headset and picked up the line. After listening for about four to five minutes,

the owner said very flatly, that is never gonna happen, especially not when you have an attitude of a 13 year old girl. The owner listened for a few minutes before he said, I don't have a manager, I own this company, and I don't have to listen to garbage like this from a butthole like you, and neither do my employees. I'm terminating your account with us. The owner hung up, and I watched him disable this guy's account and add a note to the file. Customers of Butthole do not reinstate this account.

Signed the owner. Then, he just handed back the headset and carried on about his day. Well, in all fairness, the guy did ask to see a supervisor. He just wasn't expecting to get the supervisor's supervisor's supervisor. Our next reddit post is from deleted. Background. The clients for our company tend to be a bit older. So a client calls up and I answer.

I can't get into my account. My login isn't working. This is ridiculous. I've been trying for hours and now I'm locked out. My apologies for the inconvenience. I've just reset your password. You should receive an email with a link to set and save a new password in a moment. I don't want to set a new password. I liked my old password. It's the same password

I used for everything else, and it's easy to remember. My sincere apologies, but you'll need to set a new password to gain access to your account. Can't I just use my old password? No, our data security standards don't allow that. However, if for any reason you aren't able to follow the password reset link, I would be happy to generate a random password for you and share it with you over the phone. Just do that then and email the password to me. Again, my apologies, but part of our security policy states that we cannot email passwords in plain text.

I would be happy to give you a call and share your passwords with you over the phone. Why are you being so difficult? I just want my old password to work again. Sir, I'm so sorry this process has been frustrating for you. I want you to have access to your account. Have you followed the link in the password reset email? No, it looks like a virus and I don't want to click on it. I can assure you that it's not a virus, it's a hyperlink.

You can just click on it and it'll open a page in your browser where you can reset your password. That's ridiculous, that's so much work. Why do you make it so hard? This should be simple. I want to speak to your manager. At this point, I am eager to pass off this customer to someone else, so I say no problem. I've CCed your manager and he would be happy to assist you. My manager

says, how can I help? Your employee is rude, stupid, and not helpful. I just want to log in. I don't want to reset my password. I don't want to click on this virus she sent me and this is taken forever and it's ridiculous. Sir, respectfully, we're going to need you to meet us halfway and change your password. The client responds and all caps via email. This is BS! I don't want to change my password. You're all idiots! Again, we're sorry this is frustrating for you. Please let us know what we can do to help. So my manager sees the client's boss, the director of their organization,

and the one whose signature is on the contract. My manager does not take garbage from clients. Then that client's boss replies to their employee in email and sees sees us. The client's boss wrote, are you serious? These nice people are doing everything they can to help you and you're abusing and belittling them.

This is an embarrassment to our organization. You owe them both an apology and you need to reset your password, stop complaining and log ins you can get me that report that was supposed to be in my desk yesterday. The fact that you've wasted your entire day on this is ridiculous and this will definitely be included in your performance review. My manager and I were in tears. The client's boss was Savage AF

and did not pull a single punch. The client didn't know for setting his password, but he didn't apologize. The last time I sent out an email to this client, the email bounced back because he got fired. Whoops! Down in the comments, I'm going to read this reply from accidentally the cable. Forget the password reset, we've now reset your job title. Our next read it posted from Jbane Law. Sometimes, as a consultant, you get to see how an office

functions from an outsider's perspective. Since you're an independent contractor, the company treats you differently from an employee. Also, just through the nature of contract work, your engagement is usually short term. This makes you a temporary fixture, and sometimes you're just treated as a fly on the wall, like you don't exist. And this can lead to some interesting observations, including seeing train wrecks in progress. This is one of those situations. Not so much about the nuts and bolts of tech support, but more about people getting good old-fashioned just desserts. So as a consultant, you're always going to be the IT guy, whether you like it or not.

No matter how you market your services, every single company is going to assume that you can do anything with a computer. And when business is slow, that's not necessarily a bad thing if you just need work to do. About 10 years ago, I found myself in a situation. I got an inquiry through my website asking about assistance to pulling some workstations and other mundane tasks. Usually I would pass on that kind of work, but it was winter and other client work was dry that month. I've still got to pay the bill, so I followed up, and within a day that kind of work, but it was winter and other client work was dry that month.

I've still got to pay the bill, so I followed up, and within a day the scope of work was signed. It was easy stuff. The company had its own IT department, but they just needed some extra hands. I was going to be one of three outside contractors that would deploy some workstations, do some server admin work, and set up other equipment for a new department. The money wasn't the best, but I had the time and it was all swing shift work, meaning I had no traffic and I got to sleep in. Not too bad.

The first day. I reported as requested about 3PM and talked to our contact. He was a senior engineer and charge of part of the IT department there. He said that he really doesn't have time to do anything more than a quick introduction because they're slammed with work. So he shows us the ropes and just leaves us to it. Between the three of us, we break down our specialties and parse out the work. Everyone knows this is a cakewalk of a job and wants to just get it done as quickly as

possible because the pay was a flat rate. So he did all our work and I left thinking, man that place is busy. Those guys must really be pulling down the overtime. I wonder what's going on that they have so much work. Soon enough, I would find out the truth. I head to the worksite a little early on Friday, figuring that if we all pull a long night, we should be able to wrap it up and get our weekend back. Things were going great, and we were ahead of schedule, so the senior engineer offered

to take us to a local diner while we wait for the office to close so we can work without tripping over people. Later at the diner, the senior engineer offered to take us to a local diner while we wait for the office to close We can work without tripping over people later at the diner the senior engineer said I want to thank you guys for all your hard work We're all overworked and when we got approval to contract out this job everyone was excited I said hey glad to be of service looks like you guys are crazy busy is everyone pulling doubles and doing weekends to handle your ticket load Oh, we're understaffed so we all have to pull in extra hours. That sucks, but it must be some great overtime. Over time, not really. We're all salaried.

Some loophole or something. We just put in the time because we all need the job right now. The conversation trailed off from there, but it left me thinking. In this state, most IT workers are eligible for overtime as a matter of law. There is no loophole like that. Something isn't right. Back at the work side, I'm in the network closet with the system administrator hooking up some ports and finishing the server work.

He's a friendly guy so we start chatting. So I was talking to your buddy and it seems like you guys work in the same hours here. The guy says, oh yeah, it's been like this for a year. These days 60 hours is a light work week, it's BS. Yeah and the other guy said that you don't get overtime. He laughed. That's what the boss tells us, let me show you something. He pulls up an email exchange that he had with his manager.

It was dated about 10 months ago and it made the very point that I thought that the entire department should be getting overtime and the law requires it. His boss's response in bold caps was, it is company policy to not pay overtime, working more than 40 hours as part of the job, deal with it, or find another place to work. Then the system administrator smirked and showed me his response to the boss. Sure, okay, whatever. And that was the end of the exchange. Look, I'm not a lawyer, but you might want to call up the Labor Department. I'm pretty sure it's illegal for you to not be getting overtime.

Then, to my surprise, the system admin pulls up another email from his personal account. Oh, it's blatantly illegal. I asked a lawyer and this was his response. He showed me a memo explaining the law and that most likely a lawsuit would be successful. This email was dated about 9 months ago. So you guys know that you should be getting over time, but you're still not getting paid and everyone's okay with that? We make sure to log all of our hours and document the time.

Uhhh, but you still aren't actually getting paid over time? No, but we will. Here's the kicker. According to my lawyer, the Labor Department will look back at the hours that we put in for the last 12 months and award us retroactive over time. So we all just log our time and keep records. Then, in about a month, we're all going to file a claim together. The company is going to be on the hook for all that

over time. And they won't be allowed to fire any of us for reporting them either. We all figured when this whole thing started that if we pressed the point back, then they would just figure out a way to screw us. So we all decided to stay quiet, put in the time they tell us to work, and we'll get our bonus when this is all said and done. Wow, that is some cold, stone strategizing. I asked how many hours do you guys have piled up? Hard to tell. Everyone keeps their own paper logs to keep it quiet. We also don't talk about it too much so nothing gets out, but last time we met outside of work it was a boatload of time. I figure that, for myself, they'll owe me about 13 to 14 months of salary and over time when this is all set and done. I add up the damages, penalties, interests, it'll

probably total almost two years of pay. Holy! So if the guys won't talk about it and see me get to work all these long hours, now you know why. We finished up the job that night. I exchanged contact information with a few guys and said that if they had any other contract work to not hesitate to give me a call. And that was it until three months later. I met another job and I see an email coming from the system administrator guy with the subject line Over Time Plane. He wrote, Hey IT guy, hope you're doing well. We all ended up filing a big overtime plane with the state, and the company fired us for supposedly falsifying our time sheets. The lawyer was sorting it all out, but anyway, I wanted to know if I could give your name to

an investigator who is looking for witnesses to verify some of the extra hours we worked. I agreed to talk to their investigator and got a call about a week later. He asked me some routine questions about times and dates and wanted me to email him over the proof of the job I did. Then he started going into the details of the case. The investigator said, We got this company for probably a million and overtime a day and we did it between all the guys in the department plus the firing is probably illegal.

So that's going to be another few hundred thousand on top of that. The insurance company wants to settle and once we wrap up the due diligence work, I think these guys are gonna make out rather nicely. I didn't hear anything for a while until another email came in from the system administrator. I just wanted to let you know that we settled this whole thing. The company caved pretty quickly once it was clear that we kept on as logs of our time, and the local management violated parent company regulations for the sake of making their site budget look better. I can't go into details, but we've all got sizeable checks.

Enough to pay off some loans and go back to school. I'll have to find a new job, but after I get my graduate degree, that shouldn't be an issue. Appreciate you talking to the investigators. Thanks IT guy. Man, I don't know why I have to keep saying this. Don't mess with the IT Guy. They're probably smarter than you and they know how everything works.

Our next Reddit post is from Meltdown. So this just happened like a minute ago. One of the team leads in my department was having trouble getting something to work and excel and ping me for help. I asked if she could email me the spreadsheet so I could take a look at it myself and she sent me the local link to the spreadsheet on her desktop. As in, she just sent me the link, C, slash user, slash user name, slash desktop. I began rubbing my temples, because I knew this particular person well enough to know that a simple explanation wouldn't be heard, processed, and acted on.

But I had to try anyway. I responded explaining that I can't access file stored on her hard drive, and that she needs to send me the files in attachment. She responds by saying, it's on the desktop, if the link won't work, just open it. I again explain that her desktop and my desktop are not the same thing, and that I'm no more able to open items on her desktop than she is of opening things on mine. She responds by saying, I have a recycle bin. You have a recycle bin. Therefore, since we both have recycled bins, you should be able to open things on my desktop. This is the point where I dial back my professionalism and let my 10-year absorb the hit if she pitches a fit. I say excuse me, get up, then turn on the kitchen faucet.

I work from home, and I know from prior experience that my kitchen faucet is audible from my home office. I sit back down on my desk and say, I've just turned my kitchen faucet on. Do you have any water in your sink? The silence lasted a good 10 seconds. And I swear I could almost hear the hamster wheel in our head spinning. And finally she says, quietly and clearly trying to sound as neutral and unflustered as possible. Okay, that makes sense. I'll send it over as an attachment. OP, this woman is so simple that I have to wonder.

When you said the silence lasted a good 10 seconds, do you think that was because she was trying to figure out what she said or because she actually went to her kitchen to check her sink? That was our Slash Tales from TechSupport, and if you liked this podcast, you can support my podcast by subscribing for $4.99 a month. In addition to supporting me and my podcast, you'll unlock extra episodes that I publish about once or twice a month. twice a month.