h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Ack! The perils of being a sysadmin in today's world...

Microsoft Office XP, may it rest in pieces, decides that it's not installed. It decides this on the basis that when you run the copy that is installed by user X, but run it as user Y, that it can't find some registry keys presumably stuck in HKCU and not HKLM. You have to run setup again to 'install' the product for the current user.

So, figuring that it would want the product ID, or would want to re-activate itself, I set off on the lonely trek to find the original CD that machines was installed from. Do you know how many fragging CD's we have? We sent an expedition to find last year's expedition that set off to count them. We think they have been eaten by the tribe of leprechauns that live in the media cupboard and hide the one disk that you are looking for, and randomly re-arrange things while you're not looking...

However, in less than a day, I found the disk, and installed office. Miracles do happen, even on Fridays.

Someone, it seems, has uninstalled the virus killer on that machine. Obviously trusting the users not to uninstall software is a futile maneuvre. I reinstalled that, from my own version of the kit (which has all of the user controllable features turned off, unless you know the password, which they will only get out of me after my corpse has rotted).

This is in the same office where one enterprising individual set a BIOS password, and then immediately forgot it. For some insane reason, there's no CMOS clear jumper on that motherboard, and the pin to which it normally connects on the Dallas clock/NVRAM module isn't even connected, so it took half an hour with a soldering iron to fix that. (There are days when you will just NOT be defeated, regardless of how desperate the situation may appear).

Here are the now revised rules of the office:

I am the sysadmin, you are a user. You have no authority, knowledge, or intelligence that I recognise. You will do as I say. You will do it immediately, and exactly as I say.

Mess with the settings on your machine, and you die. Mess with the servers and you die. Bring down the network and you die.

I am not interested in any opinion you may have as to why your machine is not working. I do not care if you run a cluster of Cray supercomputers at home. This is MY network. You are merely a guest. You may be evicted or murdered at any time.

Thankyou for your co-operation.