Sinking Projects

Ah, the mysteries of IT! I just love it (kind of) when attending IT project meetings that include REALLY non-technical folks.

It's hard to believe, but we're coming up on Y2k's tenth anniversary. For a feature article commemorating that nutty time, Computerworld is asking pilot fish to share their stories of crazy user (or boss!) behavior. So tell us: in the weeks and months leading up to Jan. 1, 2000, what were the wackiest, least well-informed questions you fielded from the public at large?

I work for a State Agency and the State has just privatized the whole of I.T. - they gave it all to IBM, who then subcontracted several other large companies to help.

Back at the office, what some may call a... technical epidemic. Everyone seems to be having a problem with their emails and so they're not getting their mail from coworkers and the boss. We've been doing a lot of tests and even somethings we knew didn't have anything to do with it. Could you help out?

Lame excuses no to pay: this is one of the reasons so many of us who freelance try to avoid home users in particular, and small businesses of whom we have no knowledge.

I wasn't sure how to categorize this one.

Working at a SMALL private college, a couple years ago I get "invited" to be on a Business Continuance committee with a monthly meeting schedule (what to do in case of disasters and how to mitigate damage and respond). The meeting was boring as expected until one of the people at the meeting (who has been getting more and more concerned about every possible thing that could happen to us as the meeting progressed) asks ...

This happened to me just a few days ago. Our company deploys hardware from one particular hardware vendor, and we use scripts to do automated configuration of the hardware. There is a new hardware version that is going into place and I was experiencing some issues with a removable hard drive device. So I decided to use our company's "Premier" support contract, and contact the OS Vendor.

A number of years ago I was working for an ERP company in charge of all technical services; training, installation, implementations, etc. With the sale and pre-implementaion meetings complete, I drove from Chicago to Milwaukee with the assigned consultant to load the software and begin the training.

One of our programmers became pregant. With many months before she was due to go out on maternity leave, a message was sent to India: Send us a programmer!
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Said programmer arrives and she gets to work, talking with the current programmer, getting up to speed so she can take over the project.
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During one lull while waiting for a compile to complete, the two women started chatting:
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A project I was co-leader on was nominated for a prestigious award within the company, and won while still considered to be in the acceptance phase. Shortly thereafter, the sponsors were lost during a managerial shakeup, and my co-workers on the project jumped ship.