Post #3945074

2026-07-20 00:30 UTC

Hey #IT friends! I want to hear the dumbest things you have ever heard said in a professional setting! I've got two to get this party started. The first was at my first MSP job (A job I will never do again), I was trying to create a more streamlined deployment for Fortigate firewalls (yes, eww). When I explained the idea to my boss Casey, he responded with, "Well, that sounds nice, but we have a healthy mistrust of automation here." WTF? You work in IT and don't trust automation?! You should consider a new line of work. The second was when I met the imfamous Chris at $weCantSellFiber, literally my first day on the job. Those who have followed me for some time know much about Chris. While discussing VLANs and Q-in-Q, he uttered something so incredibly stupid, that it set my impression of him from that day forward. He said, "Well, Q-in-Q doesn't always need an S-tag and a C-tag. It can use two C-tags or two S-tags." My impression of Chris deteriorated over the next year or so. Then he got fired. So, who has some true dumbassery to add?

Replies (2)

@litchralee_v6@ipv6.social 2026-07-20 00:42

@nuintari@mastodon.bsd.cafe Does it count if it was in writing rather than said aloud? I once came across a document where someone ruled out using SSH as a secure transport from a guest VM to the host. But rather than citing a colorable rationale, they blamed the VM vendor for "undocumented behavior" that prevents routing packets in the 127.0.0.0/8 subnet... Nevermind whether other address ranges were available, I'm stunned that someone: 1) thought to try this, 2) didn't try anything else, 3) blamed the vendor.

Open ##3961135
@paul@notnull.space 2026-07-20 07:33

@nuintari@mastodon.bsd.cafe my one comes via a friend, who had a manager with the knowledge of a peanut but the need to show off their supreme powers all the time. Short story really. My friend was pinging a host, the manager saw this, leaned over their shoulder, pointed at the TTL column and said "see that? That means it's encrypted"

Open ##3961261