Frustrated Consultant ‘went Full Hulk’ And Started Smashing Hardware

Who, Me? Welcome to Monday morning and another installment of Who, Me? For the uninitiated, it’s The Register’s weekly reader-contributed column that tells tales of your greatest misses, and how you rebuilt a career afterward.

This week, meet a reader we’ll Regomize as “Ted” who joined a nonprofit company that ran a small consultancy team providing its clients with tech services.

Ted later discovered that the company hired him because the previous tech team had all just resigned.

“As I went through the interview process, I learned they were essentially locked out of their servers because the previous team did not leave admin passwords behind,” Ted wrote. “They asked if I could get into the servers, I said yes, and they handed me a huge pile of old notes.”

With that “documentation” to hand, Ted managed to wrest control of the servers, a feat that earned him the job.

“Little did I know that was just the beginning of my woes,” he told Who, Me?

One of the services the nonprofit provided was a certification lab, and Ted’s bosses told him to take over its backup systems. To do so, he logged into the organization’s server virtualization platform, saw a list of VMs not mentioned in the pile of notes, and deleted them.

“Months later, I learned that I essentially destroyed the certification lab,” Ted confessed to Who, Me?

After somehow surviving that incident, Ted found himself the sole remaining consultant delivering managed services for all client sites, reporting to the nonprofit’s IT manager.

“My entire life became non-stop visits to client sites,” he wrote. His employer recognized that Ted was carrying an enormous workload and coaxed one member of the previous team back to help.

“He was one of those types that knows things and understands them, but cannot explain to other people,” Ted lamented. “After spending a couple of hours trying to explain what was going on with a failed server migration project, he essentially told us not to touch anything.”

Ted ended up spending a weekend figuring out and fixing the mess, and the hits kept coming weekend after weekend after weekend.

The incident that broke him started on a Friday, when the IT manager reported a client’s Wi-Fi was down and insisted that Ted must visit on Saturday to fix it.

Ted was already on site at another client, and the prospect of spending another Saturday working was too much.

“I started losing it to the point at which I snapped,” he admitted.

“The client asked if I was alright and as soon as I explained I was being asked to work for the fourth weekend in a row I went full Hulk. I started smashing my stuff (I broke my laptop), stormed out of the building smashing walls, and pretty much ripped most of my clothes off.”

Ted called his boss, and “exploded with language I never knew you could say in a professional environment.”

“The IT manager begged me to stay and I really appreciated him, we had some good times together all things considered, and he told me not to work the weekend and that he would hire more people.”

The client with broken Wi-Fi later dumped the nonprofit company and found another service provider. Ted’s contract expired not long after.

“They fired me and brought in a new team,” he told Who, Me?

“Those were some of the darkest days of my career but as I look back, I am not too sad about them as they helped me get to where I am now and I did survive,” he added. “And I am still amazed that I wasn’t fired earlier, and maybe some might be able to relate to the extreme stresses of IT work.”

Have you exploded in a fit of rage due to the frustrations of work? If so, make a cathartic click here to send your story to Who, Me? We’d love to help you get over the incident by sharing your story on a future Monday. ®

Original Source