A coworker filmed me ensuring a drive with sensitive data was fully out of commission over a year ago, and recently turned it into an animated gif. So here we are:

I’ve had to clean up pretty significant messes left by previous sysadmins several times over the years. It’s always really frustrating because you wonder how someone who has any respect for their job could leave something like that in place.

It’s not just the IT world though.

Since buying our condo about a year ago, we’ve never been able to get the air conditioning cold enough. After being told by one HVAC tech that “this is just how it is” and I decided to get another company out.

This guy took a lot more pride in his work and did far more extensive troubleshooting, and decided he had to cut into the sheet metal over the evaporator coils.

When he had it opened up, he was immediately pissed off at whoever had installed this HVAC setup back in 2003. He was clearly annoyed that someone who had the same job as him would do something this stupid. It showed total disrespect for the profession. Whoever had installed it managed to build the ductwork so that about half of the air flowing through it never even passed over the coils.

The HVAC tech managed to fabricate some pieces of sheet metal to force the air to flow through the coils, and it made a huge difference now that all of the air gets properly chilled.

I immediately had sympathy for the HVAC tech’s feelings. Not only do I wonder about the person who originally built this, but wonder how the previous owners could have put up with this.

My goal is to avoid leaving nasty surprises for future IT pros.