I’m a professional. You’re an amateur. You don’t know what you’re doing.

TFTS readers, I come with another hilarious tale of user-generated genius and the justice that follows. Prior to getting a nice developer job at $AWESOME_COMPANY, I busted hump getting through college on a meager job as Helpdesk/Project Manager for $LAME_SOFTWARE and a myriad of side-jobs for small businesses in the coastal metro area where I lived. When I went to work for $AWESOME_COMPANY, I ended up packing up my life and moving out into the relative peace and quiet of a small city in the center of the state about 2 hours away from my old home which enabled me to still support some of the side-job customers on the weekends. This is a tale about one of those customers.

$LITTLE_LAWFIRM was pretty much that, a small collections and estates firm that was started by $OLD_LAWYER. $OLD_LAWYER fancied himself as a bit of a tech guy back in the day, had a few Novell Certifications and such, and his son (whom by now had moved to another state) was a NetSec Manager. They were originally one of my clients at $LAME_SOFTWARE, and $OLD_LAWYER was impressed with my skills when I did an on-site upgrade of his software that he asked if I did any work on the side, which I cheerfully informed him that I did.

Over the next couple of years, I made quite a good chunk of change off of them as $OLD_LAWYER was rather obsessed with overkill on tech when it came to hardware. For their small 7-person office, he had procured 3 rather powerful Dell Poweredge R510 servers – All equipped with 2x Quad-Core Xeon’s, 16GB RAM, and 4x500GB 10K SAS drives - running Server 2003 x86. Beyond overkill hardware that was essentially wasted due to OS limitations. He reasoned the need for all this hardware was ‘redundancy’…he didn’t want to have all his business applications on one server in case that server crapped out. So one server ran the imaging application, one the collections management, one the accounting software. It was ridiculous, but worked well...for a little office, the place ran smooth as silk even if it sounded like they had a GE CF6-series jet engine mounted in the comm closet/server room.

Fast forward to 2014. $OLD_LAWYER retires at the beginning of the year, handing the firm over to $HOT_PARTNER. $HOT_PARTNER was just that…young, gorgeous, somewhat tech-savvy for a user, and did I mention she was Kate Upton kind of hot? A few weeks after $OLD_LAWYER leaves, she has me help them out switching their phones to a VOIP system, and even asks about consolidating the mass of servers in the comm closet. I pretty much lay it out that you could put everything on one box with a new OS and have no issues whatsoever. She seems rather relieved and tells me that she wants to make that happen this summer sometime once things have settled. Cool…a nice weekend job locked in down the road.

Now, fast forward to last Monday. $HOT_PARTNER sends me an e-mail one morning while I’m debugging a web application project that’s been giving me nothing but grief for the past 2 weeks:

Hey, how do I Remote Desktop into ServerAlpha?

This was something she never needed before, anytime they had a pressing support issue I would deal with the tech support for their application directly. But, $OLD_LAWYER had the admin pass so it makes sense she should have it now that she’s the head honcho. So I reply:

Hey…the user is $admin_user and the pass is $admin_pass – what’s going on…is something up with $collection_software or something?

Five minutes later, I get a reply:

Oh no, I just wanted to check on the backups.

This sets off alarm bells everywhere. She gets a notification daily in her email from the backup software, and I get an email if there’s ever an error…which there hasn’t been in years.

On a hunch, I check out my LogMeIn Central app and notice…ServerAlpha, ServerBravo, and ServerCharlie are gone. The only way that happens is if someone at the console points them somewhere else. I try to VNC in…connection refused. I try to RDP in, authentication rejected. WTF. I email her back:

What’s going on? I just noticed all the servers aren’t showing up or responding any more. Reply:

Yeah, my new husband, $SMARTGUY just joined the firm as a partner. He knows about IT stuff so he wanted to check out the servers and tune up our security.

I sighed and did a facepalm. I don’t really need this account, but hey I like the money so best to be cordial.

OK, that’s fine. But I’d suggest he hold on for a little bit. There’s definitely room for improvement, so why don’t we get a call together this afternoon at 4:30 when I get back to the house?

Reply:

Sounds great! Talk to you then.

OK…so while $SMARTGUY has made a bit of a mess, it’s nothing that can’t be salvaged is my thought process. Hopefully this guy will come to the realization that he’s in over his head.

4:30 comes around, I call them up, and it goes like this:

$HOT_PARTNER: Hey, I’ve got $SMARTGUY here…he’s my new hubby (giggles) and he’s coming on to try and expand our business. He’s a $BIG_LAW_SCHOOL graduate just like me and has some great plans for our future.

Me: That sounds lovely, I understand that you’ve got some concerns about security and the overall infrastructure that $OLD_LAWYER put in place.

$SMARTGUY: Ehhh…not really, I took a few technology courses in college and it’s pretty obvious you don’t know what you’re doing. You’ve got a giant mess here and it’s nowhere near secure. I’ve never even heard of this AVG security stuff you’re running…it’s not Norton and Norton is the best. Plus you’re not running PGP encryption on all your servers. I think you’re just an amateur that has no real training and I’m going to have to get things cleaned up and consolidated here as I’m a professional at everything I do.

Somewhere in there, my jaw dropped. Is this guy insane?

Me: OK…I’m not sure what you’re trying to get at but I’ve been doing this quite a while…20 years to be precise. I have a degree in technology management, along with Cisco, Microsoft and ISC certifications. What you guys have there…

$SMARTGUY: Cut the BS, kid. You’re no professional, you’re just some wannabe hacker that watched too many movies. You had these servers loaded with services used by hackers like UltraVNC and FileZilla FTP. And tons of ports forwarded in the firewall. Any network guy knows you should NEVER have ports open in your firewall. That’s how hackers and Trojans get into computers and steal information.

OK…I’ve had it, I’ve never run into such gross incompetence combined with extreme self-importance/conceitedness. I’m not dealing with this bastard. Time to pull the plug on the account.

Me: Alrighty then, I’ll go ahead and e-mail your wife my excel spreadsheet which has all the network addressing info and whatnot in it. You should be able to take it from there. Have a good one. <Click>

I heard nothing from them again. Fast forward to this morning.

My cell phone rings. It’s $HOT_PARTNER. I let it go to Voicemail, she leaves a message. It goes like this:

Ummmm…hey there. It’s $HOT_PARTNER here at $LITTLE_LAWFIRM. We’ve got some problems here. $SMARTGUY was doing something on one of the servers and the collections software stopped working. So he, like, swapped around the drives or did something with some RAID thing and now nothing works! We can’t even get logged into our computers. He also couldn’t read the backup drives so he tried formatting them and we don’t know what to do. Can you please please please call me when you get a chance? Thank you!

She also sent me an email asking me to call her, not detailing the issues like she had in the VM. I did reply to that:

Hey…well, $SMARTGUY should be able to figure it out. After all, he’s a professional. Good luck!

I reached into my desk and took a swig of the Johnnie Walker Blue Label my boss got me a few months ago as a reward for throwing together an application that ended up saving the company a boatload of cash. Normally it tasted good…today it tasted even better. It tasted like justice.