Most horror stories I can think of, have to do with payment.

A recent customer of mine was one of these stories.

I went in on a 3-month contract, which was a nightmare from the start. I'll never work for texans again. If a manager ever tells you "I'm looking for somebody who's not going to call me an asshole when i'm wrong, I need someone to do what I say" .. then bail.. That means they're going to make bad decisions based upon emotion, and you will suffer the consequences.

So this 3-month project was at a nightmare pace. 80 hours a week for 3 months, and halfway through they pushed my deadline up a month due to their unfounded sense of dot-com like urgency. To achieve tihs goal, I brought in 3 close associates for 3 weeks at 50 hours a week, $50 per hour on the customer's dime.. At the end of the 3 weeks, I paid them what I was owed, pretty much emptying out my reserves, trusting the customer would pay me immediately.

They did not.

$750 worth of legal fees and 3 weeks later, I got paid with a signed letter from them stating they owed this money to me. Then the check bounced. Luckily the mere mention of my lawyer got them to do a wire transfer to me within 1/2 hour of me letting them know what lowlife scumbags they were, and how the letter they had signed said if they failed to pay they were responsible for 300% damages plus legal fees.

Oh well, at least my implementation was rock-solid and will scale.. On the other hand, they'll be out of business in a month. i had setup EVERYTHING from office network connectivty, colo'd datacenter, voice & data t1, pbx, hardware procurement & installation. Once a week each vendor calls me up asking me to pay, and I tell them over and over again I'm no longer working for this customer, then I call up the customer and tell them to tell their vendors to stop telling me what lowlifes they are.

Oh GOD... I got plenty. One that sticks to mind is when I was coming into the IT world LEGALLY.

My first business position was extremely interesting. I came in as a contractor (just turned 18) as a 'Desktop Engineer.' It was more like 'Desktop Whipping Slave Girl." Hehehehe... umn... hopefully I don't get in trouble...

Anyway, I was three days into the job when I came over a user. This user had corrupted his system files. His laptop wouldn't boot... so I restored the system files (under pressure by him... I didn't even bother to check to see if the system was the standard laptop image). I didn't realize that the company owned laptop had his own Windows operating system which was an old version that was undetected by our IT department. SO... to make a long story short... the wrong system files (he had a DOS 3x instead of the company standard 6.0)... the system wouldn't boot and he went crazy on me. He grabbed me and shook me stating I broke his laptop. He practically shook me and yelled at me to the point that other individuals on the floor had to stop him. I couldn't believe that this guy was talking the way he was to me... I was in shock and took his hands off me and told him if he touched me again, I was going to protect myself. My manager was called and he stated that I had to be fired.

All in all... I didn't get fired... this guy got reprimanded (go figure... but later on he got let go).

Anyway... moral of this story, next time someone touches you in anyway for computer problems they started.... don't whip on them yet... let either legal matters take it's course... OR... if they really hurt you... protect yourself (kick butt).

My worst story comes from working in public sector IT before going private. I had just gotten back in town after four weeks when I found out earlier that Friday evening, a 150Gb DAS volume went down. Of course their obvious solution was to immediate rebuild the volume. Which the backup server immediately overwrote the next tape with the empty volume. Come to find out, since the governing body had a maximum 30 day backup retention policy and the tapes hadn't been getting checked while I was gone, they were sunk. We also found out that it was all power related since the wouldn't order a second UPS. We had a DELL 221S, (2) Exabyte 215M's, and an APC 3000RM wiped out from power (All plugged into the same UPS). Needless to say, the only saving grace was a "contraband" backup from 3 months prior sitting in my desk drawer. Their disaster recovery plan was quickly reevaluated.

I'd have to say the worst one for me had to do with not getting paid. I had a client who is a lawyer for about 3 months... 3 months of constant headaches! The last time I dealt with him I was called in at 11PM on a sunday night due to a couple machines randomly shutting down. "sasser" I was told that everything needed to be fixed by 6AM monday morning due to a big case of his going to court that morning, so I brought in an associate of mine and we got to work.

Turned out that the person who configured his router had never set up any kind of firewall or security and it had been compromised. This guy was getting hit with all kinds of viruses and malicious code. Also turned out that someone had been in his client files. We re-configured the router and started killing viruses, which took till almost 4AM. At about 4:15, in walks mister client screaming obscenities and ranting about how it's our fault his network was hacked. Now mind you, 3 weeks earlier I proposed to do a network security analysis and he rufused to pay for it! 3 hours later we had finished and I left an invoice on his desk for 7 hours at $125/Hr. He called Monday afternoon saying he refused to pay for more than 2 hours! After 45 minutes of explaining to him why he had to pay so much, he hung up on me! I've had my attorney contact him several times and still have not recieved payment! I still think about what might have happend had I just told him to get someone else to fix his damn printer the first day he called me.

If I can offer any of my fellow consultants some advice, it would be this: If you know something needs to be done such as a network security analysis and the client refuses to pay for it.. drop em like a bad habit!

The company I worked for on my last ahem....permanent job.....(like there is such a thing) was screwed up from the start and I knew that going in, I just didn't realize how bad it was. But hey, business was slow and I had to feed my family.

Anyway, about three weeks after we moved the office from one building to another (which included resubnetting the whole thing because the original genius who set up gave us a 192.170.1.0/24 which of course is a public class C. Because we changed network addresses, the management card for the UPS system needed a new IP address. I was given the task of doing this. Should be pretty simple right? Plug a serial cable in to the back and fire up hyper-terminal. Guess what? As soon as the serial cable made contact with the management card, the entire UPS system went down hard! You can imagine the wave of horror that coursed through my entire body. Of course it wasn't my fault that the UPS system was defective and I would surely be exonerated of any fault whatsoever. Nope. I got fired. The amazing thing is, when we were setting up the UPS in the new building the UPS went down once (before anything was plugged in to it) when I lightly bumped in to it and I told the VP if IT (who was only 22) about it and he shrugged it off. They sucked. I hated being there from day one. I had been there almost exactly 4 months when that happened.

They were real winners I tell you. They had no concept of internal security. One day I got reprimanded for using nmap. WHAT? WHAT? It's just a port scanning tool! Also, all of the desktops had VNC and the password was PASSWORD. Oh, do keep in mind this is a national mortgage company with about 2000 employees nation wide.

It gets better. We moved another branch office in to our new office about a week after we moved in and we had to join them all to our domain (Still on NT 4 and this was early 2003), remap their printers etc. Well, a bunch of these computers were completely locking up as soon a they tried to print. After some trouble shooting I naturally assumed it was a network related problem. Well, guess what, when I initially proposed putting that machine on a hub along with my laptop to use sniffer I was D E N I E D! What kind of idiots am I dealing with? How can I diagnose a network problem like this if I can't look at the traffic? Keep in mind, none of the rest of the bozo, including the 22 year old VP of IT had ever touched Sniffer or any other protocol analyzer, but I wasn't allowed to do it even though I had extensive Sniffer experience. Finally they relented and let me do it. They eventually relented and let me do it under close supervision (as if they even knew what I was doing). It turned out it was a problem with the PCL6 drivers and they were holding on to IP information for the previous printers and so the computer would get cut off from the network as soon as a print job was submitted. Very weird problem.