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How is it already mid-October? Well, we’re glad it’s the season of boo and eek! That means it’s time to talk about the scariest, most horrific thing that can happen at work – a MISTAKE (otherwise known as an ITOops). See what we did there?   

The thing is, ITOopses don’t have to be that scary. To take the fear out of making mistakes, it’s time to shine our flashlights on them. We don’t want you to feel like a monster when you make a mistake (or an ITOops) – especially because you’re not alone. Everyone makes an oops from time to time. 

         ITOops

         /aɪ ti ʊps/

         noun, informal

                1. used to represent a mistake or minor accident made by someone working in IT Operations

         Examples of ITOops in a Sentence: “Oh shucks! I just made an ITOops!”

We’ve all made an ITOops or two… or more. While they can suck, there’s always a lesson you can learn from a mistake. 

Let’s destigmatize (or demonster) our ITOopses. Share your ITOops stories with the Community so we can all learn from each other’s mistakes. The more we can talk about or laugh at our oopses together, the easier it will be to crush the crippling fear that comes with making a mistake. 

ITOopses won’t freak us out anymore! Between Friday, October 13th and Halloween, you can share your ITOops with the community. Here’s how: 

  1. Reply to this post with your ITOops story (Get loud, be proud!) OR 
  2. Anonymously submit your ITOops story by filling out this form (Doxxing fears be gone!)
  3. Read and react to other ITOops stories 

And don’t forget to follow us on LinkedIn where we’ll read some of our favorite ITOops stories! Just before Halloween, Automox employees will read their favorite ITOops stories by the eeky-ooky campfire! But don’t be scared, just tune in and see if we share yours! 

Invite your colleagues to share their ITOops stories, too! We can’t wait to read them all. 

At the time I'm a systems administrator for a large network with a very important mission. I've been tasked to remove the startup script from every user account in Active Directory. I've managed to figure out how to do this with PowerShell. It is around 2008 so the language is not all that old and Windows XP is all the rage. Wanting to show off my newly found scripting skills I executed what I thought was a flawless script in front of my peers. The thing about Active Directory and startup scripts is how an issue there will slowly creep into the helpdesk until eventually a peak hour hits and the tickets start flooding in. After quite a bit of troubleshooting we eventually pieced together that every user now had the " " character as the startup script. As end users would log in, the interpreter would try to launch that single invisible character with no luck at all. Eventually, despite being invisible, the issue was discovered and just as fast as it was implemented it was fixed. This is why we don't test new skills on production and actually make a plan on how to test.

@jack.smith That is a great lesson learned! Thanks for sharing!!

 

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