I went out onto a client site yesterday. This sort of work isn't what I normally do, as a developer, however they had some small amount of work that needed to be done to a database server, so off I went.
It turned out to be quite scary. After getting onsite and being introduced to the lady who "managed" the computer infrastructure, I was informed that the source server was "stand alone", so the only way I could get to it was by putting the machines physically next to each other. This was interesting, seeing as it was only the previous day that I had seen someone connecting to the server from their laptop, and unless my concept of physical space was somewhat wrong, I was pretty sure that the machines weren't next to each other.
What do you say in a situation like that? It's hard to fight the urge to say "Lady, you're wrong. There's utterly no way you could ever be right", because you know they're too stupid to be able to understand any logical reason you could provide as to why that is the case. In my situation, I waited for her to wander off to try and call someone ELSE to tell me it couldn't be done before running a quick patch from the patch panel and bypassing the firewall - MAGIC! THE DATA TRAVELLED THROUGH THE LITTLE CABLES FROM SERVER TO SERVER EVEN THOUGH THEY WERE IN ANOTHER ROOM! MORE THAN 15 METERS APART! THIS IS AMAZING. Urr. Yeah.
I didn't see her for the rest of the day. However a message was passed on - apparently she was concerned that the "tests" I'd been performing previously were causing a large amount of network traffic, as the whole network was running slowly. Oh, and also some machine had crashed in the arse end of nowhere. This was all apparently my fault. What were the tests I was performing you may ask? I did 2 pings to test connectivity. Standard 32 byte pings. I'm sure anyone who works with computers has dealt with someone like that before - you walk onsite, some fucktard forgets to save a stupid memo they're writing in word and it clearly MUST be something you've done because you work with computers, and this problem didn't happen yesterday.
32bytes x 4 x 2 = 256 bytes of data. A few words of text in notepad - you can't even generate a word file that small.
People with a little knowledge are dangerous things. They are hard to deal with, and they become irrational when logic threatens to burst the small world they live in. I really do feel sorry for them, and I wonder what deluded crap they tell their children and friends that they do at work each day.