'You did what?': Employee breaks laptop on purpose after IT team refuses her request for new equipment, company ends up changing their entire policy

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    (12.201 abl add (12.555401 abstract 1 format avg By coll var C/var/ py Duver "You did what?" 557 te 12.555401 abstract
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    r/talesfromtechsupport 16 hr. ago Optonimous The reason why we updated the company's laptop policy
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    Hello, everyone, this is the first time I've posted one of my stories of my life in tech support. So, to give some context, we give some of our users macbooks so that they are able to work from home, other offices, or sometimes out of state. We also try to keep these macbooks working as long as possible. For instance, one of our spare macbooks is one of the early models that's still a workhorse. It also helps that we use vmware so that our users end up working in a windows OS instead of Apple's.
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    So, about two weeks prior to the event, one of our users, we'll name her Problem Child, called IT asking if she could ever get a new laptop since hers is old and some of the other higher-ups have been getting new macbooks. We simply told her that her macbook still worked and that she didn't need a replacement since the laptops were just cheap but reliable hardware that just needed to be able to access vmware.
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    She wasn't exactly thrilled about the response we gave, but we thought that was the end of it. We were also happy to be done dealing with her since Problem Child was someone who managed to find new ways to make our jobs harder or break things. For instance, she had managed to completely wipe her phone and then expected us to fix it.
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    So, two weeks after we got the call from her, she puts in a support ticket that morning with a problem that everyone in IT could not believe. We were all literally crowded in one office to hear this phone call. That morning, she had managed to run over her laptop with her car.
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    Our minds were just completely blown at how this could happened, and her explanation couldn't have been any better. Problem Child and her husband had apparently gotten into a fight the night before, so her husband that morning had managed to wake up before her, went to a flower shop that was miraculously open at 6am, and then came home to give her some flowers when she was about to get into her car which caused
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    her to set her laptop onto the ground, right under the car door mind you. And then she completely forgot to pick her laptop up off the ground and instead got into the car and drove over the laptop. Somehow, her husband didn't point out to her during this that she forgot her laptop since he was by the car as well.
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    What we all found amazing from this was that even after the laptop had been run over, the only issues with it were that the mouse pad had been cracked and that the top two inches of the screen were dead. Other than that, it still worked. While I personally thought we should have left her with the Little Laptop That Could, my boss had to decline my opinion since Problem Child would just go to her manager to complain.
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    So we gave her one of our old laptops as a replacement. After that, company policy was quickly changed to have users pay for damages/replacements of their laptops.
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    Fantastic-Display106. 16h ago Can you fire someone for purposeful destruction of company property? Geesh. What were the specs on the laptop? There isn't much reason to replace a less than 8 year old Mac with an SSD if it's just being used for remote access. ↑ 191 ↓ Reply Share
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    bagofwisdom 16h ago I am become Manager; Destroyer of environments There's a reason companies don't necessarily make users wait until the device drops completely de d. It's easier to just budget the depreciation over 5 years then send them to some IT remarketer to get whatever money you can out of them. At least y'all are using Apple which supports older Macs exceedingly well. Reply ↑ Share 81凸
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    FeralSquirrels.• 16h ago Lucklessly, blindly inserting USB in the dark That morning, she had managed to run over her laptop with her car. It's at this point I immediately thought "oh boy, I can't wait to read how this plays out"!
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    Anything like this we've usually tied any related tickets to the user complaining about the device and flung it at both the IT and user's manager to hash out. Normally it results in a verbal reprimand regarding the negligence they've shown with company property and if it happens again inside of ~3 months it's a written one, as let's be real here anyone short of the "person with worst
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    here anyone short of the "person with worst luck in the world ever™" isn't likely to find a good reason beyond sheer cr p luck and coincidence to break multiple laptops, phones or anything else. This is also why we keep a stock of functional but older hardware - as anyone that breaks things usually gets one of those as the replacement until the next year-or-so's refresh when new devices are brought in.
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    Moleculor 14h ago ● went to a flower shop that was miraculously open at 6am Having worked somewhere that sold flowers at 6AM, this is actually believable. It was a grocery store. But... it still sold flowers. Reply ↑ Share 424 ↓
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    Camera_dude 13h ago • Edited 13h ago I remember the TFTS story of that entitled lady that smashed up her iPhone because she wanted a new one right before they were even officially released (aka she heard the big wigs in the company had the new ones on order and demanded one for herself, but was denied).
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    That story had a happy ending though: lady got herself fired and escorted out of the building for her shenanigans (which were caught on camera as she used the office stairwell to demolish the old iPhone). Edit: Ah, yes. I found the story rather easily as it is #3 in the top TFTS stories of all time. ↑ 20¹ Reply ↑ Share
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    Yarblo69 14h ago Over 10 years ago, I had an IBM thinkpad and was helping a friend move. Put my laptop bag against a peg on my truck and forgot about it. Backed up and drove over a "bump" .. This was a brand new laptop at the time and amazingly enough, the screen was toast but the rest of the system worked fine. Ended up hooking it up to an external monitor until it d ed years later. (1 ran my own IT company at the time, so ... my fault, I ate the costs lol)
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    Superspudmonkey • 11h ago Had the same issue where I worked. A sales manager wilfully broke his laptop because he wanted a new one. One of the other sales reps clued me in on it, so I replaced it with one we had in stock, and this one was also damaged within a week, so he got an older unit. What would you know within another week this one was broken too, so he got another old laptop.
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    He then asked "Why am I not just getting a new laptop"? I was happy to say "We can't trust you not to break a new one with your track record and we don't want to risk a new laptop being broken," We didn't see any more broken laptops until he was let go several months later. ↑ 14 ↓ Reply Share :

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