Sometimes the funniest problems start with someone trying to do everything right.

Imagine you were helping a coworker submit a simple website ticket, and their screen suddenly loaded something no one expected, all because a system you thought was fully deployed wasn’t actually doing its job.

What would you do?

In the following story, a tech support worker finds himself in this situation and decides to help write a support ticket.

Here’s what happened.

How I found out we hadn’t finished deploying the content filter

As I’m sure we all experienced, COVID forced a work-from-home policy that strained not just work procedures, but also how IT works as well.

With WFH, we needed a content-filtering solution on the computers, in addition to the corporate firewall. We deploy it, configure it, done… or so we thought.

Some time later, a coworker messages me and says they found a problem on our website. They know I’m not on the web team, but could I help them prepare a ticket with the right terms so it’s treated faster? This user always opens good, respectful tickets, so of course, I help! Techs looking out for techs!

As soon as they started screen sharing, he saw the problem.

So we start a screen share session, and we’re preparing the ticket for the web team. My coworker then tries to describe a feature that should be on the website, says “this is how it is on the website,” and just types product.com.

Well, product.com was full of ladies, definitely not using the product my coworker was describing. A few flustered seconds later, we got the tab closed, and I showed them how to clear the last hour of browser history.

We discovered the product in question is at companyproduct.com, and we immediately knew why.

It turns out the exceptions were not working properly.

We got the ticket finished and sent it off to the web team. I then went and looked at the device web filter and found that we had somehow put exceptions in place without actually picking any categories to block! So exceptions to nothing were configured.

I sent a screenshot of no blocked categories to the coworker, and they replied with the life of crime they would have led with their work computer had they known the content filter wasn’t working.

So maybe once in a while, check your filters! This is true for air conditioners, cars, and computers!

Yikes! That was quite a mistake!

Let’s see how the folks over at Reddit feel about this story.

This must’ve been an interesting time.

Didn’t see this coming.

What a shocking tester site.

At least it was good for something.

This was a huge catch!

Hopefully, the company gave that person a bonus for discovering it.

If you liked that post, check out this post about a woman who tracked down a contractor who tried to vanish without a trace.