There are some things you can figure out on your own without much knowledge. Like Ikea furniture. Building servers is not one of those things.

Check out why this tech worker was stunned early on in his role.

Curiosity is punished immediately

I currently work at a small company building very specialized servers. My main job is actually physically assemble the machines and set them up, including parts of quality control.

As I am still in training, not specialized at all, and it is also a very small company, I also became the de-facto administrator for our ticketing system.

So he gets to work sleuthing and doesn’t like what he finds…

I overhear chatter of a customer having trouble with their machine and asking for assistance fixing it. Not super unusual, but it’s a slow day and I enjoy working on problems.

So I snoop around for the ticket. It’s titled roughly “Trouble finding hard drive”, “Okay” I think to myself, “Is it not recognized by the system, not formatted properly…?”

I scroll further, and indeed, the drive being not recognized by the machine was the original error. Sadly, this was also the drive containing the system partition, with all the headache this brings with it.

A little further scrolling and I am greeted by horrible tech gore.

The customer had taken it upon himself to disassemble the server. Entirely.

The incompetence has left him stunned.

He had stripped it down almost as far as I get it when I start installing components. All because he had been looking for the drive.

The environment, far as I can tell between the strewn parts, doesn’t exactly look like dedicated work surface, anti-static matts or something like that.

In the customer’s defence, he was looking for a NVMe drive that is directly on the motherboard. He had disassembled a partition of heatsinks that could house those and found only empty slots.

The foil still on the pads of the heatsinks probably telling him that he was looking at the wrong spot.

This is when he finally relented and asked. Had he consulted the manual, available in something like 20 languages, he would have found that NVMe Slot 1 would have been easily accessible under its own little heatsink.

I am slowly becoming scared of our customers and the things they will do to these machines.

Here is what folks are talking about.

There are much safer, less destructive ways to tinker.

That’s terrible!

Hey, if it pays the bills.

Pretty much!

Haha that is a polite term for them!

I wonder what this user was hoping to achieve.

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