In the right situation, working in IT support can be a really rewarding job.

In the wrong environment though, it’s a thankless task.

And unfortunately, the guy in this story found himself firmly in the latter kind of workplace.

Read on to find out what happened when he was expected to do the impossible.

We just purchased fifty new laptops and need them ready by first class tomorrow!

I do IT hardware support for a college.

Coming in one morning I hear my phone ding for a new email as I am pulling in off the freeway. I pull into the parking lot and pull out my phone to see the following email.

“Our department ordered fifty new laptops that just came in this morning. We need IT to install the latest Windows on them along with the following software (and a long list of software follows).”

“These computers need to be ready to go by 10am tomorrow morning so we can use them for the first class.”

Yikes! Let’s see how this demand went down with the IT team.

I check to see if this was forwarded by my boss or his boss.

Nope, it was sent directly to me. No ticket, no purchase order information, I didn’t even remember seeing an order for new laptops in any department come through the system in the last month.

So I go to the office and show my boss, who reads the email and tells me that he never had a request for new laptops so he has no idea what it is about.

After a few minutes of trying to call the department with no answer, I agree to walk over and see what this was about.

Read on to find out what he discovered when he arrived at the department.

When I get to the department office, I finally track down someone who knows what is going on and she leads me to one of the classrooms with a pile of boxes in the center of the room.

My heart just sinks.

There before me, is a pile of new 7 inch Windows tablets with attaching keyboards sat.

I pick one up and look over the specs. Low end tablets, barely enough memory to run Windows 10 (installed) but would never run Windows 7 (we haven’t upgraded the school yet, it was still a new OS) – and they’re nowhere near able to run any of the software that they were requesting as each unit had about 16GB of storage.

Uh-oh. Let’s see how he responded to this discovery.

Needless to say, I was a little scared about this.

I asked her how these were even ordered through our system and she tells me that they by-passed the system and ordered from a web company to get a better deal.

I know that there was no reasoning with her so I ask if I could take one down to the office to get a look at it and she agrees with the stern comment of “These need to be ready by tomorrow! Make sure it happens!”

Back at the office I show off their new toys to the rest of the staff and my boss.

None of them are happy, there is no way we can install any software on these let alone connect them to our network so the students can log into them.

So his boss took matters into his own hands.

My boss emails the department head asking why they didn’t go through IT to get the computers.

And she responds with the same answer I got earlier, they were cheaper this way.

He lets her know that we couldn’t fulfil the request, that they would be better off returning the computers and that we would work on getting them ones that would work with our network and software.

But it’s not that easy.

Well they can’t do that because the website had a no-return policy. Not only that, but they hadn’t used a purchase order for it, they used the department credit card.

So now we are stuck with fifty Windows 10 tablets that the department can’t really do anything with and the department head is demanding answers as to why no one told her that we couldn’t use those.

For some reason they keep emailing me instead of talking to my Boss so I am getting the front end of the disaster here.

And things just kept getting worse from there.

We finally get to a work around.

The tablets are set up on the WiFi network and we have to create a generic user account for each tablet along the lines of “DepartmentTab01” and then link that user name to the MAC address of the tablets so that no one would be able to log into the network with another computer.

They were delivered to the department a week later than they wanted.

I wish it stopped there, but of course it wouldn’t.

The problems started right away.

First day with the tablets a trouble ticket comes in saying none of the tablets would connect.

Get to the classroom and the teacher had written one of the user names on the board, and was trying to have everyone connect to the WiFi with that one user name.

What is bad is that we had a printed set of login instructions hanging right by the board that she used.

But the problems just kept coming.

Then they wouldn’t charge.

Turns out the the tiny barrel plug that these things used had to be pushed in all the way to get a connection. Even just a little short of the mark and they wouldn’t charge.

None of the tablets had been plugged in properly over the course of about two weeks.

And we still get random requests for software to be installed on these.

The students don’t like the tablets either.

The students won’t even use them because the keyboards are just too small to type on unless they have the hands of a seven year old.

Why do departments do this to us?

I really wish we had a purchase system in place where all computer requests go through us.

It’s totally unfair that the department circumvented the official system to save money, then lumbered the IT team with all the work to fix substandard tech.

Someone in the department really did make a huge mistake here.

And it sucks that the IT guys are having to clean up after them.

Let’s see what folks on Reddit made of this.

This person thought the message should have been clear: the department’s mistake, the department’s problem.

While others thought some blame lay with the head of IT.

Meanwhile, this Redditor pointed out how gullible the department head must have been.

The IT team should have refused.

If you liked that story, check out this post about an oblivious CEO who tells a web developer to “act his wage”… and it results in 30% of the workforce being laid off.