IT Asset Manager Horror Stories: Tales from the Tech Trenches

Welcome everybody to a very spooky, spooky event. That's right. It is spooky season, and it is time for IT horror stories, tales story that was officially submitted. This comes from Whitney Smith, Director of Informational Technology and Assessment at Minola UFSD in New York. And this is the Paper Jam Massacre. Alright. Whitney's gonna tell us a story. And then, Matt, I'll ask for your reaction, to the story when you hear it. You might need to mute, during the video parts just so people in case there's an echo. I haven't seen him say anything about echo, so we'll see if that keeps working. Here we go. Here's Whitney. Okay, Carl. You asked for it. You want some IT horror stories? Come on. Come on. Take a walk. They can see this empty drawer. Drawer's not working. Gotta love the New York machine's blinking red. Come on over. Take a look at these piles stacking up. Come on. Come on. Come on. On. That's not enough, look at that. That's one job. Probably an elementary school teacher. One job. Here we go. That's morning morning work right there. Yeah. Keep going. Yep. Broken. Broken. Broken. Broken. Hope that helps. Thanks. That was just I don't know. I mean, do you thought? I mean, first of all, that one copy machine looked like it had at least a tree on it. There there was a lot going on there. Yeah. I do think I do think the echo is when that thing is shared. Oh, when the audio is shared? Do you hear it more? Yeah. Well, we have to have audio for some of this too. Absolutely. I'm gonna put myself on mute. Okay. Give give me a thumbs up if you can still hear me. Can you still hear me? Yeah. Oh, yeah. Sorry. Alright. Alright. Perfect. That works out better than I can I can mute myself as long as I can hear you hear me? But yeah. That looks like when I was a principal, I remember walking walking through and just hearing that. Clink, clink, clink, clink. It's almost like walking into a scare zone and now I'll support you here. The clink, clink, clink, clink, clink, clink. And it's just it's like, okay. Okay. Do say something? Do I do I cry? I don't know. I don't know what I'm doing. Yeah. And I think Alex in the chat says it's me muting too. So what we might do is this just because I don't wanna, overdo it. We'll we'll go to video and then we'll just go to me and you on screen. We'll just switch back and forth. Because I think that that way we can I think the echo goes away, but it's when I'm playing sound effects, like this next one? So from, down in Texas, the silence of the bells. Okay. Sorry. I don't know how long that was gonna go. Alright. I'll mute myself. We'll mute ourselves, and we'll play the video, and then we'll do our Hi. My name is Lacey Merrifield. I'm the IT director at Boskeyville ISD in Waco, Texas, and this is my IT horror story. So I'm starting my fourth year as the technology director, and this happened my first year within the first two weeks of school. So, know, perfect time for something to go wrong. We use InformaCast Fusion with our go to VoIP phone system for our bells and announcements. And so everything's supposed to communicate nicely together, right? Until one day it just stopped. We were probably on the third day of school. Suddenly we had no bells and no announcements, and I very quickly learned that you don't realize how much a school depends on bells when there aren't any. The teachers are wondering when are we supposed to release the students, the front office is trying to figure out how to make announcements. And meanwhile, I'm the brand new technology director thinking, I've been in this job exactly five minutes. The InformaCast Fusion Box and the GoTo's phones had somewhere down the line lost communication. I started working troubleshooting, making calls, working with support, trying to figure out exactly where that connection had broken, all of the while, school's going on all around me. Eventually, we found where the connection loss was and what was causing it. It was an IP invalid IP address that had gotten changed during summer maintenance, so before I even started. And the bells came back on, and the district survived. But I definitely learned something during those first two weeks in school IT. The systems nobody thinks about when they're working become the most important systems in the building when they stop working. And nothing introduces you to a new job quite like everybody waiting for you to make the bells ring. Yeah. Yeah. That what a fun, yeah. It's always the little things. Right? And when you're an IT, it's like every everything you touch is part of your support. Right? Absolutely. And I and, you know, being in the schools now and that the district setting and the as assistant superintendent of technology and learning, we had an issue where the bell was a minute and a half off, which almost was just as bad as not having the bells because it was the teachers like, no, not yet. And the students like, should we leave? And then like, everybody use the phone. And then for some reason, that the Android phones and the the Apple phones were a little off. So that was that was scary in a middle school of half the kids out, half the kids not out. So these these are the little things you don't think about when you're you're planning these elaborate kind of takeovers and and switching of systems. Right. We we think, I know, IT, it's network, it's it's Wi Fi. Let's just focus on those things. Although network, Wi Fi, Internet, that touches everything now. Right? Absolutely. I I say it's a utility. Like, you just want it to work just like your lights and and your water. And when when it doesn't, that's when it's break glass and and you need help. Yeah. Alright. Let's go to our next story here. And this also coming to us from, the great state of New York. I'll go ahead and mute here. Well, I feel like before I mute, I have to do the intro. This is the night of the living laptops. Okay. Here we go. My name is Alana Winick, and I'm the educational technology director and data protection officer of the Canico Hills in Sleepy Hollow, New York. Wait a minute. Did she just I have to pause. Did she just say Sleepy Hollow, New York? It sounds It sounded that way. That's awesome. And my story is that back in 2020, I was working then for BOCES supporting many school districts. One of them is Bocanico. And I had a friend who was a kindergarten teacher over in Hong Kong. And she came over and was teaching her kindergarten students through Google Classroom, I thought, as a former kindergarten teacher, how on earth is she teaching online? They had this little pandemic going on over there. So when the first case came over here in Westchester, I was like, we have to do something about this. And I found these super old laptops down in the storage room that had never been recycled. I said, we need to image these. We need to get them ready. We need to go one to one. And everyone looked at me like I was crazy. Like, I had three heads. Like, these laptops can't even hold a charge. And I was like, I don't really care if they're plugged into a wall the whole time. We need to get these ready. I'm gonna pause right there because I have to ask you, Matt. You don't Matt has not seen these stories. So before I go to the next before I finish Alana's story, I want you to guess. Let's play a little guessing game for this one. What do you think is gonna happen as she travels down into the creepy basement to get these laptops and reimage them? What's gonna happen? Well, first of all, she brought up the the basement and the old scary laptops. Like, it was almost like she was staged here, and I know she she wasn't. I mean, Sleepy Hollow. Come on. And the Sleepy Hollow. I think they're gone. We can't find them. I think somehow the the the headless horseman or headless staff member came down. We're like, I know what to do with these. We're gonna take these for parts, and they're gonna be missing. Oh, you're not even close. Let's figure out what happens. Even better. Let's go. Here's the end. Here's the ending. So they worked tirelessly to reimage all the old laptops, get them up and running. We went one to one. We every teacher created a Microsoft team, and we did remote learning drills. So every single student learned how to join Teams meeting, how to mute and unmute themselves, and we practice every day. And then we were actually in a pretty good place when that time came, and we just sent all the devices home with students. And flash forward a few months later, they created a director job, and I actually got the job of my dreams out of that situation. So, unfortunately, we went through a pandemic. But fortunately for me, I landed in a director role in a district I really love. So sometimes nightmares become dreams, Matthew. There you go. Yes. Yeah. I was not going there. I didn't I wasn't expecting that one. But, yeah, threw me off. But I think, the the theme of it for sure, you you have that fear when when you're trying those things out, when it's uncertainty and you don't know what's gonna happen. And and similar when I was talking about the the key drives and re imaging or re saving computers, same thing. You you hit restart and the new software starts rolling in, you just hold your breath. Yeah. Yeah. You don't know. I mean, it it and and at that time, I mean, you'll see a theme because I think a few I've seen all the stories, but I think a few of them are pandemic is very much associated with some of this. And that was a scary time for all of us. There's no need to add more to that. That it's it it was just part of the part of it. Was pretty Part of the joy of that. Yeah. This next story, I'm gonna share the screen without audio and see if that helps with your echo. So I'm gonna say no audio because I'm just gonna put an image up. I'm mad, I believe. So not everyone was able to send in a video. Wanda, a good friend of ours, there in Tennessee did send in a story that, I believe you have. I do have Okay. So you're gonna read this is Wanda Terrell's IT course. Sorry. The registration day of the dead. And I do think we've figured out the echo that it is when you're sharing sharing the video, and that's scary. Me, echoey, nobody wants that. That that's scary in itself. You only wanna hear yourself once, not twice. Yeah. Woah. So Wanda writes, so my IT horror story, I blame it entirely on myself. We opened a new school and added four grade levels to our district. And it was a brand new building, and it was the first time we were going to go one to one with Chromebooks. That going one to one seems to be a theme as well. And I had it in my head that we were going to roll out, of course, as smooth as possible. We decided not only to roll out the Chromebooks one to one, also take home devices, but we also did it right when students were registering, which was the week before school started. It did not go so well, We ended up having to reenroll all the devices because the white glove service that we purchased did not go well. Because we started the rollout, we had to continue it, But we made it. We didn't have enough devices because we had a higher enrollment than predicted. So they had to redo it. They had more students. You'd know a lot about that. Yep. So we ended up having to order more devices. The moral of the story, though, the team survived, but it was definitely something that I would not repeat. Yeah. You you learn from your mistakes. Right? I mean, that's part of these horror stories, feel like, is, you know, we start to learn, you know, what what are you know, she short counted. I mean, mine was she had a registration difference, you know, which does affect it. You don't know the fact that a 100 kids are gonna show up all of a sudden, like walking walking dead coming in. Where's my Chromebook? I wanna come to school today. No Wi Fi. Yeah. Where's my password? Yeah. That's coming. There's a story very soon. I'm sure there is. I'm sure there is. So, yeah, I think that's interesting that, you know, you know, best laid plans. Right? And then then it's like then, of course, in these roles is how do you pivot? How do you adjust? Right? Yeah. That's that's I think part of it. And I think we all take pride in the in the work that we do and and and rolling it out and and wanting to be smooth. And then when something happens, it's never small. It's okay. What 100 are not gonna get the devices today? Or, okay. We have to reenroll them, and every one of the technicians is just like, really? We just did this. Yeah. And all of a sudden, I've noticed I'm, like, out of focus. This is great. Oh, there we go. Back up. See this building? With your scary shirt on. There we go. Alright. Good. Alright. Here we go. I might have to go mute on this one because I do have some sound on this as a video, so we'll go mute on this one, Matt, and bring our audio up. There we go. Okay. This is the day the network stood still. Scott Lalleman, director of technology, Medina Valley ISD in Texas. Here's Scott. Hi there, Scott Lalleman. I am currently the Director of Technology at Medina Valley ISD in Castroville, Texas, just West of San Antonio. But the story is from when I was the Director at South San Antonio ISD in twenty twenty, twenty twenty one. We had my network administrator resigned during COVID, and we had all of our Chromebook traffic proxied through our content filter at the time. And when we started handing out Chromebooks in the spring of twenty twenty, we didn't have any issues with bandwidth. But we quickly found out once school started in August 2020, that the vast majority of our students who were given a Chromebook in the spring probably weren't online at the same time or online at all because the first day of school, which was a required attendance day, our entire network crashed because of all of the traffic coming in from those Chromebooks proxying. So it was a double whammy because it was coming in and then going back out. And so we had probably 7,500 to 8,000 students at the time. All of those devices hitting the network both in and out at the same time. And and that got us on the news. Oh, no. Fantastic. Not the way I wanted to end up on the news, but yeah, for a couple of days, San ISD without internet, we are experiencing internet problems due to, you know, the student devices. We had been in talks with GoGuardian for a couple of weeks before school started, and I was able to fortunately get an emergency PO cut in August, which, you know, if you know anything about school finance in Texas, trying to get anything done at the end of August from the previous year's funds is That's scary in itself. Yeah. But I was able to get an emergency PO cut for GoGuardian and deployed, their web filtering application out to all of our Chromebooks. And so we had it resolved within a couple of days, but literally everything in the district, nobody could get any business done. Phones weren't working. It was quite a nightmare. That is probably my biggest IT horror story since I've been a director. Sometimes these are, like, therapeutic too. Feel like it's like and I shout out to shout out to Scott and also everybody for sharing these. Right? Because I think it's, you know, it's one thing to be like, yeah, we messed up. It's another thing to, like, record it and put it out there. But I appreciate these folks that are, you know, sharing their stories. Yeah. Well, I think it's important in in in our roles. A lot of time, we're we're singletons or have a have a team. And as as Alana said or a couple others, like, you're in a in a remote place and people don't see all the work you're doing. And having this is almost like a little support group for for each other because you just expect it to work. And when it doesn't, everybody's eyeballs, those scary eyeballs start turning towards you. Oh, yeah. Absolutely. Oh, I've got another, story to share here. This one, I think, as a a read along. I'm gonna let me see here. I'm gonna share this one without audio until we get that echo away. This is another one from Texas. Getting a theme here at Texans. Right. It's also because I know a lot of folks from Texas and New York, so we get they're represented pretty well. Those of you in the chat, if you have a horror story you'd like to share, of course, we welcome. Yeah. Preston just said in the chat, actually, I'm surprised there hasn't been one about the July 2024 CrowdStrike incident. Yeah. Or, what was the one? I think earlier that year, there was, what was it? Oh, it was, it's a big huge you use it for school grade not gradebook system. It's like one of the biggest ones in the country. Oh, power school. Power school. Oh, the power school. Yeah. Yep. That was another one that was like, oh my goodness. Yeah. I that we should've invited them to come share it now. I don't think they would jump on. Yeah. I promise. Alright. Here we go. This is from my friend Curtis Shannon at Wichita Falls ISD, and he shares this story. During my first week at a former position, I asked the team about our password policy. They proudly assured me that it was eight characters. Naturally, I asked, okay, eight characters and what? A symbol, a number, an uppercase letter? Nope. Just eight characters. Talk about stomach churning horror story. No special characters, no capital letters, no password history, and then the real kicker, no expiration. Some users have been using the exact same character eight character password since the dawn of the Internet. It was an absolute open door for a catastrophic breach, but to the team, it was just, you know, business as usual. You know, that happens when you arrive somewhere sometimes. Anyway, needless to say, I overhauled the whole policy immediately despite the widespread wailing, gnashing of teeth, and sudden memory loss that followed. Cybersecurity should never be said it and forget it. Yeah. That's, I like I like what he says, the sudden loss of memory. It's like people are like, oh, now all of a sudden nobody can remember because whenever you get a new password, you know, I what was it again? I never That is good. Yeah. And how many people was one, three, four, five, six, seven, Like I thought I know. That'd be the first one I would try. I mean, ironic given that, like, you know, you know, pull back the curtain here. But, I mean, AI actually designed these images. Right? And you notice it even says, what's the password on the screen? I didn't tell it to do that. It just That's funny. I literally just put the story in there and said, hey. Make a make an image about this and then put Curtis in there. But I also noticed with Curtis and with Wanda, both of them, it's always this. It's like the McAuley, Cawkin Yeah. I guess AI also. It's it's yeah. It's it's almost just like, I got it. My head's gonna explode if I do not keep it in. Yeah. Alright. For this one, okay. We're gonna go, this is kind of a two part. So I'm gonna we're gonna share, we'll go mute and off, and then I'll I'll play the, we'll do the audio part of this too. So I'll I'll pause it about halfway. We're gonna take a little break. I want you to guess and predict again where it's gonna This comes from our friend Allison Harold, in New York. And let me share audio here. And her story is called Paranormal Admin Activity. Here's Alison. Well, hello, and welcome. My name is Alison Harold, and here is my horror story. So we go back a couple years, you know, just a little bit after the pandemic. And during that time, technology is changing rapidly. As much as you're growing in technology, we're also starting to think, hey, we're gonna need a couple of things regarding cybersecurity. So we got this really amazing tool, was already AI based before most people really started talking about AI like we talked today. And it has the capability of really detect threats on your network, on your Google domains, on your Windows three sixty five domains. And it does that by analyzing people behavior. When things get kind of a little bit weird after learning about people's behavior, they kind of get a score. And based on that score, if for some reason, let's say there's ransomware or something takes over your account or your account gets hijacked or you click a phishing link, your account gets automatically suspended. So we put it into place and it started learning for a couple of months. So just kind of sitting there quietly learning. And it was really working well. We got some really great reporting out of that. And so, we turned on the automatic suspension of accounts based on a risk factor for a user. So, and just let that, you know, simmer for a while. Nothing really happened. And then, you know, the summer comes around. And I remember having a problem with our Google password sync. For some reason the app had changed and it wasn't authenticating properly. So and they needed to fix it like yesterday. It was like the end of the school year. And it wasn't working properly. So I decided that to get it working immediately, I bounded to my own administrative account in Google, which I know I hear you. You should do these things and do it the right way, which I knew I was gonna do the next day or probably the next week and fix it, you know, the right way, do it properly. Well, any Gonna stop it there because I want you to guess what happens next. So she you know, I will tell you all the breadcrumbs are there. So she's laid out almost like a usual suspects. She's like, told you some things. There's this new AI software that's checking for profiles. She's fixing some with Google, bounded her account to the Google thing. What do you think is gonna happen to Allison? Well, I think only because I feel like I've done this a few times where we were just joking about passwords. But when you start linking a lot of things or you're adding passwords or trying multiple times and your phone's like, no more tries. Somehow something's gonna go wrong, I think, and she can't get in or somebody, one of the programs outthinks the room and and locks her out or something along the lines where because it seems like she's got a lot going on there and it's all new and AI is gonna start to think for her or think for the system and protect her. Yeah. This is Terminator. This is, like, all those things we keep hearing about with AI. This is I'm surprised we've gotten this far, thirty minutes in, and our first AI horror story is happening. But it's still fairly new AI. Right? So it's Sure. We're learning more about it. Alright. You're actually pretty darn close on this one. Don't know if Better than the last one. Okay. So here we go. I'm gonna share the audio. The breadcrumbs. She did. She did. She did. Okay. Here. Let's let's see how Alison, ends here. Anyway, guess what? I didn't. So we get to towards, like, midsummer. Not too many people at work, and I'm using ClassLink OneSync to do my annual rollover of accounts to where everybody gets promoted. They shift grade levels. You know, a lot of stuff happening in Active Directory, and therefore, a lot of stuff happening in Google. And so I start pulling the trigger. We we do the migration, getting all you know, my fifth grade is the sixth grade and everything. And all of a sudden, I get locked out of everything. And I think to myself, crud. What just happened? And then it dawned on me that yeah. So I wasn't behaving in a way that I would normally behave. Because all of a sudden, my account essentially through Google password sync is mass doing mass changes, mass resetting passwords, you know, hundreds of them. And so, of course, these new tool things, my account has been compromised. And, unfortunately, I was the only person at work that day. Other people who had Google administrative rights were on vacation. And so, yeah, I got locked out of everything. And I'm just kind of sitting here. Okay. How am gonna explain myself out of that one? That was rather embarrassing because now I essentially couldn't do anything. I was locked out of my entire domain. Nothing I could do. So, yeah, I had to make this embarrassing phone call to a colleague of mine who happened to be on vacation, who also had admin rights. And, like, yeah. I'm doing something embarrassing for you. Please don't laugh. Because then they had to turn my account back on. So and, yeah, super embarrassing. And, yes, they laughed. And you'll mention the story, and they will still laugh. So, anyway, have a wonderful day. I don't know how she she's great about like, she keeps her in such a humor Sure. Throughout all of I think you have to at that point. But My gosh. What a nightmare to be locked out of, like, all like, especially if you're in control of it. You're like, oh, I messed up. I locked myself out. And to make that phone call is the the the horror part of that too because I've had to make similar phone calls, but it it's like, hi. I'm gonna totally out myself. Everything I train staff not to do, I kinda did. Yeah. To be fair to her, it's a new system, and she called herself out there because she says, you know, when I bounded that account, I needed I needed to go back in the next day or maybe the next week and fix it. And she just you know, we get busy. Happen. Go on. Things happen. She forgot to change herself out of it. So oy oy oy. Okay. Alright. This one, we're gonna go oh, this is a so I saved this is a doozy. I'm gonna warn you. And and there's a lot going on in this story. And it I I will tell you, it's a good friend of mine, but, they wanted to be remain anonymous and also the school district. So because it's it's just a lot going on. So I'll I'll read the story, Matt, and then we'll kind of react you can react kind of as we go. But Sure. In the early days of the pandemic, our district wasn't yet one to one. Oh, there goes that that again, that same There we go. That you had. Devices hadn't largely been used or purchased by the schools. There wasn't really any consistency about how many Chromebooks each campus had, and frankly, how many of them actually worked. We all knew schools were probably gonna close. We just didn't know when and for how long. And I knew that, one of our one school had actually a large number of relatively new Chromebooks kind of sitting in carts throughout the building. So we came up with this plan, get as many as those devices as we could and use them for students who wouldn't have technology at home. So we rounded up a few large trucks, we found someone who would let us into the building and started hunting for Chromebook cards, and they were everywhere, classrooms, hallways, different floors. We spent hours finding cards, wheeling them into the hallways, rolling them on the elevators, and eventually get them toward the loading dock. And somewhere in the middle of all of this, my phone rang. It was my boss. Before I tell you what in itself. What do you think, yeah, what do you think happened before I reveal the next part of this? Timing, this is March thirteenth ish twenty twenty. I think that they have to clean all the Chromebooks or or or something because they're so worried about the pandemic and the the horror of of whatever they're collecting them for before they hand them out, all the staff have to get Yeah. Their hands That's a good that's actually a good guess. It was even worse than that, though. Okay. His boss says there has been a shelter in place that has just been ordered. Get out. Oh. Right now. I honestly don't know. In that building. Yeah, I he even says, I don't even know what he meant at that moment. But my boss did. He said, get out of there right now. Go home. Because again, this is, know, the beginning of the pandemic. So there's just one problem. And this and the reader states, I wasn't leaving those Chromebooks behind. So suddenly, what had been organized as a collection effort turned into something out of the breakfast club. It's like a rescue mission. Yeah. A few of us were racing down hallways in an empty school, pushing giant carts of Chromebooks down hallways, skidding them around corners, cramming in elevators, getting them out of there as fast as we could. We eventually got somewhere between twenty and thirty carts out of the building, and honestly, the entire afternoon is a blur. So we haul everything back to the warehouse, unloaded the trucks, went home, then came the next problem. What do you do with hundreds and hundreds of Chromebooks sitting in carts when thousands of kids suddenly don't have computers and need them? Right? So over the next several days, people volunteered from organization. We came in wearing masks, practically bathing ourselves in hand sanitizer. This is great. What a great storyteller. We dismantled the cards. We inventoried the devices. We cleaned them, like you mentioned, and configured them for families. At the time we thought, okay, we're just solving a temporary problem. Just get them out. It's only gonna be a couple weeks. Right? And then everything just a couple. We remember that. Was it two weeks? Yeah. Just two weeks. Yeah. Yeah. We were very, very wrong. So the first frantic Chromebook rescue happens, turns into months of purchasing, configuring inventory, distributing technology on a scale we never imagined. And somehow, it even got more surreal. This story turns Twenty eight weeks later, not twenty eight weeks later, that's the name of the movie. Weeks later, we were still distributing devices to families and cars would line up and our teams worked outside handing out devices and hotspots. But then, the wildfires came. One morning, the smoke was so severe that the sky turned a bizarre apocalyptic orange red ash, and it started falling everywhere on the cars, the Chromebooks, almost like snow. I remember at one point I was driving to a deployment, I was thinking, I'm in the middle of a global pandemic, the schools are closed, the sky is blood red and ashes falling from the sky. And here I am going to work to hand out Chromebooks. And at some point you start to wonder what's next, toads falling from the sky? And yet the work continued. We started, what started as a frantic attempt to rescue a few cards out of Chromebooks. Of Chromebooks became one of the largest technology deployments we'd ever attempted in our lives. And looking back, those are some incredibly dark and frightening days, but they're also some of the best work I've ever done as an IT team. People stepped outside of their job descriptions, they improvised, they solved problems nobody had planned for, and they did whatever they could to make sure kids kept on learning. Thousands upon thousands of devices later, we are still going. And it's a strange thing about IT horror stories. Sometimes the people trapped inside the horror movie turn out to be the heroes. I know. That was a great story, though. And I was like, I have to so it was shared with me. I was like, I have to share this. And they're like, well, little worried, you know, and stuff. I was like, I don't think there's anything too bad. But it definitely is scary. I mean, there's a lot of stuff going on. Your physical health, you know, that that takes it to another level. Right? Sure. Right. You layer that on top of it, and you put your own kind of health and safety as well as the device safety, the student safety. There's a lot going on there. So I've saved our, most interesting that was one of my more interesting story. Say this take it up one more next. We have one more. This is the final one. Okay. I gotta get Braden to shout out here, and I'll you'll see him in just a second. His video will go will go on mute in just a second. But he like, took this the assignment was just record yourself telling the story. You guys have all seen it throughout the show. Brain took it to the next level. He added a little panache to it. So Alright. Let's to that. And here, let me pull up his video and share sound, and we'll go mute and see how see how this goes. This is Final Destination Copier Edition. Oops. The sound effect didn't work. One more time. There we go. Braden Herring, IT director at Bullard ISD. My name is Braden Herring, IT director at Bullard Independent School District in Bullard, Texas, deep in the heart of East Texas. Probably not my worst story. However, it's pretty bad. Pretty bad. So the story takes place at one of my former districts in Central Texas, and we had some bond projects going on. One of the projects was moving a brand new copier over to one of our new buildings being built, which was a robotic center seen here. So I know what you're thinking, Braden. Not a big deal. Right? Except the vendor wanted to charge us a substantial amount of money to move a copier. As a first year IT director, talked to my CTO into letting me and another employee move the copier by ourselves with our own box truck. Me and another employee loaded up the copier in the back of our box truck. So in this video seen here, I decide to try and lean over and lower the ramp by myself. I thought, hey. It's already out on the platform. I can just lean down and drop down the platform myself. No. As you can see here, that did not work out in my favor. What I told my boss when she asked, is it okay? I said, well, it certainly didn't bounce. Moral of the story is pay the money. Don't be responsible for dropping a 20,000 plus dollar copier off the back of a box truck paid with bond funds. You're welcome. So, I almost forgot to explain how it was resolved. I couldn't answer that. I wasn't the boss at the time. Thank goodness I wasn't the CTO. But I do know that they got their copier. So that was good, I guess. I I just watched that like, those videos you watch when you you you know somebody's gonna fall or somebody's walking on ice or someone rides their bike on a frozen lake. And, of course, they have to pull the the video camera feed. Like, oh, the grainy video care like, that alone is scary. We're going to yeah. Exactly. We're gonna cut and, of course, people you know, that video, I'm sure, was shared far and wide amongst his team. And, look at look at how Braden messed this up. Yeah. Oh, boy. But I do appreciate, Braden and everybody for sharing their stories today. I wanna go go a little bit here and just kinda say, you know, again, thank you. And, Matt, thank you for joining and being a part of this too. These IT Horse Stories. I don't know. I mean, you and I both we we've known each other for a long time. We we both had a lot of our share stories. We could only share a few of them. Like you said, we could probably do a seven hour clip of Right? Alex says in the chat. That felt like The Office. It did. Right? When he was doing that last last The chili? Was it the chili? No. Need to Oh, are you talking about the time we had those, burritos on the way to No. Not that time. I'm saying the office sketch when he spilled he walked in with the Oh, yes. Yes. Yes. Very good. The US office, not the British office. Yeah. Correct. Correct. But anyway, in all seriousness, I wanna thank, oh, there's my lightning splash there. I wanna thank you for joining us. I wanna thank everybody, Braden, the whole team. A couple quick notes here, housekeeping before we wrap up shop. Yeah. Save the date in about little more than a month, actually, right after Halloween. We'll be doing another one of these, with a friend of ours, actually, Joseph, mister Leo Brehm is gonna be joining me. Alright. Who former IT director now works in the business office, and we're gonna talk about 10 ways to save districts of money. So that'll be, November 3, around the same time, I think around 03:00, Eastern. Of course, follow, Follett on these platforms, Facebook, X, and LinkedIn, and of course, the underscore there on Instagram. You might have seen this on one of those platforms, and that's how you registered. And I just wanna close out by saying we learned something today. You know, you can't prevent every IT horror story. Copiers will fall, networks will crash, passwords will be terrible. And, occasionally, your cybersecurity system may actually decide that you are the cybersecurity threat. But the fewer surprises you have, the better. And that's what's really good about having asset management that gives technology leaders visibility before something becomes a horror story. So, again, huge thank you to Follett Software for me for sponsoring today's conversation, and for helping build, that IT asset manager, which is really great to help kind of avoid these. They're still gonna happen, but if you can have these tools to help you out. Right? That's a that's a teammate to have in Follett. Absolutely. So, to all our technology technology leaders out there, stay alert. Keep your inventory updated. And whatever you do, don't move the copier by yourself. Especially if you're on video. Right. Happy Halloween, everybody. Thank you. Have a great one, everybody.