I stumbled across a thread containing a bunch of gamer-style achievements for IT folks. Some are humorous, and there are those that you will silently nod your head and agree with.
It might be fun to see if we can come up with a list of achievements, with point values. Heck, I might just build a tool for tracking your achievements, acoording to this list, which you can include in your profile or on other sites. Anyway, sounds like a fun way to while away these slow days around the holidays.
Wikipedia identifies a gamer achievement as:
Achievements are included within games to extend the title’s longevity and provide players with the impetus to do more than simply complete the game but to also find all of its secrets and complete all of its challenges. They are effectively arbitrary challenges laid out by the developer to be met by the player.
Leave your additions to the start list I’ve shown below!
Update!
I’ve added the tool over at fortypoundhead.com for all registered users. After logging in, check out the “My Achievements” link in the My Stuff section of the site.
From the My Achievements screen, you can add and remove achievements, and find instructions for sharing your achievements with anyone.
If you have suggestions for more achievements, drop a note through the contact link.
| Achievement | Description | Points |
|---|---|---|
| It was DNS | Successfully prove that DNS was in fact the problem | 10 |
| I took down the whole network | Apply changes during the middle of a work day, without first saving the running config to the startup config | 100 |
| Windows patch broke the server | Temporarily make a server or service unavailable due to applying vendor prescribed patches or updates | 20 |
| MSP didn’t provide much service | Easy. Happens so often you should be able to amass quickly | 1 |
| Running with Scissors | Enabled unsecure service due to vendor requirement | 20 |
| Mission accomplished | Closed Ticket because user no longer works here. | 30 |
| Hands Free | When you’re here and I try that, it suddenly works | 5 |
| Just the Tip | Resolve a support ticket by properly plugging in a cable that was only partially plugged in. | 5 |
| Out of Office | Successfully take two weeks of vacation without anyone calling you about an issue. | 1000 |
| Peon | With a senior title, drop everything to fix a CEO’s minor issue | -5 |
| Who, me? | Dumpster some critical service and successfully recover it without anybody realizing it was all your fault. | 500 |
| Down the Well | Dropped a table in production | 100 |
| Cut it off | Truncate table in production | 80 |
| Claustrophobia | Get sealed into any crawlspace by a non-IT worker who didn’t know you were in there. | -100 |
| Brain Bleach, STAT | Get scarred for life by having to review CCTV footage | -100 |
| Tread Lightly | Get sealed (by non-IT staff) into an attic above offices. | -100 |
| Things that go bump | Get sealed (by non-IT staff) into a crawlspace underneath the floor of offices | -100 |
| Animal Control | Determine that a network problem is caused by local wildlife and successfully remove them from the premises | 500 |
| F*#k it, we’ll do it live! | Successfully set up a production system you have no training for without vendor help. | 1000 |
| Groundhog Day | Have five Mondays in a week | -500 |
| Grossly Incandescent | Legitimately blame light fixtures for a problem | 200 |
| Capa’s Dream | Legitimately blame any solar phenomenon for IT problems | 100 |
| How Do You Know That? | Use skills obtained in a non-IT hobby to fix an IT problem. | 250 |
| IT Crowd | Resolve issue by rebooting | 5 |
| The Desk Rabbit | When working under desk/table, user doesn’t realize you’re there and resumes working | 50 |
| Reconfigure the Primary Power Coupling | resolve issue by plugging it in | 5 |
| Completionist | Carry out password resets for every user in an org | 50 |
| Camper | Both create and deactivate an individual’s accounts, 3 times | 40 |
| Easter Egg | Find something unexpected and noteworthy of a predecessor/old system | 25 |
| The Ol’ Switcheroo | Onboard and Deactivate the same user without them ever starting work | 10 |
| Quickie | Quick question from clueless coworker while on your way to fix urgent issue | 10 |
| Your place or mine? | Fix a client’s problem by going to their house | 20 |
| Not My Monkey | Successfully hand off an issue you have nothing to do with | 50 |
| Walmart Greeter | Successfully roll back a change before anyone notices | 100 |
| You’re alone on this one, Son | When you have a problem and even the company’s support cannot help you because it never happened to anyone else in the world. | -250 |
| Undocumented | Make a post asking about an error code and later edit it with never mind fixed it without saying what you did | -1000000 |
| I am the one | Find a resolution to an error code that isn’t documented anywhere online and post the fix. | 1,000,000 |
| Its not me, its you | ISP says there is nothing wrong on their end, because no one else is reporting it. Later it is deemed to be on their end | 50 |
| Nakatomi Plaza | A critical hard drive failure takes the system down | -50 |
| John McClane | You successfully recover the system from backups | 100 |
| Hans Gruber | The backups didn’t work | -500 |
| That was easy | Fix something just by walking into the room | 50 |
| Miracle worker | Fix something that everyone else thought was unfixable | 100 |
| Ghetto Boys | Take home a decommissioned piece of hardware to destroy it in an act of vengeance for all the trouble it caused | 1000 |
| VMify and forget it | Convert a failing physical server to a VM to avoid having to rebuild it from scratch | 250 |
| Cloud Panic | Realize you’ve made a horrible mistake by moving your workloads to the cloud | -500 |
| Three Envelopes | Do something so catastrophically bad that you are better off updating your resume than trying to fix it | -10000 |
| What is it that you do here again? | Refuse to train up to the point where all of your IT skills become redundant | -1000 |
| Golden Mind | Memorize all of your servers IPs | 500 |
| Obscurist | Find the answer to your issue beyond the 10th page of your Google search | 200 |
| Inception | Deploy a virtual server inside a virtual server | 150 |
| Butter Fingers | Drop and break a peice of equipment worth more than $5,000 | -5000 |
| Fired | Tell a user how incompetent they truely are | 2500 |
| Masochist | Accidentally volunteer for work you didn’t want to do | -200 |
| Security Specialist | Catch a user doing something illegal | 150 |
| .bat Expert | Automate yourself out of a job | -500 |
| The Whisperer | An end user you’ve trained successfully recognizes and deletes a malicious email | 200 |
| Leroy Jenkins | Tell the CTO what you really think | 1000 |
| It Was a Good Day | Consume a healthy lunch, work out, close all tickets and go home on time | 250 |
| Full Circle | Fix an issue after finding a solution you posted online and forgot about | 150 |
| I’m taking credit anyway | The user thanked you for fixing their problem. You didn’t fix it and have no idea why or how it went away on it’s own | 100 |
| Aw Fuck | Execute a command that reset the NIC, while logged in remotely | -100 |
| Aw Fuck Deluxe | Get an Aww Fuck while more than 4 hours drive from the device in question | -2500 |
| Don’t wake Daddy | Successfully patch production environment during off hours without user opening a down ticket during the restarts | 150 |
| I like to live dangerously | deploy to production on Friday after 3pm | 50 |
| Dr. Dump | Diagnosed Issue from Memory Dump | 50 |
| Lie Detector | Audit logs prove the client broke it | 100 |
| Your first time? | use a standard serial cable on APC UPS and bring the whole rack down | 100 |
| Ooopsie | accidentaly reboot the wrong server | 20 |
| Fire Marshal Bill | Server room on fire, sprinklers took care of it | 25 |
| Hey while your here | Get asked to fix another issue not related to why you were there in the first place | 10 |
| What fire? | accidentally set off the Halon fire suppression in the server room | -1000 |
| Shaggy | Take down the whole network and successfully blame someone else | 100 |
| Buddha | Worked a whole day and never spoke to a human soul | 100 |
| Terminator | Execute sudo rm -rfv –no-preserve-root / | -5000 |
| That’s a penis! | Discover a user is looking at porn on the company network | 5 |
| I’m in! | Use an exploit to break in to your own equipment because the creds aren’t known | 50 |
| Areola Bold | Find a user’s porn stash in their fonts folder | 25 |
| Self-destruct | Automate yourself out of a job | 25 |
| Murder | Automate another user out of a job | 25 |
| You Shall Not Pass | Wiped out permissions for thousands of users cause of xcacls | 10 |
| Momma taught me good | Successfully complete a month of backups | 300 |
| Sole Survivor | Keep job despite merger/layoffs, still wind up being the only black dude in the department | 1 |
| Failure’s Not an Option | Recover virtual environment after SAN controllers fail to failover properly | 99 |
| What’s That Smell? | Stay at work for over 36 hours | 13 |
| End of an Era | spinup/spindown of a datacenter | 100 |
| RTFM | Find the solution for something by reading the product manual | 25 |
| Robot Overlord | Write scripts to automate menial, time consuming, life draining tasks. | 1 per task |
| Jedi Mind Trick | Get a problem user or client to admit they were totally wrong without making them feel bad | 50 |
| yOu’Re a WiZarD!!1 | Fix a simple problem (i.e. compact and repair a DB, plug a cable in, etc.), leaving the user in complete awe of your unrivaled technical prowess | 50 |
| Scream Test Artist | Solve a mystery by turning something off and waiting for someone to complain in order to figure out what the hell it is | 100 |
| Task Failed Successfully | Recieve a self-contradicting error message | 20 |
| Just doin’ my job ma’am | Maintain professionalism when the user is gushing after you fix something | 100 |
| You do not talk about Fight Club | Come up with the perfect pun to put in a password and tell no one | 500 |
| Say hello to my little friend! | Have the exact fix for an obscure issue on your USB drive or network share without having to look for it | 1000 |
| Where is your God now? | Crash Task Manager | 2500 |
| DBAs Friend | Successfully patched production database with untested script | 10000 |
| Russian Roulette | Successfully reboot a server with over 600 days of uptime | 250 |
| Error Prone | Make IT coworker google ID10T error code | 10000 |
| Dialtone | Spent 30 hours (in one week) talking to Indian ‘support agents’ that hung up on me when I told them they were wrong | 5 |
| Gutenberg | Wrote the guide to fix an issue that the vendor themselves couldn’t fix | 50 |
| Censored | Posted it to their forum and was banned for ‘posting data that could harm, confuse or mislead other users’ by sharing this guide | -50 |
| Hasta la Vista, Baby! | Delete your own credentials from the network after being laid off | -1000 |
| Trick Shot | Accurately identify an issue without even looking at it | 50 |
| Nothing more permanent | Create a temporary fix that becomes the permanent solution | -1000 |
| What did you just do? | Cause an outage by unplugging the wrong cable | -50 |
| And now his watch is ended | Decommission a machine that’s been in production more than ten years | 1500 |
| Captain Tripps | Have an anti-virus update quarantine critical system files and crash at least 10% of your site. | -1000 |
| Oooh! Shiny! | Take home a piece of hardware that is no longer required by the business | 1000 |