Users...

I had a laptop eat itself Thursday night. Don't know when exactly, the user came in Friday morning and found it dead. We have Gold level support on all our machines, so getting a replacement motherboard was a simple matter of calling Dell and not waiting in a queue (queues are for people who're too cheap to pay an extra 1/2% for their hardware, and don't mind waiting weeks to get the machine back. I have next day onsite service, thank you very much.) We thought the onboard ATA controller had died. It did. The problem being that when it died it also killed the drives attached to it. No big deal, just a DVD/CDRW combo drive and a 30GB local drive. Nothing on it but OS and applications.

Except...

This user has been saving all his work for the last two months to the local drive, which in and of itself isn't a mortal sin, as long as they (the users)also take the next step (which this user didn't of course) and back it up to the fileserver which gets conveneniently backed up every night.

Now this will end up being IT's fault because this user holds the title of VP of some sort and we should have been backing up his machine. We don't back up desktops and laptops, we make the users aware of this. We send regular reminders of this. We make it clear where and how the users should be saving all critical program and corporate data. There are policies in place stating all this. These policies were signed off on by our CEO and COO. This will be our fault in spite of all this. Watch.

EDIT: Holy shit. I'm in shock. This person actually admitted he was at fault. He has requested we keep the drive and send it off for data recovery, which I'm more than willing to do, but he'll have to explain to the higher ups why a simple hardware failure is going to cost us multiple thousands of dollars to deal with instead of a couple hours of my (or some other IT staff's) time as per usual to get the PO signed.

Users...

I had a laptop eat itself Thursday night. Don't know when exactly, the user came in Friday morning and found it dead. We have Gold level support on all our machines, so getting a replacement motherboard was a simple matter of calling Dell and not waiting in a queue (queues are for people who're too cheap to pay an extra 1/2% for their hardware, and don't mind waiting weeks to get the machine back. I have next day onsite service, thank you very much.) We thought the onboard ATA controller had died. It did. The problem being that when it died it also killed the drives attached to it. No big deal, just a DVD/CDRW combo drive and a 30GB local drive. Nothing on it but OS and applications.

Except...

This user has been saving all his work for the last two months to the local drive, which in and of itself isn't a mortal sin, as long as they (the users)also take the next step (which this user didn't of course) and back it up to the fileserver which gets conveneniently backed up every night.

Now this will end up being IT's fault because this user holds the title of VP of some sort and we should have been backing up his machine. We don't back up desktops and laptops, we make the users aware of this. We send regular reminders of this. We make it clear where and how the users should be saving all critical program and corporate data. There are policies in place stating all this. These policies were signed off on by our CEO and COO. This will be our fault in spite of all this. Watch.

EDIT: Holy shit. I'm in shock. This person actually admitted he was at fault. He has requested we keep the drive and send it off for data recovery, which I'm more than willing to do, but he'll have to explain to the higher ups why a simple hardware failure is going to cost us multiple thousands of dollars to deal with instead of a couple hours of my (or some other IT staff's) time as per usual to get the PO signed.

Users...

I had a laptop eat itself Thursday night. Don't know when exactly, the user came in Friday morning and found it dead. We have Gold level support on all our machines, so getting a replacement motherboard was a simple matter of calling Dell and not waiting in a queue (queues are for people who're too cheap to pay an extra 1/2% for their hardware, and don't mind waiting weeks to get the machine back. I have next day onsite service, thank you very much.) We thought the onboard ATA controller had died. It did. The problem being that when it died it also killed the drives attached to it. No big deal, just a DVD/CDRW combo drive and a 30GB local drive. Nothing on it but OS and applications.

Except...

This user has been saving all his work for the last two months to the local drive, which in and of itself isn't a mortal sin, as long as they (the users)also take the next step (which this user didn't of course) and back it up to the fileserver which gets conveneniently backed up every night.

Now this will end up being IT's fault because this user holds the title of VP of some sort and we should have been backing up his machine. We don't back up desktops and laptops, we make the users aware of this. We send regular reminders of this. We make it clear where and how the users should be saving all critical program and corporate data. There are policies in place stating all this. These policies were signed off on by our CEO and COO. This will be our fault in spite of all this. Watch.

EDIT: Holy shit. I'm in shock. This person actually admitted he was at fault. He has requested we keep the drive and send it off for data recovery, which I'm more than willing to do, but he'll have to explain to the higher ups why a simple hardware failure is going to cost us multiple thousands of dollars to deal with instead of a couple hours of my (or some other IT staff's) time as per usual to get the PO signed.