As IT pros begin to close the ticket on 2024, we at IT Brew are once again asking tech practitioners not to predict trends for 2025, but to look backward and answer way weirder questions like, Have you ever seen a laptop on fire?
For the second year in a row, we asked our industry friends: What’s the wildest help desk ticket you’ve ever dealt with?
While last year’s responses gave us unpredictable troubleshooting scenarios involving dead lizards and oozing shampoo, this year’s responses didn’t disappoint, and involved celebrity impersonation, WWE-style remediation, and, of course, a laptop on fire.
These responses have been edited for length and clarity.
Nicola De Gregorio, IT technician, Workleap: They dropped, if I recall correctly, a coffee on their computer…So, I decided to open the back lid and just make sure to wipe everything off, or at least blow some air on it to make sure that it would dry. And as soon as I turned the computer around, I opened the back lid, and then I saw small flames coming out of the main board. I just unplugged the battery right away, and I was like, “Well, this computer won’t be used anymore.”
Tom Sepper, chief customer officer, Kinsta: There was suspected abuse on an account of ours, and we had requested an identity verification…The photo was a photo of [actor] Terry O’Quinn and the bar code name at the very bottom of the passport page was Jeremy Bentham. I don’t know if you’ve watched Lost, but Jeremy Bentham was an alias of Terry O’Quinn’s character in Lost.
Rick Vanover, VP of product strategy, Veeam: The perpetrators were not high-tech criminals. It was probably their first rodeo. They went into an operations hub, and with the best of tools—a baseball bat—bashed the front of a rack and a computer that looked like it was important and had very important data. The thought was that that was the surveillance camera. Well, it actually was the facility’s control system that moved the product out of the building. In all that haste of what they stole and their attempted vandalism of the wrong system, they were greeted by local authorities…Our organization got a ticket. “Hey, is this covered under warranty?”
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Aaron Walton, threat intel analyst, Expel (speaking about an earlier experience at an MSP): We got a request where the site user said, “Hey, we’re trying to open this OneDrive document, but we’re entering our passwords. It’s not allowing us to have that. So, one of the tier-one analysts started interacting with it. They tried entering passwords; they couldn’t get the file either. I looked over. I’m like, “Wait, that’s not a legitimate OneDrive. That’s a credential harvester that the site [user] is entering passwords in. And now you’re entering passwords into this, too.”
Jon Marler, manager and cybersecurity evangelist, VikingCloud: I was working at a major ISP…It was a DMCA request for a recording of a WWE wrestling event. Pretty normal, standard stuff, and we sent it to the systems administrator for the website where it was posted…He sent back this email describing how he got rid of this offending content that had been uploaded to his website. And because it was a WWE event, he wrote the email like Joe Rogan describing the most epic wrestling battle that’s ever happened in the world, basically depicting the system administrator wrestling against this illegal content in the most Ric Flair way possible…A whole bunch of us got together and we said, “This guy’s awesome. We need to buy him a wrestling belt.” And so we collected money and we ordered this custom wrestling belt that said, “Commissioner of the internet.”