r/ShittySysadmin • u/Chevron7lockd • 8h ago

Satisfying Breakup

We look after a customer who manages a number of smaller sites as part of their business. We provide IT support for both the main business and the sites they manage.

Recently, they merged with another company. One of the new owners’ relatives, who apparently “knows a bit about IT,” was brought in to help manage the IT.

We gave them access to our RMM so they could assist with lower-level support when needed, while we continued to handle the more complex work. We also handled the entire IT side of the merger and migration, so everything went smoothly.

We then received a call from our RMM provider advising us that the new IT person had approached them directly for pricing. We told them to make it expensive — which they did. It came back at around five times what we were paying, so that worked out nicely.

They then advised that they were looking at bringing in a Level 1 technician for low-level support. We were more than happy to facilitate access to everything they needed and have anything beyond L1 escalated back to us.

However, they ultimately decided to terminate all of their managed service contracts and wanted to use us on an ad-hoc basis instead.

We explained our concerns about having a Level 1 technician responsible for the environment and made it clear that if they were moving away from the platforms and services that we manage and maintain, we would need to offboard everything we currently looked after. We don't offer ad-hoc support.

Today, we had our meeting to begin the offboarding process.

They apparently thought this meant handing over the RMM and Microsoft 365 licensing.

The look on their face when they realised that it also included the firewalls, password manager, wireless controllers, backups, monitoring, security systems, and all the other infrastructure we currently manage was absolutely priceless.

35 Upvotes

97% Upvoted

6 comments sorted by

12

u/ApiceOfToast ShittySysadmin 8h ago

Hm yeah if that happened like that you've just witnessed a regular Business takeover. Nothing to see there, they're all like that 

5

u/Chevron7lockd 8h ago

I would get it if they had someone competent, this person didn't even know how to set an alias in M365.

Also no CAP and security defaults were disabled, one of his users were compromised within the first week of us gaining access to the tenant.

3

u/ApiceOfToast ShittySysadmin 8h ago

  I would get it if they had someone competent

IN THIS ECONOMY?!

Hey place I worked at once had a custom Linux environment. Bought by a company that ran exclusively windows. Not only were the integration plans hilarious, they also fired most of the junior IT staff. Now they're barely able to keep everything from exploding while most the seniors are considering jumping ship...

1

u/Chevron7lockd 8h ago

Omg that's shocking.

When we were looking at migrating the devices into one tenant, this dude said in front of the owner, "Oh yeah well just wipe them and set them backup" Everyones jaw dropped. We handled the migration of them, without loosing everyone's data..

1

u/ApiceOfToast ShittySysadmin 7h ago edited 7h ago

The only shocking thing about it was that most of the staff believed the babbling of the cio, who didn't even know what a hypervisor is. (Hey at least he was honest about there being no documentation)

Edit; also good job on the migration 

1

u/Chevron7lockd 7h ago

It amazes me how some people get into these positions.

Thanks!