Had a user complain that their PC just stopped working.  Checked the usual suspects like power lead & plug fuse.  Opened up the case to find a fried mouse!

I once had a call from a receptionist of a small accounting firm I looked after, complaining that their Internet stopped working. After taking almost 5 minutes to get her to open a command prompt and type "ping google.com" , I went the next step and talked her through doing the following;

1. Make sure the modem was on (they kept it and their server under her desk of all places, where it was easy to accidentally kick out the plugs) - Yep, it's on!
2. Reboot the modem by turning it off, waiting 30 seconds and turning it back on - Nope, that didn't help!
3. Verifying which lights on the modem were on with her - Yes, all the lights that should be on are on!

After about 10 more minutes on the phone, she begged I visit their office and get the problem fixed because "the boss was getting cranky".. No problem says I, so I jumped in my car and drove the 20 minutes or so to their suites.  Upon arriving at their suites, I headed straight for her desk and jumped underneath to investigate while she trotted off to make me a nice hot cuppa.

Doing my best to ignore the smell of feet and pushing aside all the spare shoes cluttering the space under her desk, what did I find? The power plug for the modem had been kicked out of course! I plugged it back in, accepted the praise about what an IT genius I was, finished drinking my cuppa and headed back to my own office.

Upon returning, I raised the following invoice.

• Emergency call out to repair Internet connection.  Resolved by plugging modem back into power point.

I was expecting the owner to query me on that bill, but it got paid without a single complaint. Go figure :)

Yes, this is a true story!

There are also lots of admin stories here:
http://www.computerworld.com/blog/shark-tank/

Thanks! We are looking for stories from within the EE community!

Not sure if this really counts, because I wasn't the SysAdmin in this scenario; instead, I was the problematic user! But here goes: back when I was a student at CalPoly, we had access to the school's UNIX system for things like our email. I had taken the C and UNIX class, so I knew my way around the command line enough to do more than just use PINE to check my email. I also really liked the SETI @ Home project, so I got the UNIX version of the client and installed it on my account on the school's system and would just let it run.

I think maybe I had it going for a month and I have no idea what sort of resources it was taking up. I imagine it wasn't really all that bad, but eventually, a SysAdmin did shut it down and told me not to do that again...

I imagine college SysAdmins have to deal with a lot of shenanigans like that! :-D