What is your favorite "New guy" experience?

[dlots]

My favorite training tale is we had a new guy who came from the computer tech department, he was good, but he had no networking experiance at all. he had a list of commands that he had learned fixed 90% of what we got, but he had no idea what they did, and some of them could cause issues, so he would type in the command while watching me and telling me what command he wanted to put in.

There was a closet that everything around it was emptied out for construction and no one was connected to.  It was ~5 min walk from our office, so I had someone put in a ticket for it, and looked into his eyes with out flinching as he put in a command that would take down the switch. So then we walked over to the switch to bring it back up, and he learned what each of the commands did

[deanwebb]

"Hey, Dean, this firewall still has telnet enabled!"

"I know. Let me explain why."

One explanation and about 37 minutes later, the new guy is wide-eyed with horror at what went on before he got hired... because he's got to help clean all that up!

[SofaKing]

I was a Specialist in the Army and we were just assigned a new LT.  We told the LT he needed to become sledge hammer certified.  He was a good sport so he went along with it.  We blind folded him and put his beret on the spike.  We then told him he had to hit the spike three times in a row while being blind folded to become certified.  He did good and became sledge hammer certified along with destroying his beret

[dlots]

Sadly I just found a router that had SSH disabled in the VTY line config, only telent was enabled... Yep they actively stopped people from using SSH...  Now I just need to figure out how to find the other ones like it.

[NetworkGroover]

I was a Specialist in the Army and we were just assigned a new LT.  We told the LT he needed to become sledge hammer certified.  He was a good sport so he went along with it.  We blind folded him and put his beret on the spike.  We then told him he had to hit the spike three times in a row while being blind folded to become certified.  He did good and became sledge hammer certified along with destroying his beret

Heh, in the Navy we had a few good ones.
1. Mail Bouy Watch - get a new guy dressed up in full FFE (Fire Fighter's Ensemble) with electrical gloves, safety goggles, and a hook.  Then have him stand watch alongside the side of the ship waiting for the ship to pull up to the "mail bouy" so he could hook our mail and get it.
2. ID-10T forms - send the new guy to the personnel office requesting and ID-10T form... just so he'd remember we'd right it on their hand.
3. For new engineers, before performing daily maintenance, have them fill out a request chit to tighten down the CHENG's nuts..... "CHENG" stands for Chief Engineer - the officer in charge of the engineering division.

Another unofficial one was we had a guy in our workshop who destroyed a 3.5 floppy that was basically garbage.  We convinced him it had vital data on it and he was an idiot for destroying it and it had to be fixed.  We made sure he had proper safety gear (those big electric-proof rubber gloves, safety goggles), and proper tools to fix (tweezers, scotch tape).  Actually had him at it for an hour - even our division officer dropped in and maintained her composure when she saw him and managed to walk out of the space before she started cracking up.

Good times.