Friday fun: Funniest/weirdest Atlassian experience

[miikhy]

Hey all,

Hope you're doing well today. It's Friday and let's have fun.

I'm Micky, an Atlassian Consultant (I know it doesn't mean that much), I do everything which can help my customer loving Atlassian apps as much as I do :)

My thread for this week is pretty simple: would you give a few lines on your funniest/weirdest experience with Atlassian products? We'll have fun but if we can also catch some inspiration...

Here's mine: I used to work for a platinum partner and we had a customer whose goal was to customize Jira, I've spent the whole week with them and they were very serious with the branding so spent a couple of hours on customizing the CSS set of colors for Jira (grey/blue scales). Their Vice President finally jumped in for approval and we've ended with a very nice light pink header with white font, I've asked if it was related to any new branding she just replied "will fit quite well with my favourite purse". Still wondering if she made fun of me, their Jira is still pink.

Any better story?

Disclaimer: we're not making fun of anyone, there's no dumb request, there's just funny implementation or contexts :)

Have a great Friday community!

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

Not strictly Atlassian, but I left the BBC to join Adaptavist.  My boss knew I knew Altassian stuff, but had not really done much "real" consultancy, so he took me to shadow his next gig.  My first engagement as a Jira consultant was for, um, the BBC.

To be fair, most people don't know the BBC is effectively two separate organisations, and I'd worked with one and the consultancy was with the other.  But still, it was the building next door to the one I'd worked in, the barista in the coffee shop asked me if I wanted the usual on the way in, I got asked why I was wearing a suit about 27 times and must have talked to 25% of everyone we walked past!

The consultancy was to recommend how to get this business unit aligned with the Jira I'd been looking after for the previous 4 years.

[miikhy]

Good one, I'm in Montreal and it's a very common thing to get back somewhere you know 50% of the staff here, especially around Atlassian. Hope they were proud of their consultant :)

[Jerry Ryan Ishmael]

Cool! Montrealer here too.

Which partner are you with? do you attend the monthly AUG at Ubisoft?

[Monique vdB]

@Jerry Ryan Ishmael I'm not in Montreal but my husband works for Ubisoft! (The San Francisco office.) I had no idea the Montreal office had a monthly AUG! That is so cool! 

[miikhy]

@Jerry Ryan Ishmael sorry for the late reply! I'm not with a partner at the moment, working for National Bank of Canada as a direct consultant :) I'm sometimes attending the AUG but really depends on when it is!

What do you do here in MTL?

Cheers

[Jerry Ryan Ishmael]

hey @miikhy, no worries!

I am in Support for tracktik.com ;)

[miikhy]

Cool to know!

Cheers

[Jisu Oh]

Ah I have one episode. I think this is a rites of passage of those working with JIRA.

When I was a noob JIRA user, one evening, I wanted to cleanup our backlog as it was a big mess.

I just learnt bulk change, yay! Y'all get closeeeed then went home happily.

Next morning, we had standup which started off with how many emails everyone received from JIRA notification from bulk change without unchecking the notification checkbox. I believe it was between 30-50.

Luckily devs found it funny but for me.....

[miikhy]

That one. I do feel you. We've all done that. At least it did not have such an impact on your career :)

Similar story in one of the largest Canadian bank, a $600M+ project where an admin had the great idea to bulk transition bugs to use a new workflow. The most critical report at this time was Bug Aging based on transitions, screwed it all, the requester was a VP... That was kind of tricky to deal with :)

Always be safe with bulk operations ;-) thx for sharing

[Jisu Oh]

oh my.... I can't even. Happy to share, hope it helps for others to not make same mistake :P

[Max Foerster - K15t]

Hey guys, 

I got a story as well. When I was working in the field of IT operations for a company years ago, we introduced Jira and Confluence for everyone (~60 users) and just started using it. So learning by doing would be the best description, or trial and error :D Shortly after my collegue left, I was the only (unexperienced) administrator for the Atlassian Suite. After a half year we were heavily relying on these tools (and I loved them already) and I came to work one Friday morning around 8AM and people were already panicking. Nobody was able to log into Confluence, except for a few people (at this point I didn't know why, they still had a valid user session). I knew I left the tool in a perfect state around midnight (No maintenance, testing or something happened that night!). I wasn't able to log in as well.

Confluence was using Jira as external user directory and this link just magically vanished over night. And of course no local administrator was present in Confluence to set it up again (HAHA, things you learn the hard way!). I opened a ticket with Atlassian while trying to find a solution on the internet. Found one at some point and had to create the user in Confluence_DB (not very experienced with DBs back then...). Next problem, my colleague set up the system and did not document the database credentials. In the meantime Atlassian reacted and a really nice and great support guy started to work with me. By pure luck I was able to find out what credentials have been used for the DB (good thing if you know your colleagues well after a years of constantly working together) and then the support guy and I were able to identify at least the problem and faced a few minor problems with creating the local admin account. It took us roughly until noon to fix everything and I was sweating like hell... Looking back it was also fun in a way! ;) But we never were able to identify why all of this happened. The lessons learned are still very valuable to me ;)

[miikhy]

Weird experience! At least you got it back working!

I can imagine how intense that might have been :)

[carolyn french]

I can recall an urgent question here on Community that made me chuckle - I AM STUCK, BECAUSE OF BIDOOF!!!. I hope they got unstuck...

[miikhy]

Nice memory :)

[Monique vdB]

Hahaha I remember the Bidoof thread! 🤣

[Suvradip Paul]

@miikhy - Sorry, it might be a old post but can't resist myself to add the below one.

I don't think it's weirdest or not but sometimes I see myself and peers actively participate, contribute, collaborate in weekend(s) and even in public holiday(s). There is some magic here which gets us involved around the globe and round the clock. 

Happy to hear from others if you disagree or feel free to correct myself.

[Kathy Hart]

When first started working at my present company as a brand new project manager who had never even seen Jira before, I attended a Scrum meeting, and the leader had copied all the ticket numbers out of Jira and put them in a spreadsheet and was going down the list asking each developer what they were working on and how it was going. 

About a week later, I realized that you could do that directly in Jira and not copy the tickets to something else to review them. 

My mind was blown. I was like, shouldn't you be the guys who know how to do this? 

And he didn't even copy the ticket names, just the numbers, so they all had to know what their ticket numbers were to give him updates. 

Maybe they just did it to sucker me into being the Jira Admin.