I was working in a large agriculture & construction equipment company as a contracted desktop support technician back in ’97 or so. We were installing Windows NT 4.0 on a number of workstations when a new hot-shot technician was hired on and brought out on site to assist us with our deployments. He was touted as being the golden-child of our group because he had all of his Microsoft certifications.
He arrived on site, and we got him started right away on an issue we were having with a particularly difficult NT installation in another office not too far from where we were working.
We were working along on our tasks when about 5 minutes passed, and he came back and sheepishly asked “how do you log in?”
Apparently, he had never experienced the ctrl+alt+del key combination of the NT logon and didn’t know what to do.
Never mind that it actually tells you what to do on the screen, but I digress.
[Picture Source: nedrichards (CC)]
Next up: Have him help with an old Novell server. CTL-ALT-DEL has special powers there!
All those Microsoft and Novell certs in the 90s were just pointless. Without any practical experience they were useless pieces of paper. Couldn’t tell you how many times I needed a hired someone with the NT Admin certs to set up an in lab network for testing and when handed the NT disks, pointed to the server and told the names and settings to use to setup a new NT network the first words out of their mouths were always “How do I do that?” 😛