BOFH: In distributed denial "Is there... something wrong with the internet?" our user asks quietly. "No, no, pretty sure it's working fine," I say, looking over to the PFY's Bittorrent machine which is sucking up so much bandwidth it’s in danger of affecting the QoS of the phone system... "It's just that I can't seem to connect to my home email," the …
Also the hours of fun that can be had dropping random text files onto the user's desktop, followed by the phone calls and blackmail down the pub to ensure deletion of the offending screengrab that has been taken of their machine...
Amazed the user in question never realised that the only reason he was still allowed access to the internet was the fact he was saving the head of IT hours of downloading time every week when the latest episode of Star Trek Enterprise hit the file sharing sites...
Getting in early and moving around an entire team's wireless mice and keyboards is good fun too.
It took until lunchtime before everyone had the right mouse and keyboard combo again!
Anon to avoid recriminations. And because my current workplace only uses laptops. Boo.
Fun and games, but, taking control of our MD's pc and flashing messages like "perv alert" or "Naughty boy" and forcing his mouse and keyboard to move to unblocked smut sites while watching his reaction through my office was class :D
He was not amused when I told him his pc was infected with a virus cos his 15 year old son had been browsing porn and showed him some cache logs (ok I admit they were the FD's personal laptop cache files, who incidentally was a raging queen in his spare time :D ).
Ah all good fun tho, but perhaps a little childish
You'll find the bluetooth versions have better range, and the dongle is equally tiny and un-noticeable.
Failing that, the best way of all is remote desktoping with auto-allow permissions (works best on OS X). You don't even need to be in the same building...
Of course, I've never *ever* tried it....
You're remiss on your BOFH history...it's likely something that is only available to Register Platinum level cookie users, as opposed to us normal "lead cookie" types, the same as one of the BOFH stories was.
In case anyone thinks I'm serious, I'll have a bridge to sell on the eighth day of this week.
Wireless laptop mouse... Fond fond memories... I never went to the extreme of full webcam backed remote operation, but I did have several minutes of fun inducing "parkinson's disease" on a work mate's mouse movement, which would always stop whenever I went to look at the problem for her :-)
Lucky she's such a good sport... Such a good sport infact that she borrowed the wireless mouse and USB receiver and had days of fun with all the others on customer support. Probably not such a good idea though, they kept ringing me to get me to come and have a look!
Being the helpful, approachable techie in the office is such a cross to bear sometimes!
..I'm currently locking horns and doing battle with our ISP. Polite battle, mind, but still. Damn' office connection has been more crappy than normal for a couple of months now. Up and down like a whore's knickers. One probable culprit is BT shifting our 54db ADSL lines to ADSL2+. But I'm still determined to find out where the missing 1Mb/s has gone to. We only had 4Mb/s to start off with.
Now of course if our multi-billion dollar company could spend £10k on us we could prolly have a nice fibre connection - we're only just outside a large town.
Barstads the lot of 'em.
Oh well. Off home soon and I've got 11Mb/s of throughput there :)
One disaffected youth dripping superglue into ball-style mouses on the management floor, and another doing neat tricks with the photocopier paper. screen printing rude words into a whole stack with lemonade. Once dried the copies were fine, but if you stuck them back in to make secondary copies the rude words fluoresced and came out vivid black. Nowadays you can use a stencil and a security aerosol.
Then there was the autocorrect gag - an autocorrect file on the secretaries computer that changed the letters after the director's name - MBE became MZM and it was months before anyone noticed.
Old skool on Win 3.1 Take screenshot of user's desktop folder. Set it as wallpaper. Then minimize the actual desktop folder. User clicks and clicks... Could probably do that yet, on desktop centric folk.
New skool, for Apple Fanbois. Turn buddy loose on my iTunes (he _always_ wants to choose) which drives the stereo from the laptop. Meanwhile, use iTunes Remote on the iPhone to mess with his selection. Starts, stops, restarts, song changes.
(sure you could do this with the appropriate Android app + scriptable Amarok/Rhythmbox)
I had an incident once, many years ago. A co-worker took it upon himself to change my screensaver to Marquee, and set the text to something scatological. I responded by changing a line in his .INI files to SHELL=SOL.EXE. Just incase he was clever, I also added TASKMAN.EXE=WINMINE.EXE.
Mine's the tatty one on the end there, thanks.
I did the same on a 'colleague' using nothing more elabourate than a long thin USB lead (my desk was adjacent to his).
Started with USB mouse 'drifting' (anyone who'se used the early MS optical mice knows they tend to drift) - he changed the mouse 5 times.
Bored, attached a mini USB Hub and a keyboard. (by this time I'd let the rest of the office in on the secret..) random keys, screens appearing mysteriously... It was only when he unplugged it ready to do a full rebuild and I heard 'You Bastard!' I knew I'd been rumbled.
Mind you, I'd had him going for nearly 6 weeks....
Happy daze.....
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