Where I used to , work we had a real old school technician. He was an electronic engineer by trade, and had got into computing almost by accident. His employer needed someone to support their new PDP, and he ended up doing it purely as a result of the act he had some electronics knowledge.
When I first started working at the company, I shared an office with him, so we got talking. I also got used to the smell of burning, and the slight pop as something he was working on either exploded or caught fire. His electronics knowledge came in handy a fair bit. We operated several computer labs, and needed wierd bits of hardware more often than you'd think. He built his own Ethenet cabe and socket tester, which didn't do anything that you couldn't do with a low end commercial tester. It *did* cost a lot less though.
Another project involved a video editing lab we'd set up. Because students frequently needed to capture video (analogue only at that time), we needed the students to be able to plug and unplug stuff at will but we didn't want them messing around at the back of the PC. We had £5k broadcast quality capture cards, we *really* didn't want the students messing round with them.
So, this technician designed quite need breakout boxes. The box offered composite video, s-video, line level stereo audio phono sockets. It offered all that in both inputs and outputs. It also had a stereo 3.5mm headphone jack, which was amplified. A neat, if not exactly pretty, unit.
He also dabbled a bit with scripting, but wasn't always careful. I noticed one day that a lot of the software i maintained in the lab had started complaining it wasn't installed properly, or otherwise malfunctioning. This was preventing tutorials, so I had to solve it ASAP. I would also have to notify my boss because there would have been complaints.
After comparing a fresh install (done from the original disks) of one of the applications that was failing, with the install that was failing, I noticed that the failing install had no image files. No JPGs, No Gifs, No Pngs. This was what was then called "Multimedia" software, so the image files were part of the install.
Concerned we had files going missing, so therefore concerned we had a virus on the machines that was somehow being missed by the anti virus software we used, I talked to all the technicians, asking if they'd noticed anything..
That's when this technician stepped forward. We had a problem with the machines having too small a system drive (for whatever reason, we used an image with a tiny C drive and a D drive taking the rest of the space, and had the applications installed on the D drive), and he'd noticed that students, as they were browsing the internet, were using a lot of space on this drive, so he wrote a script that over night, logged on to each machine in the lab, copied any images to his machine (yes, for the reason you probably think), then deleted the original. When I complained, he altered the script to limit where it looked.