Facebook prank sent techie straight to Excel hell

It's another Monday, dear reader, which means the working week has begun anew. On the bright side, it also means another dose of the reader-submitted tales of IT hijinks we call Who, Me? This week our hero – if we can call him that – is a jokester we'll Regomize as "Mark" who once worked for a huge corporate in the kind of …

[Andy Non]

Flying office chair

Back in my day Facebook was unheard of. Doom was the time waster of choice in the IT dept. I wrote some extra levels for the game and my colleagues were always up for the challenge. One colleague was tentatively exploring a poorly lit, sinister corridor when he noticed a small gap in the wall. He tried to peer through the gap and brought his face closer to the monitor. Suddenly a Boss appeared and stuffed a rocket into his face at point blank range. Startled, he flew backwards on his office chair and crashed into metal filing cabinets behind him, bashing his head and effing and blinding. The rest of us just cracked up laughing.

[simonlb]

Re: Flying office chair

Ah, the Doom editor. Didn't use it on Doom but for Doom II, I made quite a few extra levels with that and still play them today occasionally. Imagine starting the level and there is a Cyberdemon stood right behind you giving you about a second to move before you get a rocket in the back of the head. Fun.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Flying office chair

What's this got to do with the article?

[Pascal Monett]

In our office it was Quake

We were doing "network stress tests" during the lunchbreak. It became such a success that our little room, fir for three, was often occupied by six howling monsters during lunch hour.

One day, we were really getting on with the destruction and the howling glee. Unfortunately, that day, one of our colleagues in the next room had scheduled that time for a business call.

Needless to say, we were soon relocated to the basement, and that was the end of our network stress tests.

[Mooseman]

Re: In our office it was Quake

"We were doing "network stress tests" during the lunchbreak."

We used to run similar tests in the wee small hours (working for an international parcel delivery service it was either insanely busy overnight or dead quiet) - 4 of us used to play in various hubs including London, Brussels and the Midlands. Great fun!

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: In our office it was Quake

Cstle Wolfenstein. Unfortunately I found the apparent motion would make me sick, so couldn't play very long. Had to give it up for other pursuits. more of a pc test than a network test.

[ITMA]

Re: In our office it was Quake

And what a great "network stress testing" tool Quake was/is LOL

Ah.... But did you install the "bombs" wad pak and neglect to tell one particular colleague - who then wondered what the f*** was going on when he was hit by homing missiles and gib gun rounds from everyone else as we strained to keep straight faces.

[Robin]

Re: In our office it was Quake

We got given the thumbs up to play Unreal Tournament at lunchtime, which was great. Although I often wondered what non-IT employees thought when they walked past our department at lunchtimes to see us all staring intently at our screens in silence, only for one of us to suddenly exclaim "you bastard!" after being shot by a camped sniper.

[Ol'Peculier]

Re: In our office it was Quake

Where I worked at the time it was the done thing to hit the page button on the phone, shouting "got you!" and hearing "you bastard!" from teh floor above.

Happy days...

[Lord of Cheese]

Re: In our office it was Quake

For me and a mate it was Commander Keen, Hexen and Heretic, we had an office with just the two of us in desktops strategically placed away from casual gaze. We had been given notice our jobs were at risk with notice set at 6 months so I think fair game we were slacking however our newly in post Chief Exec (who ordered the reorg) wandered past, popped his head in and cluelessly said "good to see people hard at work" as we furiously concentrated on said games before wandering off none the wiser...

[Antron Argaiv]

Re: In our office it was Quake

xnetrek

Brought the R&D [yellow cable] Ethernet to its 3 Mb/s knees. After which, play was decreed to be allowed only after 4 PM.

[An_Old_Dog]

Quakers

Management allowed us the use of office computers to play Quake, but only after 17:00. At that time, our tech group was sited in a huge U-shaped "bullpen" made of cubicle dividers. We had more players (the other tech group was in basement, networked via 4 Mb/S Token Ring, while we bullpen-dwellers had 10 Mb/S Ethernet) than PCs in the bullpen, so extra players began temporarily borrowing "unused" office PCs. Some players, seeking any advantage, would borrow higher-spec PCs from various offices.

It became so unwieldy that we began bringing our home PCs to a designated host's house on Saturdays, setting up folding plastic tables and chairs, running Ethernet cables down stairwells, out into garages and onto backyard patios, etc. Of course there was food, beer, caffeinated beverages, a large TV showing SF movies and cartoons, and such.

As a side-effect, we became very good at "flash networking"!

[Maximus Decimus Meridius]

Sales Manager Hell

Years ago, the company I was working for was moving premises but the actual move date kept getting delayed for various reasons. The sales manager had spent a fortune on mugs, notepads etc. with the new address, phone number etc. on for giveaways at an upcoming international expo. In my youthful wisdom, I decided to fake a fax from BT saying that as the move was taking so long, they had had to reassign the phone numbers and new ones would be generated.

One of the directors was in on the joke. He hauled the sales manager into the boardroom and gave him a real earful about wasting so much money. The SM turned an interesting shade of red and would have rung the poor chap at BT (who's name I had found and signature forged) to give him a real earful if he hadn't been restrained and let in on the joke.

He was never the same again.

This was also the same sales manager who never actually went out of the office but was always demanding a car phone (yep - it was that long ago). He was presented with a new mobile at the works Christmas do, all wrapped up. His face was a picture. Even more so when he unwrapped in and it was a box of Smarties in the shape of a phone.

[I ain't Spartacus]

Re: Sales Manager Hell

We had an obnoxious loud, shouty finance director. Who once walked out of his little corner office into the main office swearing and shouting and smacking his hand into the big echoey filing cupboards with several massive bangs while I was on the phone right next to him. Proper toddler tantrum. Guess he'd had an annoying phone call.

That Christmas "secret Santa" bought him a megaphone. I couldn't laugh too much because he was absolutely furious!

Which of course made it even funnier.

This being a "Who Me?" article, I have to confess that it wasn't me - although I sort of wish it had been. I drew someone I liked, so they got a nice present from secret me.

[jake]

Re: Sales Manager Hell

About a billion years ago in Internet time, call it roughly 1985, my Boss and I were in my office talking to the company owner on the speaker phone. The guy in charge of Advanced Manufacturing slammed into the office, making all kinds of demands, threatening us with firing and worse of we didn't drop everything to do his bidding. Until the owner's voice came out of the telephone, saying three magic words: "Dave, you're fired." ,,, My Boss was given the newly vacated AdvMan seat the following morning, and I took over his position. The owner cautioned both of us separately "Play fair with everybody, I don't like assholes". Needless to say we took him at his word.

[Anonymous Anti-ANC South African Coward]

Re: Sales Manager Hell

"I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid you've been fired"...

[An_Old_Dog]

Re: Sales Manager Hell

"Apology accepted, Captain Needa." (Vader turns.)

"YOU are Captain, now. Do not fail me."

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Sales Manager Hell

That's a fake story Jake, you're a total lying idiot. I can't wait til your heart bursts.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Sales Manager Hell

If a prank affects someone's wellbeing, well, it's not really a prank.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Sales Manager Hell

Pranks are a form of bullying.

[Terry 6]

Re: Sales Manager Hell

It's certainly difficult to do that sort of thing without it being bullying.

[SnailFerrous]

I was expecting a regonimised Crowdstrike (ex) employee this morning.

[Kevin Johnston]

The ones not chained to their desks covered in blood sweat and tears are hiding in a filing cabinet in a basement with signs on the door saying 'beware of the leopard'

[spacecadet66]

Sounds like a decent place to work undisturbed on updating one's resume.

[Anonymous Coward]

Sounds like a decent place to work undisturbed on updating one's resume.

FTFY.

[Hazmoid]

Upvote for the Douglas Adams reference :)

[Anonymous Coward]

It will happen ... but their PC is not working for some reason !!!

:)

[An_Old_Dog]

Windows PC CrowdStrike Temporary Workaround

.... a Linux or Unix distro which runs entirely from bootable media!

[PM.]

Nothing funny about it, i guess

[Anonymous Coward]

you guessed right, I've repaired six of the bastards today, five of them went okay.....

[Mike007]

I might find it funny if it was submitted by the person who forced that junk on to perfectly good computers, except that these stories don't normally end in people being fired :(

[Michael H.F. Wilkinson]

I had a little bit of fun putting a program named CRASH.EXE in the directory of the executables of an image processing system I was developing back in the days of MS-DOS. The more inquisitive users of course wondered what this program did. What it did was redirect the keyboard interrupt to my own interrupt handler, which did nothing whatsoever with any key press. It then caused the screen to flash and put a message in the centre stating the system had crashed. No key press could stop the program, so a hard reset was the only option.

On a single-user, single-tasking OS this could be done safely because no other program could be running. It did cause some consternation with people sheepishly admitting they had crashed the system, and could I, being both admin and developer, set things right. Generally I got very evasive answers when I asked them what they had done to cause the system to crash. Some owned up they had run CRASH, whereupon I would ask them what they had expected such a command to do. Some mumbled they thought it might be a game. Some bolder ones asked why such a program was on the system in the first place, and I said it was there for testing purposes.

Testing users, that is, not the system.

[Anonymous Anti-ANC South African Coward]

Should have made crash.exe grab the speaker and play a high-pitched whistling beep that go on and on...

[PRR]

> made crash.exe grab the speaker and play a high-pitched whistling beep that go on and on...

DRAIN.COM asked "Press any key".....

>>> Standby while water is drained..... èóøè!þè‰ (strange gurgles)

>>> Spin dry cycle starting..... èrøè ý¿ (didn't know a 5150 PC could make these sounds??)

>>> System OK now.... you may proceed.

Maybe only 15 seconds, but the first unexpected time, it went on forever.

[Terry 6]

Just reminded me. I had a child referred to me who could be particularly annoying ( apart from the issues I was working with him for). One day I was working with him in his own classroom while the rest of the class were out for some reason or other. I recorded his voice on the classroom PC and made it the Windows start up sound. After that whenever his teacher turned on the computer his voice would say chirpily "Hello Miss".

I think I probably relented and changed it back at the end of term.

[James O'Shea]

You should have borrowed the power mac crash sound from Apple. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ckx1J0WDrZA

I remember the first time that I heard it...

[Anonymous Coward]

metalpipe.wav

[RAMChYLD]

> You should have borrowed the power mac crash sound from Apple

First time I heard it I actually panicked. I missed the tire skidding part and only heard a loud bang.

I thought something inside my prized Beige G3 had exploded.

(As for what I did to get that, well, I added more RAM to the machine. It turns out that the specific Mac model doesn't like double sided 512GB PC133 SDRAM sticks...)

[Andy the ex-Brit]

In high school (age 16 or so) the PCs in the computer lab ran something DOS-like and were used mostly to write and run BASIC programs, which everyone stored on floppies. I wrote a program that just showed the C:> prompt and watched for a disk to exist in the A drive. Then it showed a growing row of dots . . . . . . . followed by FORMAT COMPLETE while reading the A: drive to make the appropriate sound and blinking light.

Then it started POKEing random memory locations so that the computer would lock up and nobody could see my code. I'm sure I caused a few moments of panic.

[Terry 6]

I used to have to set up a couple of BBC micros during lunch for a lesson straight afterwards. For some reason (Obv a long time ago) I could neither do this at the end of the lunch break, nor lock the room. I put lots of "Do not touch " signs on. And I'd get back in after lunch and the machines had been messed with and I had to redo it all hurriedly. After this had happened a couple of times I set a little programme running which displayed a do not touch message. But when a kid did touch it it set off all sorts of alarms and warnings and flashing lights and scary messages. It only got triggered once .

[John Brown (no body)]

"Some owned up they had run CRASH, whereupon I would ask them what they had expected such a command to do. Some mumbled they thought it might be a game."

It's entirely possible that some of them remembered an arcade game called Crash. Think a primitive version of Pacman, not a maze though, just concentric tracks, two race cars going in opposite directions with gaps at the four compass points where you could change lane, one lane when in fast mode, two lanes in slow mode, eat all the dots without the computer car crashing into you. Old enough that the first "proper" game I wrote was a copy of it in BASIC for the Commodore PET, but still sometimes found in pubs and arcades many years later.

[swm]

At MIT, decades ago, people kept crashing the PDP-6 by finding bugs in the operating system. So they added a command "crash" that crashed the machine. After people trying the command and crashing the machine it turned out that crashing the machine wasn't a challenge any more and the machine became very reliable.

[Doctor Syntax]

I'd have thought it was a bit risky upsetting the person who uploaded your time-sheet. You might expect to end up having to explain that you weren't late in, early out 3 morning this week and didn't have a 2 hour lunch break on Wednesday.

[Tomato Krill]

Sure but not as risky as running MSExcel in the context of a user with permission to write to HOSTS….

[Korev]

When Facebook was that new, a lot of places still had people running XP in admin mode.

Icon because it was obviously a dumb thing even back then...

[Korev]

And the places that really hated their staff might have been running Windows ME

[jake]

And businesses that were (are) serious about doing business had (have) the likes of Facebook blocked at the routers/firewalls ... except for people who can show a business case for using it at work.

[David Hicklin]

>> Facebook blocked at the routers/firewalls

Was this really a thing in the very early days of the internet ??

[jake]

Facebook didn't exist in the very early days of the Internet.

But it's been a fact for every router/firewall that I manage since before Facebook became widely known, call it 2005ish.

The corporate network and Internet connection is for doing corporate business, not for the employees to waste time on anti-social media.

[Anonymous Coward]

Except for all of the shitty software that would not run unless the user was a local admin.

At my previous job, our ERP software needed to be run as local admin. I challenged this with their support, and was told the only supported configuration was if the user was a local admin. I once spent most of a week trying to figure out what permissions to tweak to be able to get it to run without local admin privileges, but no luck.

This was FOUR YEARS AGO!!!

[RAMChYLD]

I'm betting it's the part where it uses some obscure kernel-level DRM that breaks if not run as local admin.

[Anonymous Coward]

Nonono.. it's the bit where it queries "Am I running as admin?", and horks up a lung if not.

[Anonymous Coward]

I was expecting the macro would have updated the offender's timesheet to log 8hrs/day of "browsing Facebook" instead of what he actually claimed.

[Will Godfrey]

Rather different

At one place I worked our favourite was wheely chair races along the office, which had a long wide corridor between the desks and the windows. One day we were gobsmacked when the boss appeared unexpectedly, grabbed a chair and joined in. It transpired he had known all along we were doing it, but wasn't bothered as long as the work got done on time.

[jonsg]

Re: Rather different

Not relevant to the original article but to your comment: in one previous workplace in the mid-90s, we had an office unicycle. If you got bored or frustrated, you got on the unicycle and rode it up and down the office for a while.

Remarkably, no-one got seriously injured. Even more remarkably: as the department klutz, I didn't even manage to sprain anything. On the other hand, I never quite got the knack of riding it either.

[PB90210]

Re: Rather different

Top Gear's Jeremy Clarkson drove a Peel P50, the world's smallest (footprint 54x39 in) production car, round the BBC's offices

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peel_P50

[Doctor Syntax]

Re: Rather different

He also drove a 3-wheeler round S Yorkshire turning it over on roundabouts & corners. The in-joke was the selection of people who helped to turn it back on its wheels. The faces would be familiar to local viewers, less so to the bulk of the Top Gear audience.

[ArrZarr]

Re: Rather different

And just to defend the Robin's good name, it was specifically weighted to roll at the drop of a hat.

[Herby]

Re: Rather different

The Reliant Robin I believe had a locked differential, so when it started to roll, it was difficult to stop. Modification to enhance production values.

[upsidedowncreature]

Re: Rather different

Famous Yorkshire people weren't they? I remember Phil Oakey of the Human League was one, although I don't know how familiar he'd be to a global audience.

[Terry 6]

Re: Rather different

In the days before all this computer wizardry I took a temporary job in a mail order company. It was soon pretty obvious why it was a temporary job. Our task was to cram little slips of paper with customer details cut from a a magazine into plastic wallets extracted form some filing cabinets and then return these wallets.They fitted so tightly that our fingers bled from the cuts. And it was very visible that, like archaeological layers, the wallet files would start ordered, then get less and less so as the staff got more and more fed up. And then a new bunch of temps would be brought in, it would get ordered again. Rinse and repeat. So I decided to just take the piss until I got fired. The manager was never there, so that was pretty easy. Wandering round the building holding a clipboard filled a few hours each day ( I'd found some in a cupboard). Then I set up a "Who could make the biggest ball of rubber bands" competition. This eventually deteriorated into flicking the rubber bands over the partition into the manager's office. Bonus points if they landed on his chair.

This was at the time of the Woolworth's fire in Manchester, which interrupted proceedings for a couple of days- it was just across the road from us. But once normal disservice was resumed there was some brief chair related shenanigans- until we were all marched down to Personnel and released back into the wild.

[PRR]

Re: Rather different

> ...details ....into plastic wallets extracted from some filing cabinets and then return these wallets.They fitted so tightly that our fingers bled from the cuts. .....the wallet files would start ordered, then get less and less...

New Jersey Division Of Motor Vehicles, 1960s-1970s. Vehicle registrations and driver licenses were documented on flimsy paper filed in long tubs. You who started DP in olden days may have been taught "tub files" as a computer concept, but it goes to paper (and dang-sure to Mesopotamian stylus on clay tablets).

Guy I knew got in on the end of that era. (He was the Man who moved heavy tub-files for the mostly female longterm workers.) He started studying Electronic Computers. (They wudda taught PL/1 but real life was dominated by COBOL; in state systems, for another four decades....)

[jake]

Re: Rather different

Ah, yes. Chair races ... Quite common in campuses all over the young Silly Con Valley.

Of course the inevitable happened. Being youngish engineers, we motorized them. Naturally. We had a stock of 12V Gel cells (used to keep the sonalerts beeping in the event of power failure, and long since disconnected as bloody useless). We also had quite the collection of scrapped 1960s & '70s computers with perfectly good motors and pulleys and etc, Steering was rudimentary, mostly friction of one sort or another. Driven wheels came from old, unused carts that used to be for pushing bunches of punch cards and attendant printouts from place to place. You get the idea ...

Also naturally, "Who needs brakes‽‽‽" ...

One of my comrades managed to spin out in the sweeper (fastest part of the "track"), and put his foot out to stop his progress with the main door to the room. He missed, hitting the drywall next to the door. And put his foot through it. And then through the sheet on the outside. Just as a corporate director was leading a group of VIPs through.

The VIPs bust out laughing, and the director just shrugged & decided to see the funny side. Fortunately,

Nobody got fired, but we were strongly advised to keep our extracurricular activities off campus.

We also discovered the contractor had skimped ... the sheet-rock was 1/4", not fire-rated 5/8".

[A.P. Veening]

Re: Rather different

We also discovered the contractor had skimped ... the sheet-rock was 1/4", not fire-rated 5/8"

Nice silver lining, I do hope the contractor received his just rewards for that.

[dmesg]

Re: Rather different

My brother was an F-16 and B-1 engine mechanic back in the day. His shop had a large, perfectly smooth and level titanium table used for alignment and calibration. It also had a raised border guard all around it.

Flash back to the 60s and 70s, when as kids we had a game called Battling Top (https://nostalgiacentral.com/pop-culture/toys-games/battling-tops/). Great fun, we played it often.

Flash forward to my brother's shop. Yep. He introduced his fellow mechanics to the game, only this time played on a titanium surface by people with metal-shop equipment at their disposal. Lunch and break times saw fierce competition. All manner of designs evolved -- one top carried, via bearings, a non spinning frame with arms that would drop magnets when the top was jostled, hoping to destabilize competitors (nice idea but it didn't win).

IT angle: one day someone brought in a platter assembly from a disk pack. For the youngsters here, these were several metal platters about a foot in diameter, stacked several inches (or higher) on a heavy metal spindle. This particular assembly had a spindle that, at bottom, came down to a precisely machined cone with a sharp point. Quite literally, this thing was made to spin.

The guy spun it up with an air compressor.

Seconds later, everyone in the shop dove for cover as the other tops began making contact -- and ricocheting off equipment on the way to embedding themselves in the walls.

No one dared touch the assembly until it stopped spinning on its own. The point on the spindle was now nicely rounded.

They declared the fellow the Ultimate and Eternal Lord of Battling Tops and never played again.

[spacecadet66]

Re: Rather different

And I bet you'd have run through a wall for that boss if he'd asked you to. This is what actual good management looks like.

[A.P. Veening]

Re: Rather different

Possible with American wall, less so with European walls.

[spacecadet66]

Re: Rather different

Well I said "good" management, not "great".

[PRR]

Re: Rather different

> wheely chair races.... gobsmacked when the boss appeared unexpectedly, grabbed a chair and joined in. .....he had known all along we were doing it

Where I 'worked', the Boss told her child and child's best friend to race chairs around the "square" corridor. Kept the brats out of her office, and worked-off a lot of excess energy quickly.

It was irritating, mostly cuz I was not invited.

[robinsonb5]

Re: Rather different

I did once go to admonish a co-worker for riding a pallet truck like a scooter (the quickest way to get it from one end of the factory to the other - but a bit risky due to the lack of brakes) - only to discover it was my co-director!

[phuzz]

Re: Rather different

You could have stopped them in their tracks just by dropping a single zip-tie in their path.

[Prst. V.Jeltz]

Facebook was quite a new thing and few businesses had yet devised policies about whether or not it was appropriate to use it

I was amazed when the internet became a mainstream thing , and still to this day to some extent ,that companies felt the need to give all the employees access to it.

Right now as i type this on El Reg for instance Im getting less work done than otherwise.

Obviously I need it to cut n paste everything form StackExchage, just not those other drones in admin.

[Richard 12]

I'm certain that a large part of that was because it'd cost a lot to prevent it, so why bother?

Some people needed internet access for actual work purposes and everyone with a computer needed it to be on the network.

Windows already ruled due to the Excel shenanigans, and had no security whatsoever because the World Wide Web was just a fad that would never catch on.

So better to just trust the employees.

[jake]

"it'd cost a lot to prevent it"

Not really. Default is to block everybody, in and out. Allow only that which is actually needed for the business. Simples.

[wolfetone]

I spent far too long (and continue to do so) to drum in to the users to lock their machines if they're away from the desk.

One colleague was a prick, and didn't particularly like me. So obviously anything I said he would defy. Every time he would leave the computer unlocked I would tell him not to do that. He ignored me.

The thing is I knew he had a morbid fear of spiders. So one day I had enough of his bullshit. So I went on his computer and changed the background to a spider. Full desktop background.

It took 3 hours for him to discover it, as he was shutting his computer down. He saw it, shrieked and threw himself back on the chair straight in to the partition wall behind him. The chair caused a sizeable hole in the wall.

CEO was pissed off with what happened, but I showed her the emails I had sent reminding him of his duty to follow IT policy. So she was still pissed off, but not with me.

He locked his computer from then on.

[MatthewSt]

Our training method was an email from said offender to the rest of the office letting them know that they'd be bringing cakes in the following morning to celebrate IT Security

[wolfetone]

Next time I see a colleague not lock their computer I'm doing that!

[The Oncoming Scorn]

Pharma Security

I used to do the Intel Video flip screens in one department (While telling the offenders co-workers which room I would be in if they wanted to come & tell me what they did wrong or that I would check back in 20 mins), this was the team of Ladies in Quality who travelled the world auditing other plants & bringing back exotic local confectionary to share & poison me.

The two worse ones were a meringue that smelt & tasted of the scent Devon violets & a chocolate liqueur of which the liqueur center in question was brewed from cabbage & had a little piece of the leaf as a courtesy detail suspended in it..

[nonpc]

Our variation (on a VAX VMS system to give an indication of age) was am email admitting irrestable urges of undying love for to prettiest (or not) programmer (stage 1), or to the next level female, or a 100 line email of 'I must not leave my unlocked terminal unattended' to their immediate manager.

I found myself with an autorun message of 'No!' and a logoff when I made the same mistake and trying to log back in. I learnt a lot in trying to find how to circumvent it without help from those responsible or who would hold me to ridicule.

[treesap]

Oh man, my go-to when somebody left their machine unlocked was always to rotate or flip their desktop screen. (CTRL+ALT+ arrow key). Given most people didn't already have that shortcut memorized, it was hilarious to watch them Google for the fix while using inverted mouse controls.

(One of the tiny joys lost in my WFH world, haha.)

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh dear. There's a local branch of a national chain where I've witnessed a witless "supervisor" doing stock monitoring with her laptop on the shop floor, often leaving it open and unlocked for many minutes at a time.

Thank you for reminding me of the CTRL+ALT+Arrow.

That'll larn her

[jonathan keith]

Correction..?

I assume the subs had a heavy weekend, and that para twelve should read:

Dave was in his manager's office making all manner of excuses for spending time own social media and pleading not to keep his job

[BenDwire]

Re: Correction..?

Indeed so. Scroll back to the top and you'll see a Send Corrections link - that does what it says.

Just don't try to correct the spelling back to the King's English as they get all snarky /s

[A.P. Veening]

Re: Correction..?

Just what is a snark?

[Allan George Dyer]

Re: Correction..?

A good thing to hunt.

[prandeamus]

Re: Correction..?

The snark was a boojum, you see.

[cyberdemon]

Re: Correction..?

> Just what is a snark?

It's a pint-sized insectoid creature from the game Half-Life. It can jump to head-height and is very aggressive, but short-lived and explodes a few seconds after it is set free

[hammarbtyp]

Disaster Cascade

Back in the day, when dinosaurs roamed the earth and CrowdStrike was just a glint in a corporation eye, there was computer virus called Cascade, whose effect was to randomly drop letters on a DOS window to the bottom of the screen.

A colleague, lets call him Damon (Not because he was the anti-christ, but because that was his name) , was always curious about how such things were achieved and set out recreating the effect, but without the entire virus part. This he achieved, and as a prank it was installed on another colleagues PC (This was the days before logon security), to run up when the PC rebooted (which was something in those days happened quite a bit)

Unfortunately, it was done on a Friday afternoon, and was sort of forgotten about, until Monday when IT came rushing around claiming that we had a major virus outbreak and all PC's had to be shut down, so that they could be examined, and any removable media was to be quarantined.

Fortunately before the hard drives were placed on a funeral pyre, someone fessed up to what had been done and we all had a good laugh about it.

Apart from the person whose PC it was, and IT of course.

[Andy Non]

Re: Disaster Cascade

I did exactly the same thing, knocked up a program that slid the characters on screen down to the bottom, mimicking a virus that was doing the same thing. I only put it on my PC though but managed to freak out an IT guy from head office when I motioned him to my desk and asked him if he knew what was wrong with my computer.

[jake]

Re: Disaster Cascade

"knocked up a program that slid the characters on screen down to the bottom, mimicking a virus "

Available as shareware from the very early days. The file is called fallscr.com, but there may be other varieties with different names ... My (failing) memory suggests I first saw it as a simple prank executable on a CPM box long[0] before the DOS virus version showed up.

_{[0] Long is subjective ... maybe all of 6 or 8 years in this case.}

[l8gravely]

Re: Disaster Cascade

Reminds me of "melt" on my C= Amiga which when run would take a screenshot and then proceed to melt your entire screen down to the bottom. It was really cool and fun to spring on people.

[jake]

Re: Disaster Cascade

Yeah, there were several variations of melt for various GUIs. I wrote a screensaver version for early Sun kit (4.2 and 4.3BSD based).

[Anonymous Anti-ANC South African Coward]

Re: Disaster Cascade

Do you get a Cascade for Windows?

Just as a prank, mind...

[Allan George Dyer]

Re: Disaster Cascade

That's nothing, some guys turned it into a movie franchise!

[mirachu]

Re: Disaster Cascade

Where guys == women.

[Unoriginal Handle]

One colleague at my first IT job would come back from lunch and play a golf game on their computer. To the point where his work was affected, and added to my load too.

So I added a batch file on his computer which replaced "golf.exe". It put up a warning message about unauthorised software being run and the disk would be reformatted to remove it, then it ran chkdsk in silent mode ...

He could actually move really fast to reach that power button when he wanted to ...

[David Hicklin]

I used to play snipes over the Novell network at lunchtimes often with my manager

It was a different world then

[Anonymous Coward]

tech support tech spending too much time on thinkorswim

In the early days of my career, I worked a hybrid job where part of my day was spent working in technical support, and the rest of my day was spend working on helpdesk IT tickets.

One of our other helpdesk techs wasn't very good and it became very apparent that part of this was due to him spending so much time on Thinkorswim trading stocks instead of reading wiki articles to be able to better support the software that he was supposed to be supporting for our customers.

As a result of his poor performance I was routinely being required to neglect my helpdesk duties and work in technical support all day long, because he couldn't keep up with the call volume due to constantly having to put customers on hold so he could go ask other techs for advice on how to handle the current support call that he was working. I got fed up with this and started monitoring his computer's network traffic with Wireshark and discovered that he was constantly on the Thinkorswim site. I had domain admin access to all the workstations in our office, so I remotely accessed the hidden c drive share on his computer and edited his hosts file to redirect any traffic going to the Thinkorswim site to go to our internal wiki site. He came to me complaining about a week later and my response was that someone higher up the food chain in IT must have noticed the Thinkorswim website traffic volume and did the redirect to ensure that the techs in tech support were not wasting so much time on it when they could be doing other activities to better be able to provide technical support. After about two weeks of being blocked from it, I reversed the change, but he never tried to access the site again after being blocked from it.

He became a better tech and didn't have to constantly put customers on hold to get advice from other techs, so I didn't feel bad for blocking him. I am all for making side hustle money when you can but stay on top of your regular job always.

[NXM]

hardware jape

People in an office I used to work in claimed they would ask a trainee to find out what was wrong with a computer. What the trainee didn't know was that the office joker had taped a low-voltage electrolytic capacitor to the back and wired it to mains socket on their own desk. Flick the switch and BANG!

I don't know if they provided new trousers.

[BenDwire]

Re: hardware jape

We were far less subtle in my design lab: Someone would charge up a decent sized capacitor using an AVO Insulation tester (a few kV), then gently lob it towards an unsuspecting victim. They would usually catch it in mid-air, and in doing so touch both terminals. Almost as effective as a cattle prod. Oh how we laughed ... until one day a slightly wiser victim let it fall to the floor and watched it scoot along and weld itself to the legs of a metal chair.

We had a bit of a rethink after that ...

[Martin Gregorie]

Earlier days, simpler amusements....

Back around 1968, when programs were corrected with 12 key manual card punches, our amusements were smpler:

- a plastic flowcharting template and a handful of rubber bands was perfect for office snipers

- a pencil and two punched cards would fly quite nicely

A few years later I discovered that a job punched on paper tape could be written that would imitate a George 3 crash on an ICL 1903, using its speaker for the preliminary whistle and the operator's teletype console to output a spoof crash message. I used the paper tape reader to input the job input because, unlike the card readers,it was quiet enough for the job entry not to be noticed.

[Stevie]

Re: Earlier days, simpler amusements....

I made a flying Klingon battlecruiser out of a couple of punch cards while working on a contract at Bitney Powes (name changed).

One staffer tried to harsh my 60s show mellow by stating I couldn't possibly know how it flew, but I went on a two minute monologue about how the canard design I had used would not only fly but was effectively stall proof as the "deck" above the "globe" was set deliberately at a slightly higher angle of attack than the wings, and the "globe" (actually just a 2d silhouette) acted as a rudder until he begged for mercy.

[fishman]

Timeouts

Back in the early 1980's we had a PDP-11/73 as the office computer, running TSX+ (a multiuser version of RT-11). I was put in charge of the computer. The editor program would timeout after a certain period of inactivity, printing a message when it would exit. I had written a program that would allow me to replace a string with another string in any type of file including an executable. So I replaced the timeout message with the message "CPU meltdown - program aborted". One user ran into my office scared that he had broken our computer......

[Elongated Muskrat]

Re: Timeouts

That brings back memories of a time many years ago, as a pre-teen, when I used a disk sector editor to change the branding in Protext on the Amstrad CPC to say "Pootext". This sort of thing is hysterically funny to a twelve-year-old.

[Marty McFly]

Same prank, but for teenagers

From a colleague, years ago... Parent determined their youthful male teenager was frequenting some rather adult websites. Host file DNS entry changed to the IP address for fbi.gov.

After school the next day... The air was heard being sucked out of the room with an astonished shriek.

[NITS]

Re: Same prank, but for teenagers

Some years ago our tween son was doing home school. Part of it was online. More-that-a-bit obsessed with all things LEGO, he kept visiting sites like lego.com when supposedly doing school. A few entries added to the hosts file put an end to that.

I've since confessed to having done it.

[TSM]

Re: Same prank, but for teenagers

Years ago I edited the hosts files on my kids' computers to block Youtube. But I told them I had done it, and this followed several unsuccessful atempts to get them to moderate their consumption.

They'd been using enough to regularly chew through our monthly quota (sometimes before mid-month), causing us to be shaped down to dial-up speeds, which was not acceptable when I had to remote desktop in to work to fix something that had broken. Back then we had 2GB for peak hours and another 2GB for off-peak, but off-peak didn't start until 2am and our batch failures were often before that.

Obviously things are a little different these days :)

[Elongated Muskrat]

Re: Same prank, but for teenagers

I'm pretty sure you can do this with a Pi-Hole. You are using a Pi-Hole as a DNS proxy, right? Right?

I would have thought it was mandatory for basic hygiene with a teenager in the house.

[Anonymous Coward]

Pranks I was lucky to get away with

- Changing my colleague's name to something silly on Exchange right before he sent an all company email

- Throwing a squashed orange at my colleague which missed and went out of the window narrowly missing my manager's face as he walked past

- Organising a Christmas bombardment of a neighbouring team involving 1KG brussel sprouts hurled over the partition between us

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Pranks I was lucky to get away with

I must get one of those sprouts for our next Christmas dinner.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Pranks I was lucky to get away with

Haha should have said 1KG of sprouts. But I like your idea. Also makes me realise I have never considered what the weight of a cabbage might be.

[Elongated Muskrat]

Re: Pranks I was lucky to get away with

1kg sounds about right for a head of cabbage, if it's one of the dense types; I'd say about 500g for one of the less dense pointy hispi type ones.

[Ivan Headache]

Re: Pranks I was lucky to get away with

I think that the post should get more than a kg. Were you thinking ad-hoc payments or a regular celery?

[Manolo]

Re: Pranks I was lucky to get away with

An African or a European cabbage?

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Pranks I was lucky to get away with

European I assume... If the African ones are non-migratory?

[SVD_NL]

Ah, the good old DNS redirect

I remember a story my dad once told me, where someone working for a very large company played an April fools prank on everyone. This was during the early-ish days of the internet.

He redirected the url for a well known newspaper website to his own server. The carefully recreated page had the headline: "[company] files for bankruptcy, thousands of layoffs expected".

Apparently it caused quite the ruckus in that office building.

[parrot]

Re: Ah, the good old DNS redirect

That’s hilarious. I laughed out loud!!

[DS999]

I remember on one consulting gig

I didn't know any of the Windows people but I usually sat around their area since it had nicer chairs. So I heard all the goings on, and there was one guy that was kind of an odd duck that most of them didn't really like. He decorated his desk with very weird and eclectic collection of ... stuff. I'm not sure how even to describe it, it was a little of everything from matchbox cars to taxidermy. I guess he was worried someone would steal his "valuable" stuff so at the end of each workday he'd put it all in several desk drawers and carefully lock the drawers.

One time after he left a couple of the guys epoxied the drawers. Apparently they used really good stuff because it took him a week to find a way in, all the time he was worried whoever did it might have messed with his stuff so he was an angry nervous wreck. He was accusing everyone on the team and most of course knew nothing about it. It was all I could do to keep a straight face because I'm sure if I gave any sign of knowing the culprits he'd have been on me even though we'd never spoken!

[Elongated Muskrat]

Re: I remember on one consulting gig

Yeah, nice way to bully the obviously neurodiverse guy, because punching down is always funny, right?

[Elongated Muskrat]

Re: I remember on one consulting gig

Well, either 5 people missed the obvious implied sarcasm (do I really need to tag it?), or actually think that bullying what one autistic friend of mine refers to as "neurosparkly" people, is perfectly fine. I wonder how many of you lot work in sales?

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: I remember on one consulting gig

Why did they do and how is this funny? It's just plain bullying. Did they shove him in a locker next?

[Daedalus]

"Golf" prank

So there was this Golf program written in Basic back in a time when you could write anything to anywhere without it being traced back. And I took a dislike to it because reasons.

So I edited a line or two to detect when the file's "owner" was using it. Just asking for UserID, and springing the trap if it was him.

Whereupon a message appeared saying he'd been "sent down" as we artlessly put it in those days. Various shenanigans then erased all traces of the trap while sending a message that it had, indeed, hunted and caught the Snark.

Well, I got the message and observed him later staring disconsolately at a printout. Never did let on to him.

Another time during a course where we all had terminals and the ID's popped up on the trainer's screen as we logged in, we decided we didn't like the boring default names and substituted our own. However the list cut off at 6 names or so. Borrowing a tip from Ender's Game, I started prefixing my ID with a space so it would pop up at the top. The final time was when the trainer came in sporting a very loud tie. I changed my ID to " A Nice Tie, Dan"

[Anonymous Coward]

Pre IT role

More a gritty engineering workshop.

- Welded two of the apprentices bicycles to a high ceiling.

- Turned a guy’s Mini sideways in a tight parking spot.