Same old
Before computers (remember those times?) if a colleague left documents at the desk unattended, they could expect "funny" cactus shaped pictograms to appear seemingly out of nowhere.
Welcome, dear reader, to another installment of Who, Me? in which Reg readers share tales of techie woe to remind you that your day could, in fact, be worse. This week's hero is someone we'll Regomize as "Don" who worked the help desk at his county's largest employer some twenty or so years ago. Like many help desks of the …
In the early noughties we often used to have fun with a colleague (and it came both ways, we got as good as we gave ! ), for example swapping the tin of M&S curry in his lunch-time procured shopping in the communal fridge for a tin of dog food (an easy label swap), putting kippers in his briefcase, inserting "adult" magazines into the pile in his in-tray (remember those??) and so on.
Anyway, one time when working on a code specification document he left his PC unattended and (foolishly !) unlocked, so whilst he was away we had some fun in the MS Word dictionary, adding some auto-replacements. First of all was his name (whenever he typed "Gary" it auto-changed to "Gazza"), "floating point" became "flossing point"....and then there were some more risqué ones (I'll let you use your imagination). Some he spotted, some he didn't.
Luckily all documents went through in an internal review before being sent out, so that's when a lot of our fun came to light (along with sworn future vengeance and retaliation).
> Back in the day, I never heard the term "cannabis" used to refer to grass, weed, MJ, etc. It's only since it has become legal that it's been called cannabis (at least, here on the left side of the pond)
Must be who/where you hung out. It's been current most of my life.
Wikipedia: "Cannabis is a Scythian word. The ancient Greeks learned of the use of cannabis by observing Scythian funerals, during which cannabis was consumed." Scythians are like 5000 BC.
Google nGram Viewer shows printed use back before 1880, rising to peak in 1972, again peaking 2010 period. Similar in US and UK.
A Dutch Funding agency is name "NWO" I spent a lot of time getting frustrated that Word would constantly replace it with "NOW", even though I had autocorrect switched off. Then I found the "Replace as you type" feature. Killing that made live a little more bearable. Thank goodness said funding agency now also releases its application forms in LaTeX.
The one I heard about was someone who was writing their biology-related PhD thesis, and some wag changed every instance of "organism" to "orgasm".
The even more evil programmer's equivalent is to randomly replace semicolons (';', Unicode character 003B) with the Greek question mark (';', Unicode character 037E).
Probably the French humor antibodies in me (they/we keep putting canned laughs on pranks where people get hurt or really scared), but any prank where the victim can get hurt / suffer real repercussions fails to make me chuckle.
It's like leaving a chuck key on a lathe's chuck - the operator is supposed to verify before starting the lathe, yes, they should know better, yet when they get it deep in an eye socket I somehow don't see it as just their fault.
Back in the early 90s, my Uncle did tech support for a local company, and decided to play a prank. He'd read something about hacking the company PABX, and used what he'd learned to prank a friend.
He bypassed the restrctrictions on calling premium rate lines the company had put on the PABX, and attempted to transfer the call to his friend.
He got a call from his boss a few days later, asking to see him.
Apparently what had happened is that when he transferred the call, because he'd bypassed the restrictions improperly, the call had got stuck on hold in the system and did not transfer. Three weeks later, the company got a £1500 phone bill, and got the company that installed the PABX in to investigate, when the engineer found what had happened. That PABX had helpfully logged everything, including where the call started..
So, my uncle was called in, as the user of the extension that actually made the call. I don't think he had to pay the money back, but he was fired. I suspect he didn't have to pay the money back because the system really should have hung the call up when it wasn't answered after a while, and any tribunal would have pointed that out.
Personally, I wouldn't do that sort of stuff, not even as a prank, but if I did, I would have initiated the call on the user's extension. Not my own.
That said, some people are that stupid. I was called into my boss one day to explain why there were hundreds of pounds worth of international calls made by my extension. I was confused by this, as I make any personal calls on my mobile (I get free mminutes, so it's not worth me using my office extension for personal calls, and at the time, didn't have any family or friends abroad, so no reason to make personal international calls).
Wanting to sort this out, I got the swtichboard operators to send me a list of calls made by my extension. It was then I noticed something. Every single international call was made when the building was closed to staff, so I couldn't have made the calls even if I'd wanted to. Turns out one of our security guards was going into my office every night, and calling his family. He was fired.
Security guards are poorly paid and often looking to "supplement" their income. I know of a couple of cases where they were caught:
1) Large automotive OEM had photos of their top secret new design leaked to the press. A bit of image enhancement of the reflection in the wing mirror revealed an image of the guy taking the photos.
2) Place employed a security guard with a guard dog. The dog was "laid off" after a month as it was "paid" more than the guard - who was then caught stealing to make up the short-fall.
We had a digital PABX installed in the 80s with all the joys of call forward, ringback, ring around, etc - but no voice mail, which was a few years in the future. Our dept secretary. got fed up of us everyone call forwarding to her so she had it disabled for all except the bosses. I was going to be out of the company for a couple of days so, for some unremembered reason, I call forwarded my external calls back to the switchboard. The result was that when I got a call it was sent back to the switchboard which then sent it back to my phone.......and so on, until all the internal lines in the PABX were busy and no one could make or receive calls. They called the PABX company to report the fault and the tech who came to fix it took the call-forward off my phone and explained about the idiot on the second floor. I got a bollocking when I got back to work, which I thought very unfair at the time.
Another phone story...
At my first job, we had a digital PBX. Outside calls required a five digit personal access code. I did the math and realised that 100,000 divided by the number of people in the company was a reasonably small number. Assuming that the access codes were randomly picked meant I had a decent chance of hitting another one in less than an hour of trying...which I did.
Shortly thereafter, access codes were changed to SIX digits :-)
That said, some people are that stupid. I was called into my boss one day to explain why there were hundreds of pounds worth of international calls made by my extension.
In the late eighties, the university Engineering department I was working in accidentally gave unrestricted international dialling access to a group of extensions. The BT bill for calls to China for the next quarter came to 40% of the department's entire budget.
Ahh sometime in the early 90s my dad had a jar of coffee in his cubicle. Over time he was suspicious that there seemed to be less coffee in it when he opened it in the morning than there was the last time he closed it the previous day. Not one to let the mystery continue unsolved he placed his camcorder somewhere out of sight, with a view of his coffee jar and left it recording one evening after he left.
Mystery solved, it was the cleaner that done it!
Showed the video to his boss and wanted something done, boss was obliging but his managers said that as the evidence wasn't captured on company equipment there was nothing they could do. Strangely though the coffee after this stopped disappearing on its own...
When a poor student (back when dinosaurs roamed the earth), I had a job at the computing center. Said job involved a locked room, to which I had the key. Said key was also discovered to fit the telephone wiring closet (tsk, tsk).
I had a multiline phone on the wall in my work room, with a couple of outside lines and an intercom line, and a free button or two. The university had something called "Out WATS" which allowed free calls to the other part of the state. Being an impecunious student, this was attractive to me, as my family lived in that part of the state and calling there was pricey. Unfortunately, my the phone in my workroom did not have the Out WATS line on it. However, I was there to learn, so one day when things were slow, I went into the wiring closet, found the connections for the phone on my wall, and the connections for the Out WATS line. Patched the two together, and now I had something on one of the unused buttons that would let me call home for free. Which I did once or twice, to make sure it worked, then left it for the next person to discover what the unlabelled button did.
It's the thrill of the journey, not what you do when you get there :-)
Back in the good old days the BBC had a dedicated network from Blighty to down under (presumably Neighbours related). The offices there were reachable on an internal number, at which point you could dial for an outside line and make an international phone call without it showing up as one!
Yep, back in the 90s I was supporting a government office in London from my home based in the antipodes, using 1200 baud modem. Had to do a complete recompile of the application, normally a 7 hour job but which crashed at hour # 6, so I had to restart it from scratch. The boss hauled me in next month to ask about the horrendous bill ($1300 if I recall) and I managed to explain it away. Only now do I calculate that would have been enough to fly me there and back and accommodate me for a week. Ah well, lost opportunity.
One we used - far too often, it has to be said - back in DOS days was to abuse the fact that the OS recognised ASCII 255 (a 'blank') as a valid file system character. It was entered by holding the ALT key and using the number pad IIRC.
It's as simple as it is effective. Add a few quick lines to autoexec.bat to echo "Running disk cleanup", create a directory with the blank char as the name and jump into it. Echo "Done" and, for good measure, set the path to current directory. Voila! One 'empty' disk.
Top hint: doing it to the MD's PC on a Friday night, forgetting he's giving a presentation on the Monday, gets you in more trouble than the prank really deserves.
I used that trick when we installed the first ever network at the company I then worked for. The 'server' was basically a machine with a fat set of hardisks and an optical disk backup running PowerLAN (think ARCnet, it's that long ago) and it had no quota management or access control, and people in the office seemed to have a sheer unending variety of crap they would hang on to as soon as they saw free space.
So they didn't.
I wrote a Turbo Pascal quicky that pumped out files of several MB filled with the same character - that way they pretty much vanished in the backup compression, but they too up space in directories with blank spaces in them. If we genuinely needed more space I just zapped a few files in one of those directories and presto - space was available.
It was primitive (I think we ran Win95 or 98 or something in those days, I recall going through migrations from 80286 to 80386 to 80486 before I left, but it was also fun, especially since I was well up on electronics and thus bought some resistors and BNC connectors from RS instead of paying the ludicrous prices network companies were asking for ARCnet coax terminators.
And then I learned about Linux and landed in TCP/IP land :).
A private company ("OnCommand"?) developed SCCM in 2000. We had a test version of it from them, and tried getting it to work in our lab, in anticipation of using it after our Win2K rollout.
We never did get it to work, and later, Microsoft bought the product (and the company?) and folded it into Windows.
MS haven't renamed anything. The confusingly-named Remote Desktop Client for Windows (Remote Desktop for short) - which is a client app for Azure Virtual desktop - is being phased out in favour of the ludicrously-badly-named Windows App.
Said Windows App is, as I told them six months ago, somewhat broken and definitely not ready for use in production. Still, it is not RDP (mstsc.exe); although that is the underlying protocol it uses.
> ludicrously-badly-named Windows App
Confusing and ill-defined branding is a hallmark of MS's marketing department.
This is the same company notorious for rebranding the same product a dozen times, using the same brand on a dozen different products or both for maximum confusion.
Confusing and ill-defined branding is a hallmark of MS's marketing department - In their efforts to cause confusion, they also tended give their products a name that could be confused with a 'real standard". MAPI for IMAP comes to mind, after an "accountant" company director told me that they were the same...
A few years ago, a service engineer performed a remote software upgrade on the blow-out preventer (BOP) on a drilling rig.
Said BOP being a rather important safety system (think Deepwater Horizon), this is done only while the BOP is safely stored on deck, i.e. emphatically not while the rig is drilling.
Unfortunately, a typo happened, and the wrong rig was connected.The BOP of a very much actively drilling rig was thus nonfunctional (in that both its control pods were down; it could still be operated by sending an ROV down to the seafloor to turn a valve as a last resort).
Seasoned oilfield employees both on board and ashore were apoplectic and the remote support facility for the BOP was subsequently protected with two mechanical LOTO padlocks.
I had similar fun using the remote connection feature of SMS back when SMS was a brand new product
At the time I was working for a very small reseller, far too small to actually need any of the features of SMS but as we were selling it and I might be called on to support it* I'd installed it on a couple of test machines to play with before rolling it out to a select few live in house machines
*Yes, I'd been on the official Microsoft SMS training course at their original Reading, UK offices but that course was a complete shambles to the extent that we, and I assume the other trainees, got a full refund for the course
Almost everyone in the company shared one open plan office (as I said, we were a small company) with my desk being tucked away in one corner looking out at the rest of the office from where I could see the desks\screens of a number of people including one of the sales girls
Seeing the opportunity for some mischief I remote connected to her PC and I'd periodically move her mouse just as she was going to click on a button, said mouse movement wasn't great but it was enough to cause her to miss the button she was trying to click on, sometimes I'd only cause her to miss once other times she'd "miss" maybe 2 or 3 times on the trot before I'd let her actually click the button
I was able to see from her body language that she was getting a confused but anytime I could see she was really focussing on where she was clicking I wouldn't do anything only for the mouse to then "miss" again a little while later after she'd relaxed
She even called me over at one point saying her mouse was doing strange things and I dutifully checked the mouse out including taking the ball out and checking if the rollers were gummed up but for some reason I was unable to find anything wrong with the mouse and me clicking around various windows worked fine as it did when I stood and watched her to "see if I can spot if she's doing anything strange to cause the problem"
This went on for maybe 30 minutes all told until one of the sales guys came over to talk about something and seeing that I was struggling to keep a straight face asked me what was going on to which I showed him what I was up to
It only took another minute or so of the pair of us "giggling" in the corner for the sales girl to turn to us and say "it's bloody you messing with the mouse isn't it?" at which point we both burst out laughing
Thankfully the sales girl took it all in good grace but she did call me a few names afterwards
Ah yes, the stock sunos sound library toilet flush, and roaches, old favourites to run remotely :-)
Another fun trick was to use xscreendump/xscreenload (modified code so the dump was performed without a beep/flash, and before the days of xauth) in a loop a few seconds apart. Ostensibly harmless, it just replaced the users screen contents with how it was a few seconds earlier, causing them to 'lose' work. At the time our workstations were all in one room (along with the help desk) so we could sit and watch the confused users until they asked us for help, at which point we could miraculously 'fix' the problem.
Early 90s, I was a graduate student in a lab, where X11/Motif was the platform of choice for scientific computing/visualization. There were not many user access controls to paint something on another remote X window, you needed only the IP address, didn't even need an account.
At random intervals, I would popup a rectangle (of random size and color) on this user's XTerm, which basically flashed for less than a second and left no trace. He never found out who did that or how.
So, Eric B, if you are reading this, sorry mate! Good times.
A Linux/X story...
Back in the early 90s, I had a job which involved schematic capture using ViewDraw on a 486 running Win3.1. Remember QEMM? Well, more than one sheet of a schematic open caused a Windows crash.
I put up with this for a while (had a Sun at my previous job and ViewDraw never crashed on UNIX) until I knew enough about Linux to add a second HDD to my work PC and set it up to dual boot. We had one UNIX machine in the lab, with a license for ViewDraw, but the lab was noisy and inconvenient to work in.
I set my desktop 486 up as a Linux Xterm, and remoted into the UNIX system...so I was running ViewDraw on the UNIX system, but using the display, keyboard and mouse of my machine in my office. Life was good, and schematics were completed in record time.
It was about this time that I realised the capabilities and reliability of Linux were somewhat better than those of DOS/Win3.1. From my POV, it has remained that way through the current Win10/11.
I did something similar with my work Linux system. Fortunately, our IT people had seen fit to provide Unix (HP-UX, AIX, Sun, etc.) users with access to Microsoft "productivity" apps. They had a set of NT boxes in the data center, populated with the standard Windows app suite. And some software that enabled them to export display, keyboard and mouse to any specified Xserver (remember the bass-ackwards definition of client and server in the X protocol). And connect the NT user account file space to my system using NTFS. So I had an entire Windows desktop as one window on my Linux PC.
I managed most of my career without a stinkin' Windows box on my desk. Only had to fire up the NT environment once a week to handle "Windows-only" stuff.
Pretty sure that violates some clause or other of the Windows license :-)
Ever since that event, I have been a Linux fan...and a Microsoft skeptic. If a bunch of unpaid volunteers can build something like Linux, how come a megacorp like Microsoft can't build something equally robust? Linux has gotten better over the years, while Windows appears to be declining, at least from the perspective of a random user.
It must have been about 35 years ago. Back when you downloaded Slackware onto 3.5" floppies and the kernel was the 0.9 release. I was supporting Windows 3.1 users, but was trying to learn what I could about Linux, Unixware, and Solaris X86 (liked that one) to see if they could help us, or at least me.
A handful of users needed to access a Unix box remotely, so I re-partitioned their hard drives. Installed Windows and Slackware, showed then how to set the active partition so they could dual boot. And, learned enough about X11 to give them Xservers (I don't really care for X windows server/client usage either).
A little bit Rube Goldberg, but you do what you have to do when you don't have the budget to buy actual X11 terminals. It worked for them.
A little story from back in the days, when we still had a personal desk at work, including name plates. One evening, in a nearly deserted office, I and some colleagues came up with the brilliant idea of defacing an absent colleagues name plate with some word play. The result of our shenanigans was edgy back then - which today would be considered outright discriminatory. And rightly so. Anyhow, what stupid me wasn't aware of either was that the very next day both said colleague was on holiday and some representatives of an important customer were visiting. Luckily, our boss found it before the visitors arrived but, understandably, didn't see the funny side of it. I would like to say that I bravely came forward admitting my guilt but probably I was rather whistling innocently. Anyhow, I've kept clear of such (not others!) shenanigans every since.
This is why I always bring up https://www.dotbun.com instead, when I see an unlocked workstation.
Always more fun, and gets the point across that an unlocked workstation will be invaded by The Fluffle.
Icon because every bunny knows they're innocent...
Ooh... well spotted, I missed that.
Maybe they chose those names because this is the one where "Don" cleverly bothers "Phil", or at least tries to?
(Also, from what I've heard, Don and Phil's- as opposed to "Don" and "Phil's"- singing may have been harmonious, but their actual working relationship was often much less so...!)
When my wife, now a very senior doctor, was starting out in General Practice I decided to have a play with her iPhone and edit the auto-correct settings. She didn't really use email on the phone, just text messages to me and various friends and family, nothing professional. I didn't do anything very rude, more silly, like "yes" changed to "okelie dokelie", "no" changed to "nodelie dodelie" etc. I don't think she even really noticed but it probably amused a few people.
What I didn't realise is that iCloud (I think it was called MobileMe back then) syncs lots of things, including auto-correct settings. So Apple Mail on her MacBook happily rewrote the contents of all her emails to use the silly phrases. Which she sent to managers, supervisors, patients, her professional college etc. for several weeks. Fortunately she spotted it and instantly blamed me before she sent anything potentially career damaging.
I was working for a large telco with a team of support folks who oversaw the local servers in each department.
We had a horrible habit of using Telnet to jump on to boxes to do remote work and patching, as well as messing with each other’s kit. It would happen on a rather frequent basis that we would jump to one of our peer’s boxes and reboot it while they were up to something. This was our little in joke to get a person’s attention when it was time to head out for coffee , or more often than not, the pub.
Ah, the good old days.
There's some truly joyless bastards lurking here, I guess the 8 of you were the same in the office, so were the target of many a prank.
Down vote away, especially if it puts a little joy in your lives.
Unlocked workstations resulted in any of the following:
Inverted screens,
Desktop icons removed, and wallpaper replaced with previous desktop screenshot,
Very rude emails composed to the head of IT, not sent, just left full screen
System language changed to Russian, or Greek
Many years ago, I was s sysadmin at an early web bureau. We sat in our ‘server room’ that was hot even in winter, so we had windows open, and desks close by them. On the other side of a small courtyard there were a flock of web developers who thought it was very funny to throw snowballs in though our windows from the snow on their window sills. They thought it was funny right up to the moment they saw that all their PCs were shutting down with no chance to save any work in progress.