IT boss left root session open for bring-your-kid-to-work day

WHO, ME? Comedian W.C. Fields is credited with the aphorism "Never work with children or animals," which The Register mentions because half of it has some relevance to this week's edition of "Who, Me?" – the reader-contributed column chronicling the ups and downs of working in tech. This week, meet a reader we'll Regomize as " …

[Korev]

Sounds like a child process

[David Harper 1]

That deserves a ...

(see icon)

[Phil O'Sophical]

child process

Look, Daddy! SHUTDOWN worked just like it did in the movie!"

Oh, fork!

[Albert Coates]

Re: child process

My favourite comment by WC Fields (a famous drinker) is: "Water? Never touch the stuff. Fish fuck in it."

[Albert Coates]

Re: child process

I love the down-voters, they have obviously led a very sheltered life, and being confronted with an actual uncensored phrase from the 1920s apparently does their tiny heads in. Bless.

[doublelayer]

Re: child process

You love the down-voters, all one of them? I've seen complaints about downvotes, even made a few, but I don't know if I've ever seen one on a 32:1 up-to-down ratio post so far.

[Albert Coates]

Re: child process

Thanks, I was referring to down-voters in general - their antics are generally hilarious, except for the carefully considered DVs for our resident "wine and steak" aficionado. PS ratio now 69:1. My subsequent comment garnered 4.5:1, how the haters do multiply. Would any down-voter to care to elucidate the reasons for their negative reactions? Nope, didn't think so.

[cosmodrome]

Re: child process

-1 doesn't need justification. It would take all the fun out of it.

[doublelayer]

Re: child process

I wasn't the original one you complained about or one that contributed to the second ratio you're complaining about, but I have two guesses about why the second one got some. One rule is that complaints about downvotes will get more downvotes from people who dislike those complaints on principle.

The other is that your posts aren't that convincing. You claim that the voters are unable to handle a phrase you only used in one post, so your claim can apply to a maximum of one voter. Some people may think that's an unfair assumption and a useless complaint with so small a target. Now, you're claiming you were speaking in general even though your original comment is incompatible with that. I think I've analyzed this as far as I can.

[vogon00]

Re: child process

"child process"

Or even a spawned process

_{I came here to say that, but you beat me to it!}

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: child process

Better than a zombie I guess.

[Matt in Sydney]

Re: child process

I am sure it is paraphrased. That's a 5 year old's remark. 9 year olds are refactoring your code.

[Jedit]

"Sounds like a child process"

No, it was a hardware fault with the daughter bored.

[Korev]

Re: "Sounds like a child process"

Superb!

[Doctor Syntax]

Could have been worse

rm -rf /

[Aladdin Sane]

Amateur

sudo rm -rf --no-preserve-root /

[RT Harrison]

Re: Amateur

Logged in as root so don't need sudo. Was the flag '--no-preserve-root' available for rm back in the 90's?

Does anyone grok TFA or has clout chasing invaded El Reg.

[Yet Another Anonymous coward]

Re: Amateur

No, back in the 90s we died like real BofHs

[Eric 9001]

Re: Amateur

Reviewing GNU fileutils 3.13 from <1996 (which goes back to 1985), it did not have the --no-preserve-root option, neither does 3.16 (<1997), nor 4.1 (<2001), nor coreutils 5.0 (<2003).

As per ChangeLog of GNU coreutils 5.2.0, --preserve-root and --no-preserve-root were added to GNU coreutils on the 2003-11-09 (presumably added to avoid problems with poorly written scripts that do; `rm -rf /$DIR`).

So no, it wasn't available for GNU rm back in the 90's, nor in other proprietary rm implementations.

But you can still do; `rm -rf /*`, just fine, which the worse bash script writers (like Valve), cause with beauty similar to; `sudo rm -rf /$VAR*` (empty $VAR is equivalent to '' and /''* resolves to /*).

Try it; `echo rm -rf /$VAR*`

[myootnt]

Re: Amateur

The difference between men and boys is -s. Once and done, have some self-confidence, man.

[cosmodrome]

Re: Amateur

right, because sudo is for little girls.

[Flocke Kroes]

Re: Could have been worse

dd if=/dev/zero of=$(mount | awk '/ [/] / {print $1}')

[Joe W]

Re: Could have been worse

Me, I guess 25 years ago or so:

"Oooooh, I'll just delete the hidden files. They start with ".", so if I just do

rm -rf .*

that should work....

...

that takes quite a while..."

That's how I learned it matches ".." as well.

[Maximus Decimus Meridius]

Other options...

She could have turned off the dinosaur containment system.

"Its a Unix system, I know this.""

[Bebu sa Ware]

Even back then we locked our serial terminals

AIX as far back as v4 did have a version of the lock command

lock -2000 would lock the (non X11) screen for more than a day [2000 minutes (33h 20')] and xlock for an X11 display.

In practice I think I used the screen command with serial terminals which supported locking although I don't recall that many Unix versions shipped with screen.

I guess much of the internet was built with 24x80 hardware terminals which is another cue for a four Yorkshiremen sketch. (We had a papertape punch for our display, 7 toggle switches for input and edlin…)

These days our zillionaire tech bros masters having "bring your kid to work day" would be expecting your kid "to work" but to be fair I am sure they would provide the empty Cola bottles.

[TimMaher]

Re: Papertape punch

You were lucky!

I just had a manual Hollerith punch on my desk.

[that one in the corner]

Re: Papertape punch

Right.

We 'ad to nibble holes in tarmac then run t'reader 'ead along road just to get first sector loader in place. Then they'd strap us to drive spindle and make us run round in circle for 19 hours a day!

[Scott 26]

Re: Papertape punch

> Right.

I read this one word and semi-corrected what was coming next.... (I also automatically read it in the correct accent).

[Doctor Syntax]

Re: Papertape punch

"We 'ad to nibble holes in tarmac"

The local council does that for you.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Papertape punch

That would explain a lot of roads...

[Doctor Syntax]

Re: Papertape punch

"I just had a manual Hollerith punch on my desk."

You had Hollerith cards?

I just had edge-punched cards, a notch cutter and knitting needles. (https://bregroup.com/store/bookshop/identification-of-hardwoods.-a-microscope-key but do they include the cards?)

[cosmodrome]

Re: Papertape punch

We could only dream of cards - we just had the holes and needed to glue them together.

[pirxhh]

Re: Even back then we locked our serial terminals

I remember terminals (either HP or Nokia, IIRC) with a keylock - pull out the key and the keyboard does nothing, while the host can still update the display.

[J.G.Harston]

Re: Even back then we locked our serial terminals

You used portrait displays? I've seen some of those in a museam. We used much easier-to-use and cheaper 80x24 displays.

[Lazlo Woodbine]

At least she didn't type "Let's play global thermonuclear war"

[Anonymous Coward]

at the gay bar!

[SuperGeek]

I bet that changed things!

I bet there were no more "bring kids to work" days after THAT!

[Anonymous Coward]

Groups!

Why, in any sanely-designed system, would you need to log in as root to run accounting or engineering programs, even were they written in BASIC?

[skwdenyer]

Re: Groups!

I think the term “sanely designed” is the key thing here.

Back in the day, we used to have Operators whose job it was to run jobs, etc. Since jobs were only run by these hallowed high priests, they had little scrutiny or oversight, and many argued they *were* the safeguards..:

[FirstTangoInParis]

Re: Groups!

A lot of people these days kick against the often voluminous company processes. I have to remind them that the processes only exist because someone (sometimes monumentally) screwed up once upon a time, and the process exists to stop them falling into the same trap.

[KittenHuffer]

Re: Groups!

These days I would argue that, cos the company processes where I w**k proliferate far more and far faster than it would be possible for my cow-orkers to fsck up!

I'm sure that there is someone employed by the company to 'do' company processes, and they have to be seen to be doing something ..... so every three months we get given a bunch of additional processes we have to conform to!

[that one in the corner]

Re: Groups!

Oh, there is definitely someone paid to "do" company processes.

Ours used to draw lots of lovely process diagrams, neatly drawn out in black and white, no fancy schmancy excess graphics from marketing, just lots of thin line from one box to another.

All carefully exported to the company intraweb as JPEG, so everything had that "am I wearing the right glasses?" blur. PNG? Never heard of it. SVG? Oh, la-dee-dah Mr Dev wants SVG!

[CountCadaver]

Re: Groups!

In a similar vein - health and safety laws are written in the blood of others.....

[the Jim bloke]

Re: Groups!

Time to do an update,

bring in the interns, a tarp, and half-a-dozen buckets...

[Scene it all]

Re: Groups!

I was a "system programmer" back in those days, which meant I was responsible for installing software updates from IBM. Thus I was told the passcode to unlock the door into the hallowed raised-floor room. One day, while attempting to make a backup copy of the main "procedure library" I accidentally got the cards in reverse order and copied an empty disk pack (remember those?) on top of the active library. I had to go to the tape library room (remember those?), get out the last backup tape, and restore the procedures disk. Without the procedures file, all operations grind to a halt in an IBM shop of those days so the actual "operators" stood around glaring at me as I did this.

So even the hallowed priests can mess up.

[Androgynous Cupboard]

Re: Groups!

My first job was maintaining a program in tens or hundreds of thousands of lines of C which had been auto-converted from BASIC. Loads of "if (b_streq(a, "") == true" to check if the string was zero-length, the vast majority of variables were global and, oh yes: liberal use of "goto"

Frankly keeping the BASIC would have been a better option.

[Anonymous Coward]

BASIC to C conversion

This couldn't have been the converter I wrote ~40 years ago. It was such a traumatising experience I gave up coding forever.

The guts of the generated C was an enormous switch{} statement where the labels corresponded to the line numbers of the BASIC code. This vile hack was partly inspired by Duff's device:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duff%27s_device.

If it had been submitted, the code would almost certainly have won one of the earliest Obfuscated C contests.

[Claptrap314]

Re: BASIC to C conversion

I'm sorry, but that triggers my much younger self: "That would be AWESOME!" I would LOVE to play with that...

[K555]

Kinda dull

I'm not sure a 'who, me?' would be quite so entertaining if it read....

"We had a 'bring your kids to work' day and our systems were perfectly designed so nothing bad happened."

[R Soul]

Re: Groups!

Especially if they'd been written in BASIC.

[EricM]

Re: Groups!

Why, for an self-confident admin, you'd need non-root users at all? /s

Honestly, I remember *nix systems in the 90s even in larger companies, that only had a root user (plus of course the usual stuff: daemon, bin, sys, lp, etc.). So it was not advisable to log on and do anything before the caffeine from the second coffee hit your bloodstream...

In smaller companies this might have been the case much longer.

[J.G.Harston]

Re: Groups!

My second-ish real-ish job I turned up for the first day, and, yep, was told that everybody logs in a 'root'. This was in a company doing data support for the **** **** stock exchange.

Edit: Doing a quick gurgle, and amazingly the company is still around 36 years later!

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Groups!

Yes, there were many Unix- and security- ignorant-and-or-indifferent users, admins, and managers back then.

[Claptrap314]

Sure

"back then"

[DS999]

In the 90s

We all logged in as root, and we liked it!

We were also very careful because of that, and those who weren't went on to write "Who Me" articles like this one.

[The Oncoming Scorn]

Re: In the 90s

I am Root***

* You read that in Vin Diesels voice.

** You read that in Amy Ackers voice.

[FifeM]

Children at work

That brings up the story of the man who took his young daughter to work. As the day went on she became increasingly unhappy and eventually burst into tears. When staff gathered round to see what was wrong she said "Daddy, where are all the clowns you say you work with?"

[chivo243]

Re: Children at work

I worked at a school, there were always children at work... some were lil' bastards.

[Anonymous Coward]

The other half of the kids and animals quote.

We had a data entry temp (the sales manager's wife) in the office copying data from about 5000 file cards into a contact management system back in the early 90s. She was alllowed to bring her dog into the office because it needed to be medicated during the day. It was extremely well behaved, and most of the time just slept under the desk next to her.

At one point when she left the office to visit the ladies room, the dog for whatever reason decided to climb onto her chair and then onto the desk where he managed to knock 2 stacks of file cards onto the floor. One stack had been entered already, the other hadn't. About 500 mixed up cards.

Having to check whether a card had already been entered into the system before she tried entering it again (the system didn't check if a contact already existed until she went to save at the end of entry) added about 4 hours to her processing that batch of cards. We did instigate a change after that, we gave her a pen to tick each card after she had processed it, not sure why we didn't do that from the start.

[Anonymous Coward]

Sources of Chaos

It could have as easily been a coworker dropping a stack of files, loaded 3-ring binders, or books onto the desk hard enough to shake the desk and mix the cards.

Or it could have been an IT staffer dropping off a new/refurbished desktop PC, or a new/refurbished laser printer.

[Excused Boots]

Could have been worse, if it had been a cat, not only would the card stacks be dumped, but the terminal, coffee mug etc, would have been on the floor.

[JoeCool]

And some additional data entry would have been performed.

[Doctor Syntax]

That takes me back to punched card days. Double punching to verify.

[JulieM]

Something similar happened to me at an Open Mic night at a local pub. I had taken my dog (a German Shepherd cross) with me. She was sleeping under my table, so I nipped to the loo. While I was away, she woke up, noticed I was not there and went to look for me. She jumped up onto the stage and knocked over a music stand, sending pages of sheet music into the airstream of a large fan; a guitar; and some lights. Then as I returned to the scene, blissfully unaware of the carnage that had been unfolding in my absence , she caught my scent, ran towards me, and proceeded to greet me as though I had just returned from a voyage around the world .....

[that one in the corner]

Was she named "Molly"?

Never let a child named "Molly" near tech without the appropriate precautions.

[Excused Boots]

Re: Was she named "Molly"?

Certainly not without a guard in close attendance.

[Ian Johnston]

Many years ago I entered "shutdown" as a command on the Oxford University Engineering Department VAX 11/780 and to my surprise it did exactly what it said on the tin, although I was only an unprivileged student user.

The system manager was a little vexed, but on the whole grateful that I had found a hole in the system, which he assured me he would fix at once.

Two days later friends in another research group asked if it was true that I had caused the outage and if so how I had done it. Yes, I said, and like this, but it won't do anything this time because the problem has been fixed.

Reader, it had not been fixed. The system manager was rather more vexed and less grateful the second time.

[Korev]

> Many years ago I entered "shutdown" as a command on the Oxford University Engineering Department VAX

That sounds like a very complicated vacuum cleaner

[just4this]

Voice command shutdown.

I’ve shutdown a few vacuum cleaners down by shouting FUCK OFF with that right now.

Some people have no respect for the well worked out secret sleep rota on a night shift.

[AtomicWombat]

Nothing sucks like a VAX.

[The Oncoming Scorn]

Nothing sucks like a Henry.

Allegedly stated by Megan.

[Ian Bush]

Not really on topic but I once, in a different millennium, brought down the Oxford University VAX by trying to tape archive a file for which the path was too long.

[CorwinX]

It's a rare individual...

... who can be both a good manager and a techie at the same time.

In my long career I never accepted a promotion above team/project leader.

I don't have the personality to deal with people problems. My approach tends to be more along the lines of Mr Travaglia's BOFH ;-)

[Antron Argaiv]

Re: It's a rare individual...

Made it to Senior Engineer (sometimes Principal and once, Chief, but I was neither) and that's where I wanted to stay. I really, really like designing things, solving technical problems and building sh*t. I have no interest whatsoever in getting roughly the same amount of money to act as an interface between upper manglement and the people who actually do something productive (or don't).

[Bob Royal]

Re: It's a rare individual...

I was made the company's youngest ever Senior Engineer, in the 70's.

All thanks to Ted Heaths stupid socialistic Price & Incomes policy.

It followed that I became youngest Principle on the same basis.

The only time I was made responsible for an underling, things didn't go well.

The chap who was given the role instead of me, built an empire out of it.

My boss who always kept me, despite other manglement, was a manager, not a mangler.

[Giles C]

Re: It's a rare individual...

I’m much the same zero interest in management, I am a techie and reasonably at it.

I usually end up being a lead technical engineer on network projects (not a pm as that isn’t my forte).

But my approach to management is

If you don’t know who to do it you can ask me I will help

If you don’t know who to do it and you break it you are on your own, as occurred in this conversation from just before I left a company

Caller: we have a problem (we…… at this point I am 100 miles from the main office having just been working overnight)

Me: what has gone wrong

Caller: I turned spanning tree off on a port on the core switch and the site seems to have stopped working

Me:Why on earth did you do that?

Callee: Someone suggested it

Me:Well the network has gone into a loop so you need to do three things

1. Go and tell management

2. Shutdown that core if the console has locked then pull the power (this is a Cisco 7010 chassis running about 10 fex extenders

3. Wait 5 minutes check everything is running and then power the core back up it will take about 20 minutes to boot.

Caller: do I have to tell management?

Me: well if you don’t they will realise quickly and then come demanding to know what is going on, this way you may get away with just being told you are an idiot.r

I still don’t understand why turning spanning tree off on a production interface was ever a good idea and without any change documentation…..r

[Excused Boots]

Re: It's a rare individual...

"I still don’t understand why turning spanning tree off on a production interface was ever a good idea and without any change documentation”

STP is a bit of a black art at best, so if it is all working, then leave it the fuck alone!

[Yet Another Anonymous coward]

Re: It's a rare individual...

<ANYTHING TO DO WITH NETWORKING> is a bit of a black art at best, so if it is all working, then leave it the fuck alone!

[Korev]

Re: It's a rare individual...

That's why people who are good at it are paid a packet

[Doctor Syntax]

Re: It's a rare individual...

You need the right connections to get a job like that.

[The Oncoming Scorn]

Re: It's a rare individual...

& reciporate with a token of your gratitude.

[CrazyOldCatMan]

Re: It's a rare individual...

reciprocate with a token of your gratitude

Ahh.. token ring. Surprisingly quick for a headline 4mbps data rate, quite physically robust and, nearly, impossible to break when looked after by someone competent..

Or me. Although I did manage to kill it (temporarily) on my first job as a techie. We had a per-floor setup - each area had its own ring, all joined by a central ring that just acted as a bridge between the zones.

I, being a keen young techie, got asked to repatch one of the local connections as the office had been moved around and some of the connections needed checking and moving. Instead I managed to repatch the central ring.

Walking out of the network room to a whole floor of machines clicking away [1] and the look of fury on my boss's face was not a nice experience. I hastily went back and put everything back where it should be (we, even in those long ago days, had proper cable management so I just had to look at the patching plan I *should* have looked at before doing anything..).

My boss said something along the lines of "every techie is entitled to one major screw up. You've just had yours. Don't do it again". Being Glaswegian it was in a little more.. detail about my shortcomings.

The incident got recorded as "equipment failure".

[1] When a token-ring card doesn't see a token for an amount of time it starts giving out a clicking noise. One machine doing it usually means the user has kicked the cable for their machine and knocked it loose.

[Giles C]

Re: It's a rare individual...

Networking is easy, servers and applications are the black art….

Spanning tree is fun especially when parts of the campus run MST and other PVST on the same layer 2 broadcast domain… Then it is less fun….

[Yet Another Anonymous coward]

Re: It's a rare individual...

> servers and applications are the black art….

Turn them off and on again ?

[the Jim bloke]

Re: It's a rare individual...

When it comes to networking - I am out standing in my field..

[Gary Stewart]

For old timers like me

Export TMOUT in .bashrc (or use systemd equivalent?) with a value in seconds.

I have it set to 15 minutes in .bashrc and have written a BASH script that allows me to set TMOUT to between 5 minutes and 60 minutes (command line parameter is in minutes), disable it with 0, or display the current value of TMOUT in minutes.

[Eric 9001]

Re: For old timers like me

That exits bash, which may not be wanted if you would like to see previous backlog later.

xscreensaver can lock the whole xorg session in 15 minutes (programs like xfce4-screensaver also work slightly less well at locking - a cat may find a key sequence that crashes it and thus unlocks), keeping all shell state in place until you unlock with the password.

systemd-shelld soon now?

[Boris the Cockroach]

The owner did a

"bring your kid to work day"

The buggers still here 20 yrs later.

[Yet Another Anonymous coward]

Re: The owner did a

"bring your kid to work day"

Those chimneys aren't going to sweep themselves

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: The owner did a

Better than that one Russian flight where it was a kid in the cockpit and said kid crashes the plane.

[Eric 9001]

Re: The owner did a

Might be a different flight I'm thinking of, but it was actually 2 kids in the pilot and copilot seats - a girl and a boy and both were encouraged them to play with the control sticks.

The way the autopilot worked is that minor to moderate inputs were ignored, but big inputs disabled the copilot and were followed - the boy had the strength to apply a big input and applied one.

Then the pilots failed to recover from the upset despite all the height available and then stalled and crashed.

The plane wouldn't have crashed if either pilot had remained in the seat and allowed one to play at time, or had applied correct inputs once either managed to get back into the seat.

[Rob Daglish]

Re: The owner did a

See also Airframe, by Michael Crichton for something very similar

[Anonymous Coward]

Happened to me

I was working in medium-sized ISP. The gateway was in one of the windows in a tmux session, I was leaving for the day, late afternoon. I typed poweroff to turn off MY machine. Incorrectly typed in the logged in gateway handling all machines and VLAN traffic.

Stayed 2 hours more fixing stuff :-(

AC bcz I still blush years later

[Yet Another Anonymous coward]

Re: Happened to me

And you learnt to make the prompt or terminal background RED on the remote/production system - right ?

[ricardian1943]

Re: Happened to me

Unless you're red/green colour blind

[Giles C]

Re: Happened to me

As long as the colour can be distinguished by said colour blind person (me), colour blindness encompasses a range, for example green and orange are the same (yes grass is orange normally) traffic lights are orange, red, white etc,

There is a reason I only wear one colour of socks, or always wear a white shirt, or want labels of coloured items….

[Giles C]

Re: Happened to me

We had just got our first Citrix servers, and one of the admins finished their session and told the machine to shutdown rather than logging off. The machine did that and dropped alll the other users at the same time - he only did that once…

[FeRDNYC]

Security through hopes & prayers...

A friend used to have a combined live/work space for his photography business, which meant he'd often have visitors hanging around the studio at all hours and in all states of self-restraint/trustworthiness. Since this was also in the pre-smartphone era of 3G mobile communications, it wasn't yet the case that everyone had an always-ready device in their pocket for accessing their online presence (and even if they did, said access was slow enough to be a deterrent), so whenever people happened upon a computer with a fast broadband link it was often seen as an opportunity to "check my email" & so on.

So, the incentive was already in place for unauthorized persons to access the computers scattered around the space. Not that they'd have malicious intent, by any means, but there was still the possibility of significant accidental harm. See, the friend in question had a stereotypical artist's approach to content management & data security:

PCs had a single account with Administrator access, which was always logged in. (Probably auto-logged-in, except in the latest few years of the setup.)

Project files for a given Client N were invariably (a) on the computer desktop, (b) in a folder named "New Folder (##)" (nearly always a 2-digit number, because there were that many), and (c) open-and-unsaved in whatever application was being used to work on them.

Every application that had ever be opened on the computer since its last restart was still open, and almost certainly had unsaved files. Very frequently, unsaved newly created files, so you couldn't even safely exit the application without assigning a filename and directory location to a bunch of "Untitled Document N"s — which nobody but their creator had enough information to actually do.

You almost couldn't avoid messing something up — even I, who had set up and adminned all of the systems there, couldn't avoid stepping on land mines, because it wasn't a question of technical knowledge. To safely "jump in" on a machine that had in-progress work active on it, you had to know the intent for a lot of things that gave no indication as to their intent, because that information existed nowhere except inside the mind of the machine's owner. (And honestly, i often questioned even that.)

Suffice it to say, it was not an environment where you wanted other people messing around in the session, no matter how innocently.

Eventually, I picked up on all this, especially after being around long enough to start finding predictable patterns in the goings-on. On the eve of one such occasion, at the point where "work time" had been suspended and people were arriving to the space for an evening social gathering — always my cue to depart — I very pointedly and conspicuously told him, "I'm done on that machine, so you can go ahead and log out." The response I got was, "It's fine, everything is exactly the way I want it." Okey-doke. I did my part. Off I went.

The events that followed I only learned of days later, when next I arrived to the space. In a scene ripped straight from the pages of Predictable Events Quarterly, what had happened was:

1. The chosen approach to securing the computer "exactly the way [he wanted] it", rather than logging off, was to switch off the display. And nothing else.

2. At some point, some visitor that evening decided to go looking for a computer where they could "check their email".

3. Unfathomably (except, totally not in the slightest), said visitor spontaneously earned a degree in IT management, and worked out how to switch a screen back on. They were thus undeterred by that impenetrable barrier to their accessing the machine.

4. In bumbling around attempting to reach a web browser, they closed some application (which was no doubt running fullscreen and getting in the way of any attempts to access other software), accidentally destroying several hours' worth of unsaved work.

...And I had to pretend to be shocked and appalled by this completely unexpected occurrence, when all I really wanted to do was spray-paint "I F---ING TOLD YOU SO, IDIOT" on a frying pan and repeatedly smash it into his thick skull.

[Stuart Castle]

Back in the early 2000s, when a lot of people didn't have fast access to the internet, my then employer came up with the bright idea of inviting a load of school kids for special training sessions, as we had a good internet connection.

So, myself and my colleague spent a couple of days teaching these kids how to browse the web, how to search. That sort of thing. Well, that was the idea.

Once they discovered Google, we spent our entire time stopping them searching for porn, usually nude pictures of Britney Spears.

[ChrisBedford]

This is why as an IT support drone I am unimpressed when (usually older) people tell me their kids / grandchildren "are very good with computers". I keep trying to explain to them that confidence does not equal competence but sadly when faced with such a wildly different different way of doing things from the way they did it at that age, "blasé" impresses the hell out of them. I always wonder if they would be as blown away by the same kid, with the same (i.e. zero) skills got behind the wheel of a Ferrari and just put their foot down, but you might as well talk to a brick wall...