Who, Me? Well, gentle reader, we have some bad news: the weekend is over, and another five days of labor have commenced. The good news is Monday means it’s time for a dose of Who, Me? in which Reg readers send in their tales of … let's say … hard-earned experience.
We shall Regomize this week's student in the school of life as "Curt." Many years ago Curt was an IT field engineer/admin for "a very large corp." and in that capacity looked after many sites in the north of England, including a call center near his home which he used as a home base. Curt told Who, Me? that it pained him to tell this story, but it must be told.
Curt enjoyed a good deal of camaraderie with his fellow office-dwellers, including one colleague we'll call "Jill" though that was not her name. Jill, Curt recalls, had a good sense of humor and the two of them enjoyed the occasional prank. "The usual office wind-ups," he told Who, Me?, such as "jumping out round corners to give her a scare, withholding the telephone number and calling pretending to be a customer – the usual stuff."
Curt sounds like a joy to work with.
Anyway, both Curt and Jill would occasionally connect to a remote desktop to use specific apps. As far as Curt was aware, only he and Jill ever connected to that particular station. On one occasion, Curt was at another site and logged in to the remote desktop, and saw that Jill was also connected.
He had a brilliant yet terrible idea: he would send messages through the Task Manager that would pop up on the screen for Jill to see.
"I CAN SEE YOU JILL!"
"ARE YOU SCARED, JILL?"
"YOU SHOULD BE!!!"
- Did you hear the one about the help desk chap who abused privileges to prank his mate?
- I don't know what pressing Delete will do, but it seems safe enough!
- Python script saw students booted off the mainframe for sending one insult too many
- Techie made a biblical boo-boo when trying to spread the word
Now, this does not look good. The Register would like to take a moment to advise all readers: don't do this sort of thing. However, it's important to note that Curt believed that only he and Jill could see these messages. Also, that he understood that Jill knew he was the only other person who used the remote desktop and that therefore she would immediately know the messages were from him and not some actual psychopath.
As it turned out, he was mistaken – in a number of ways.
Jill did not, in fact, realize that only the two of them ever used that remote desktop. And when the ominous messages appeared she did not know who they were from. She alerted a colleague sitting nearby, who alerted the IT department, who escalated the issue to the managing director, who concluded – logically – that the corporation's IT security had been compromised by some cyber pervert and made it a priority to find the miscreant.
By the time Curt called Jill on the phone to share a chuckle about his little jape, the matter had gone nuclear.
Rather than a chiding "oh, you got me" on the phone, Curt found Jill in tears and genuinely terrified that she was being stalked. His blood ran cold as he realized quite how ill-judged his prank had been. He knew that his next phone call – explaining it all to IT – was going to be difficult.
Luckily the higher-ups eventually came to accept that there had been no malicious intent and it was office banter gone badly wrong. There was a written warning to sign, but beyond that the only punishment was spending the remainder of his time at the company being mocked over what came to be known as "Popgate."
Well, that took a lot of courage for Curt to confess. If you've got a deep, dark tale buried way down where you don't want to look at it, perhaps consider sharing it in an email to Who, Me? to lighten the burden on your soul. ®