The case of the mysteriously disappearing printers
Many moons ago, when I used to do desktop support, I had one user in my office who was laziness personified. Every hour, on the hour, she'd be outside in the leper colony, sucking down nicotine for a good ten minutes or quarter-hour. At least three times a week she'd come up with a problem with her PC which would prevent her from doing anything, and since she wasn't able to do any work until her PC was fixed, she may as well step outside for yet more nicotine.

One of the problems she frequently employed suffered was that the printers would disappear from her profile and she wasn't able to add them again. Never mind that I'd knocked up a "how to connect to a networked printer" document, complete with screenshots, and given it to her ages ago, no, she still professed complete ignorance about why they kept disappearing, and how to bring them back again.

I'm rather pleased with the solution I finally came up with, but at the same time a bit embarrassed that it took me so long to think of it.

I sat at my desk and remotely edited the permissions on the relevant Registry key to be read-only so that, try as she might, she could no longer delete her printer connections and pretend that "they just vanished".

So I foiled that little ruse but she still came up with plenty of other wheezes to avoid doing any work. When the company went through a round of redundancies she was, thankfully, one of the first to go. Evidently her boss also realised she was a lazy bint.
( flake has nothing against your right leg, Fri 25 Sep 2009, 0:20, Reply)