I'm
in IT, but not really support. I do get the occassional phone call for support, and if there's no-one else around, then I don't mind doing it.

However......I was working for one firm once as a salaried employee. They had several offices in the world, most in the UK. One in London.

One of my jobs was to design and write a credit control system for them from the ground up...and so I did.

A lot of the time, this involved working in the London office. The London office didn't have clocking-in cards, as their employees were trusted to some degree. In our office we DID have a clocking in card system - thankfully electronic and for some odd reason it had a MS Access v.2 database behind it - but I'll come back to that later.

Upon arriving back at my main office after a few days in the smoke, I was told that my 'flexi-hours' (read: flexitime where you can start any time before nine and leave any time after five) were not up to the minimum for the month. Obviously, this didn't sound right and I queried it.

"Ahh, I see. You haven't counted the days I have been working in our London office."

"Prove you were there."

"What?"

"Prove you were there, you could have been skiving off for all I know"

"I.Was.Sat.Right.Next.To.You.When.I.Was.There!"

"That's not proof."

etc.... this was not the first or the last time that this particular "IT Manager" had issues like this. There were many things, like I had a serious bout of proper flu three years before this. This manager had come in from nowhere, gone through attendence records from the year dot and started pulling people up about it. When it was my time to be pulled up, I explained that I had flu three years ago and that's why in that year I had 8 days off. Eight days. None the year before and none in the preceding years. Hardly a serial skiver, I'm sure you'd agree.

This was really the tip of the iceburg. This bloke was a useless IT manager, and even if you could get past the "what's this mousey thingy then?" type questions, you might be able to forgive if he was a good people manager....but as you can see....he wasn't that either.

...back to the credit control system.

One of the requirements was that it had to accept emails sent in from clients and send an automated response back. It also had to send *chasing* emails for overdue accounts etc...

Around the same time, the aforementioned IT manager wanted a 'corperate screensaver'...I knocked one up in a day, and rolled it out to the entire company (thankfully all automated due to an earlier distribution prog. I had written).

What this nobhead didn't realise was, that he had pissed me (and pretty much nearly everyone else, off - 18 of the 40 programmers left in his first year, some after 20 odd years of working there.

The screensaver, when started would also turn it's host machine into a telnet server. When a signal was received it would start pinging the mainframe downstairs...a lot.

Of course, if an email with a certain subject was sent into the credit-control system, it would broadcast continually to any telnet servers on the network. They, in turn would start their distributed denial of service attack. It wasn't called that in those days - in fact, I don't think it had been done before.

Of course, you could see on the network where the traffic was coming from, and paradoxically, the traffic would increase over lunch when people's machines became idle. Once someone went to one of the machines where the traffic was originating, the screensaver would terminate and the traffic would stop.

Sadly, after I left, my anger subsided, and I realised that this would only put my ex-colleagues jobs in jeapardy, and so I never sent the email that would trigger it off.

I believe it's still running now. If I ever run into that bloke again and he pisses me off.......
(dchurch bah, Fri 25 Sep 2009, 15:51, Reply)