TDKfe90
Slightly tenuous story but as we all know, this QOTW sucks. So remember the subject heading above and read on...

I'm a professional code monkey and I love not only my job, hacking away on the internets and whatnot every day, but I love the camaraderie and pranks of an open plan office. Unfortunately at this grown up stage of my career I feel too self-conscious to do a victory dance on my table when my code compiles or launch into a minute of shouty swearing when I get a random segfault.

This was all different when I was an undergraduate working in "The Compsci Lab": a large room stuffed full with state-of-the art Solaris workstations. And a massive stereo, pizza boxes and a wall of empty Irn-Bru cans. It was the perfect work environment.

Well, it would have been if it weren't for the fact that any time you were getting your head down to try and finish a piece of practical work you had to do battle with a lab full of "practical jokers" trying to hack your system and delete all your files. Most of the time it was a good laugh but occasionally things got close to boiling point. I remember being promised - completely sincerely - a severe beating if I went near a group of machines doing experiments for one guy's final year project.

So what did we do? There were hacks like making someone's .Xauthority file publicly visible, copying it over yours and running xscreensaver. The result is that the other user's machine is locked requiring your password to get access again. Very annoying. You could log into their machine and run a background process that uses all the CPU cycles and RAM. Again, annoying. The most beautiful gotcha though is when you see someone has left themselves logged in. Quick email to the whole department with the subject heading "I am gay" (I don't make the rules, just follow them with extreme enjoyment).

But messing round with someone's settings here and there was boring. What I actually wanted was to have someone's password. With their actual password there would be no limit to the amount of havoc you could wreak. A cunning plan was devised, it was so perfect I permitted myself a small maniacal laugh. Deciding my first victim would be my close friend Andy, I got to work.

I watched him working away at his usual computer one morning so I waited until the opposite computer on the adjoining desk was free. I quietly went over to the free computer, logged in, locked it and left again. I then had to wait until Andy left for lunch and just hope that he didn't log out but instead just leave his computer locked. He thankfully obliged.

Looking around to see if the coast was relatively clear I unlocked the computer opposite his and opened a blank text editor. I then crawled under the adjoining desks, unplugged the keyboard cable from his computer and plugged it in to mine. All was ready, I simply had to wait for his return.

And a long wait it was. A computer with just a working mouse isn't very entertaining. Eventually Andy returned and after another eternity with him chatting and getting his books in order he sat down at his desk and started typing.

I sat there barely containing my excitement as his password appeared to me in that blank text editor. Again and again he typed while nothing happened.

"Fucking things broken!" asserts Andy.

Nevermind, he wanders over to another free computer and starts working there. I had his password, let the pranking begin!

Over the following week more "I am gay" emails were received by all from Andy. In disbelief he states, "But I haven't left myself logged in anywhere!". But then anytime he locked his computer and left the room I'd sneakily type his password in to unlock it and leave him to question his sanity upon his return. The lab was on the way back from the students' union so I'd go in at 2am and log him onto all the computers available and wait for the carnage the next day.

I could see the joke wearing thin and as I mentioned he was one of my best mates so it was only fair to put him out of his misery and let him change his password to one I didn't know. After a 10 minute chat one afternoon in the lab we decided to get back to work. He goes to his keyboard to type in his password.

"No Andy, allow me."

I typed and his computer became unlocked. The penny dropped. The swearing began as I burst into fits of laughter.

Later that day when he started talking to me again he told me the thing that annoyed him most wasn't the fact that he'd been caught out by my trick, or all the crap I'd done to him for a week. What annoyed him most was that he had lost that password forever and had to come up with another.

Rest in peace, TDKfe90
( djtrialprice, Fri 8 Feb 2008, 12:27, 5 replies)

Now that is a lovely story
and totally on-topic as far as I'm concerned.
( chthonic, Fri 8 Feb 2008, 12:59, closed)

And the uni was?
It wasn't York by any chance...?
(morse, Fri 8 Feb 2008, 13:55, closed)

Not York but the University of Fifeland, Scotland
It amuses me to think that every university computing lab in the country has the same abusive, Irn-Bru littered atmosphere.

Cheers for the props chthonic.

And the victim in question is still a close friend in the same town as me and a b3tan to boot. I'm waiting for him to read this and then come round to my house and kill me.
( djtrialprice, Fri 8 Feb 2008, 15:08, closed)

yup..
Pizza boxes and the bar was only 50 yards away... ours was called the Spod Pit, complete with IRIX workstations and blazing fast connections... ho hum...
(morse, Fri 8 Feb 2008, 15:26, closed)

I like this
*click*
(misskitty reeks of sex and turpentine; laudanum afternoons, Sat 9 Feb 2008, 4:53, closed)