Never Piss Off A Techie
I worked as a contractor for an insurance company in Croydon where I fell out, big style, with the desktop engineers team leader. A write twunt he was. Basically, he was trying to make his engineers wear ties to work and me, from my lofty position in the Server-Lan team, was dissing his efforts via e-mail and telling his team that the company dress code specifically said that they didn't have to wear ties if they didn't want to. Eventually had to show this team leader the relevant section of the company hand book before he'd back down. And he wasn't happy.

So, a few weeks later I sent an e-mail around of Clinton with his mouth morphed into and arse-hole and put the caption "I Told You He Talked Shit" into it and sent it to all of the techies - both Server-Lan team and Desktop. Well my enemy was on the mailing list and he of course received a copy. Little shit went straight to Human Resources and demanded I was sacked for sending inappropriate e-mails. As it turned out,the project I was involved in was so critical to the company that I was virtually bullet-proof so no harm was done other than a slap on the wrist but this meant war. And so the campaign began.

At this company it was traditional to assign insulting nick-names to everyone - my self included. As examples here's a few of the old team.

The Nose, Wop - Cockney/Italian network engineer.
Fat-Boy, Cake-boy - my boss
Dances-With-Voles - a rather short engineer.
Swamprat - me, as I lived up North I must live in a swamp.

Now this was all part of the culture in this company. We insulted each other constantly and took the piss out of everything imaginable. You needed a thick skin to work there but it was all done in fun.

So now it was time to assign a nickname to the new team leader. And it was Bungle. (From Rainbow) And then the campaign started. Overnight I uploaded the theme tune to Rainbow to every machine in the company and set it as the Windows start-up sound. From 8:00am onwards Bungle was assailed with "Up Above The Streets And Houses" warbling from dozens of PC speakers all day, everyday. Most of the users caught on that he hated his new nickname and really hated that music so they'd wait until he entered their work area and click on the wav and watch him start to twitch.

Next was uploading various random Rainbow screen savers to the companies PCs - especially the desktop team. As I controlled the policies of the domain he couldn't even remove them. This low-level harassment went on for a few weeks and the name Bungle was permanently associated with this hapless twat. The breaking point for him was when the IT Director himself started to refer to him as Bungle. That's when the psoriasis started. Itchy,puffy,red,cracking skin all over the backs of his hands. So, he started to wear black leather gloves to work and phase two started.... He was now THE HOODED CLAW!!!

We started to wear black fedora hats and bandanas in the server room and would leap out from behind racks in the server room at him and cackle madly.... After a while he stopped coming in. Then I uploaded wavs of Penelope Pit-Stop's "Help! Help little old me!" and Muttleys sniggering laugh to users machines and the users were clicking on them every time they saw him and he finally cracked. Nervous break-down and off on long-term sick for the rest of my time there. And I didn't feel the slightest bit guilty, only a warm contented feeling of a job well done...

That'll teach the bastard to try and get me sacked....


I remain, as usual,
( Legless Mister Stabby - shanks for the memory, Wed 4 May 2005, 15:47, Reply)