Techie turned the tables on office bullies with remote access rumble
- Reference: 1767594552
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2026/01/05/who_me/
- Source link:
This week, meet a reader we’ll Regomize as “Patrick” who told us about his time working on the tech support team at a UK government agency.
“One of my colleagues was an 18-year-old whose entire job was resetting passwords,” Patrick told The Register . “That's it, that is all he did. We had a large number of users and hence a large number of numpties who regularly screwed up their logins.”
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Patrick described his young colleague as “remarkably patient” and “a good lad who we all got on well with.”
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So when Patrick saw two other members of staff shouting at the youngster, he felt protective.
“I can't remember what the shouting was all about, but it quickly became evident that this had gone way beyond a telling off and turned into outright bullying,” he told The Register .
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The young worker looked decidedly uncomfortable and, once the tirade ended, returned to his desk with his head down.
Patrick hoped a team leader would step in to offer comfort, but nobody intervened.
So he decided to do something about it.
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“Step forward the ‘Mean Avenger’: me,” he told The Register .
The Mean Avenger’s revenge plot started with reconnaissance.
“I walked past the desk the bullies were working at, and in passing took note of the asset number printed on a label on the PC,” Patrick wrote. He also observed that the bullies were working on a large and complex spreadsheet.
He then returned to his desk, looked up the PC’s asset number and learned it was also the PC’s hostname. His next step was to fire up a command line and type a command to shut down the PC – silently, remotely, and instantly.
And then he waited until he heard the bullies speak words that suggested they had finished working on the spreadsheet and all that remained was to press Save to preserve their work.
[6]New boss was bad, his attitude was ugly, so the tech team pranked him good
[7]Techie 'forgot' to tell boss their cost-saving idea meant a day of gaming
[8]Untrained techie broke the rules, made a mistake, and found a better way to work
[9]Web dev's crawler took down major online bookstore by buying too many books
“I counted to five – which should have been enough time for the save to complete – and pressed Enter to remotely shut down the PC,” Patrick confessed to The Register .
And he got the timing just right, because when the PC shut down the bullies assumed the save had failed, their work was lost. The bullies then started to blame each other for the mess with the same horrible fervor they’d brought to their abuse of the young worker.
“Their argument was long enough, and loud enough, to finally get a response from management, who arrived at the scene to calm things down,” Patrick told Who, Me?
All that remained was for the Mean Avenger to make his escape, which Patrick feared would be hard because log files recorded his actions.
“If anyone went digging, they would find a big arrow pointing in my direction," he wrote. “But nobody looked and I got clean away with it.”
“I never told anyone what I did, until now.”
Have you stepped in to save the day when management turned a blind eye to rotten workplace behavior? If so, do the right thing and [10]click here to send your story to Who, Me? We’d love to tell your tale as the year unfolds. ®
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[6] https://www.theregister.com/2025/12/22/who_me/
[7] https://www.theregister.com/2025/12/15/who_me/
[8] https://www.theregister.com/2025/12/08/who_me/
[9] https://www.theregister.com/2025/12/01/who_me/
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Well Done
I can only approve anything that makes a bully sit down and reevaluate his position.
Unfortunately, that is not what happened here, but kudos for making the bullies bully their own kind.
Re: Well Done
Yes, unfortunately bullies won’t relate the shutdown as a consequence of their behaviour towards the support staff.
Neat trick
Risky, but well executed. Very mild revenge by BOFH standards, so one could consider this a lucky escape for both the bullies and Patrick.
Re: Neat trick
Yeah, the only way "Shut down" could have been involved with the full-blown BOFH version would have been "Shut"ting the lift doors after lobbing the aforementioned PC "down" the lift shaft. But only after making sure that a couple of trailing cables from it have unfortunately snagged on the clothing of the two office bullies first of course.
Try finding that in the system logs!
Re: Neat trick
TBH, that's why I stopped reading it.
While the earlier issues might have involved discomfort such as tripping over some cables (perhaps repeatedly), the latest (last four years) have been outright killing. In every episode.
Sorry, nope.
Re: Neat trick
You stopped reading BOFH because of the killing? Honestly I think you missed a lot of earlier stories or you're just misremembering but the BOFH has always been a homicidal maniac. That's not something of "the last for years". I'd say the reactions have become LESS murderous with time in fact.
Re: Neat trick
"I'd say the reactions have become LESS murderous with time in fact."
Disappointingly so.
OP should avoid reading Agatha Christie novels.
That reminded me of the innocent fun I used to have with loosely (lousily?) protected Linux boxen at university. Remote logon to a fellow students machine and initiate shutdown with a ten second delay (or was it five, or three?) and watch and hear their reactions... No real damage done as all that was going on was students torturing C++ or vice versa. And it took an astonishing long time before someone figured to check the log...
"students torturing C++ or vice versa."
Substituting Rust for C++ you could remove one of the disjuncts and save an 'or.'
I would not presume to suggest which disjunct might be omitted. ;)
Linux (and Unix) boxen within Universities only have crap security when the institution has dispensed with the services of a (competent) system administrator or have never availed themselves of the same. A remote login shutting down a Linux host would normally require root from sudo etc or a dodgy auth/policy configuration. An unprivileged user logged in to the console is normally and reasonably permitted to shutdown but care has to be taken with remote session software like Nomachine on a shared multiuser box . [Don't ask.]
"And it took an astonishing long time before someone figured to check the log..."
Just cat from/dev/null to the relevant logs (use >, not >>), then shutdown.
Looks like Patrick Excelled himself
The BBC Econet * commands were most fun at school. *remote *view etc etc Especially on half-competent teachers.
Decent...
Should be the Green Bastard though...
Happy New Year ...
... and may your screw-ups be ever covered up.