PC component scavenging queue jumper pulled into line with a screensaver
- Reference: 1664177534
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2022/09/26/who_me/
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This week meet a chap we'll Regomize as "Peter", who wrote with a tale of working at a small tech support outfit on the outskirts of London.
Peter told us that this company had Shoemaker's Children Syndrome: staff were so busy delivering lovely machines to clients they got by with unreliable junk for their own work.
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"In the days when the Pentium 4 at 1.5GHz reigned supreme, you would be lucky to find a 500MHz Celeron in our office," Peter lamented. And even those modest machines featured parts from PCs that clients had returned.
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That sad state of affairs meant that when cast-off machines came into the office, staff would scavenge them for parts they hoped would make their PCs more palatable.
While this arrangement was undoubtedly a little tawdry, Peter and his colleagues dignified it with rules that required the longest-serving staff to be offered right of first refusal.
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The system worked – until a batch of scavenger-class machines came into the office on a Friday afternoon when the old hands were more interested in easing into the weekend with a beer than upgrading their PCs.
One young whippersnapper took advantage of the situation by coming in over the weekend and helping himself to the prime cuts from the Friday haul.
This was not just a violation of office etiquette, but also a serious inconvenience, because the incoming machines had already been earmarked for other roles.
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So when the youngster commenced the new working week by pointing out he was packing an awesome Athlon 1333, GPU, and even a SATA disk, it did not go down well.
Worse still, Peter recalls the youngster "left the workshop in a filthy mess and was now being smug about it" by boasting about the specs of his upgraded machines.
Revenge – or at least a sharp lesson in proper behavior – was clearly called for.
Peter administered it with a screensaver while the youngster took a break from work.
[6]Bad UI killed the radio star
[7]Chemical plant taken offline by the best one of all: C 8 H 10 N 4 O 2
[8]Salesperson's tech dream delivered by ill-equipped consultant who charged for the inevitable fix
"This was in the days when Windows 2000 was our OS of choice because XP looked a bit too colorful," Peter explained. So he installed a screensaver that displayed the Windows 2000 Blue Screen of Death (BSOD), followed by a fake reboot, then another crash into the BSOD.
The youngster returned from his break just as his PC "crashed" to the BSOD.
"His instinct was to aggressively pull the power cable out of the back of the workstation and begin taking it apart," Peter recalled.
The PC duly rebooted … but then the screensaver kicked in and the machine "crashed" again.
At which point the youngster would start replacing parts to figure out which component of the patchwork PC was causing the OS to fall over so often.
Peter says the youngster eventually restored the PC to its original configuration, leaving the lovely new parts to be returned and redeployed as previously intended.
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[6] https://www.theregister.com/2022/09/19/who_me/
[7] https://www.theregister.com/2022/09/12/who_me/
[8] https://www.theregister.com/2022/09/05/who_me/
[9] mailto:whome@theregister.com
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This is the most unusual way of using a Sysinternals tool...
.... to solve an hardware problem, LOL!
Guess the screensaver was https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/bluescreen
Re: This is the most unusual way of using a Sysinternals tool...
Gotta love that screensaver!
We used to have a guy in the office who was very punctual... for smoke breaks! He would take a break every hour, on the hour, with the precision of a Japanese train driver. This included returning from lunch at about 12:45 only to disappear at 1pm.
As he often left his PC unlocked, I managed to create a simple webpage with a picture of his empty desk (complete with 'timestamp') and pointed his browser to it
He didn't quite tear down the place looking for the 'spy camera'... he also didn't learn from the episode as his boss (not ours) kept asking where is was and we couldn't tell a lie, could we children...
In the department of a friend of mine, it was customary to Hasselhoff unlocked PCs, when their owners would go out for a smoke or some loo-time.
Colleagues would image-search for some hilarious depicted of the TV star of Baywatch or Knight Rider fame, and instate it as the desktop background.
Colleagues from my dorm back in the student days, took a screenshot of the empty desktop, used it as the background, and then removed or hid all the icons and the start menu.
Do lock you PC, was the message, I guess.
-> Icon: I think I might have misplaced the key for locking my PC.
That was a bit more wholesome than one place I worked, where we would "meatspin" carelessly neglected machines... if you don't know what that is, please don't look it up at work. In fact, I'd advise not looking it up at all.
The action on leaving a PC/Mac unlocked escalated at my old work...
People got bored with changing the screensaver message and somehow it became the tradition to send an e-mail from the offending PC to the department group e-mail address stating the offender would be buying cakes for the whole department.
One member, let's call him Andy, didn't learn but then decided Poundland cakes were the best answer. That resulted in a message from his account which included the name of a local expensive cake shop/supermarket being included! His complaints to IT simply resulted in a reminder to lock his machine.
I have a slightly different tale.
We had a colleague at another site crow about how she had been on a really expensive computer security training course and how everything was now locked down solid.
She sent some very strange security related messages over the next few weeks - obviously we had hacked in and were sending them on her behalf.
When one of our team visited the head office and saw her crying in her glass box we immediately stopped. (We didn't go as far as 'fessing up, but she may have had suspicions. When they closed down our site, they disconnected all the infrastructure and removed the PCs over the weekend. We came in on Monday morning and thought we had been neatly burgled. We were just finishing off the inventory before ringing the Police when the Site Manager arrived and told us the bad news)
You always have to be careful around your domain admins.
Many years ago when I worked for a departmental IT team at a UK university, it was world cup time. One of the German lecturers couldn't help repeatedly crowing about Germany's successes and mocking the relative failings of the England team to my colleagues. Guess who turned up at work the following day to find an enforced England team wallpaper on his office machine courtesy of a new group policy one of my colleagues had rolled out for him.
It was all in good humour of course!
I remember having that screensaver on my PC. It was good fun watching other people's reaction when it kicked in
BOFH vs PFY?
Pretty evil that one