Hacking a Foosball table scored an own goal for naughty engineers
- Reference: 1688369533
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2023/07/03/who_me/
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We'll let you decide which of those categories this week's tale falls into, as a reader we'll call "Edgar" (because that's what we called him last time he shared a tale) admits a bit of down-time shenanigans.
Edgar, you may recall, worked for Burroughs, the company that made adding machines (and dominated the market for such things, right up until the dawn of the PC age meant no-one wanted them anymore). As such, he and his co-workers were quite the dab hand at mechanical gizmos.
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On one occasion early in his career at Burroughs, Edgar was sent on a training course, which was held at a hotel in Bournemouth. You don't particularly need to know where the hotel was – it's not relevant to the story – but it's the kind of detail that makes a narrative like this all the more compelling.
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Anyway, this particular hotel had a games room, where the adding machine engineers could blow off a bit of steam after a long hard day learning wrangling adding machines. One game that attracted their attention was a table football game (also called table soccer or foosball). The kind of thing where rows of wooden players are controlled by pulling and twirling handles along the side of the table.
Now, Edgar and his fellows noticed that this particular table had a slight flaw, inasmuch as when you scored a goal the ball went through a series of chutes into a receptacle, and you had to – shock, horror! – insert money to retrieve it before you could play further.
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Surely the hotel's owner must be unaware of such a tragic design failure hampering the recreation of their guests?
[5]Security? Working servers? Who needs those when you can have a shiny floor?
[6]Data cleanser did its job, but – oopsie! – also doubled customers' bills
[7]A toast to being in the right place at the right time
[8]Fed up with slammed servers, IT replaced iTunes backups with a cow of a file
Edgar and the gang decided to rectify the fault, and used their handy tools to re-route the chutes on the underside of the table so that when a goal was scored the ball landed with a clang in a metal bin. Fun was restored.
Then, naturally enough, the hotel owner arrived. Edgar asked the we call him Basil, so we shall.
Basil saw the engineers playing a spirited game of table football and announced "Come on lads, let me show you how this game is played!" Fun continued, with the Burroughs side desperately defending while also not particularly aggressively trying to score lest their handiwork be found out.
Inevitably, of course, the stalemate could not be maintained.
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Clang!
Basil investigated the source of the noise and discovered the fix to the machine. Was he grateful? Appreciative of the engineers' work in freeing his game from the oppressive shackles of capitalism?
No, he was not. He demanded to know if the Burroughs folks had done this to his machine. While no-one claimed credit, the pile of tools and two removed chutes sitting next to a "Burroughs" bag on the floor gave the game away somewhat.
At the following morning's training session, the trainer was not in a great mood. "I'm ashamed of you," he thundered. "You've let me down, you've let the company down, and you've let yourselves down!"
"How dare you get caught!"
So what do you think? Is this a tale of something that shouldn't have been done ("fixing" the game) or something that should have been done, but wasn't (hiding the evidence)? Make your case in the comments.
And while you're at it, if you've got your own stories of shenanigans – on the job or off – that you think might be worth a run in Who, Me? [10]tell us all about it in an email and we'll tell the world – protecting your anonymity, of course.
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Re: Always cleanup after you are done
If might have turned out completly differently if they would had moved their tools away.
Yeah, that was quite an own goal
Re: Always cleanup after you are done
Lucky that the result wasn't decided by penalties!
------> Mine's the one with the whistle & coloured cards in the pocket!
"How dare you get caught!"
That's the spirit! Fun can not be contained but the path must be carefully planned.
We had a similar tables when I was at college. Our fix was slightly different. The money you put in simply fell into a wooden box under the table, the bottom of which was simply a piece of hardboard held on with pins. We just removed a couple of the pins which allowed us to recycle the money.
At Uni someone worked out how to push the coin tray thing in far enough to release the balls, but swallow the money. They then just stuck ten quid on the table so no one suspected when they spent the whole afternoon playing...
A pub pool table I used to play on was similar, it used to take 2 x 20p coins to release the balls but with only one coin in the right hand slot it would still wobble the rack enough to drop the coins with a few attempts and return the coin, rather than take the p*ss we only cheated every other game so that the table still made enough money to stay.
When I was at college many years ago, it was common practice to scrunch up sheets of newspaper, then jam them into the pockets of the pool table in the common room. Hence every time someone potted a ball, the ball could be freely retrieved, thus allowing multiple games of pool without paying all the time. Needless to say, the college wasn't impressed after a member of staff eventually spotted what was happening and an edict was sent out informing all the students that tampering with the pool tables would result in a ban from the common room.
Still, was fun whilst it lasted...
Shades of rapping the coin operated timer box that controlled the snooker table lights in *just* the right place to continue playing... but 'twas in a far country, a long time ago, and besides...
Rumour has it that the plastic cups from hot-drink vending machines would fit in the pockets quite nicely. I clearly never had the chance to try this...
Artform
The art to such fixes is to make it as discreet as possible. A bit of tape over the diverter hole, or a retrievable coin in the payment slot, or just open the coin bin.
Ummm.... I would imagine ;-)
Re: Artform
Picking the lock on the coin box was fast and easy. Pinball machines and air hockey, too. Then Pong.
Recycling something as filthy as money is a good thing, right?
Or so I heard from a friend ... who claimed they never stole a dime. Which I believe. The machines took quarters.
Inlaws "acquired" a pool table that required coins to release the balls once sunk. I was asked to install a little hidden switch that bridged the coin contact. I'm guessing the Burrows crowd were more mechie than elecie.
My somewhat thrifty in-law decided to keep the coin action for parties, and it was a nice little earner. No need to reveal the little switch tucked up under the table ;-)
Then, naturally enough, the hotel owner arrived. Edgar asked the we call him Basil, so we shall.
It sounds like the table football table was Fawlty...
Wasn't Basil the rat?!?
No - that was Roland
Heeeeee!
Yonks ago!
Back in the mid-1960's, when I was only fast approaching my teen years, we had a family holiday at a caravan park on the Hampshire coast. The park had its own cafe, bar and "social club" where families could go in the evenings. There were a few coin operated gaming machines, one being a simple "Find-the Lady" game. You put in your penny and lights flashed behind four illustrations of card deck queens. The challenge was to press the button below the one you thought the lights would rest on when they stopped - if you were right, you got two pennies as your prize (remember, this was back in the days when there were 240 pennies to the pound, and a pound would get change from a meal for our family of four, so doubling your penny stake was more than a token win).
After a couple of evenings there, I noticed a pattern to the wins: after a win, the next one would be the one to the right (or back to the first) - so, once you won once, you could carry on winning until the machine ran out of money. I also noticed a sequence to the "random" outcomes when there were no wins - I don't know why I did it, but I wrote them down and the sequence repeated after a 100 or so times. So, I was then able to sit and watch the mugs put their money in for a while and then step up with my own penny and proceed to empty it of its win pot - almost 5/- on a good evening. Since that was more than a week's pocket money, it wasn't a bonus to ignore!
I also discovered that when the machine was first powered on, it ran through a play sequence. Flick the power switch on the wall socket below the machine (it was wall mounted) and I got a free go. It upset the sequence but it gave me a free go - not too often, though, or the barman might notice!
Anon for obvious reasons.
Anyone remember banging the handset rest in old coin operated phone boxes - the ones with the A and B buttons - to "dial" numbers and get calls for free?
It also worked for longer distance calls - you just had to concatenate the local area codes to jump local areas to your final call destination.
So I am told.
" (also called table soccer or foosball)" - but only by barbarians.
In Oakland Halls at Salford University in 1987 there was a Rygar machine. It didn't take long for students to realise there was a spot halfway down the right hand side of the cabinet which, if thumped in just the right way (in an Arthur Fonzarelli stylee) would produce a credit. Never found out why that worked. Can't imagine they took many coins out of it.
Way back in the 6th form common room at School the "committee" got permission to hire in a pool table, on the strict condition that the school would not be liable in anyway.
All good for a month or two until the people who'd made the arrangements, and had the keys, did some mods for perpetual free plays - that (and the pool table) lasted until the next time the supplier came to empty the coin box and found it empty. I don't know how much the pupils concerned had to pay up to settle the matter but it was a significant sum.
Always cleanup after you are done
If might have turned out completly differently if they would had moved their tools away.
They could have claimed not knowing who did it.
additonally they could have offerd to fix the machine for the hotel owner.