Facebook prank sent techie straight to Excel hell
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- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2024/07/22/who_me/
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This week our hero – if we can call him that – is a jokester we'll Regomize as "Mark" who once worked for a huge corporate in the kind of busy office you see in the movies where everyone's always busy doing business of some sort.
This was in the early days of social media. Facebook was quite a new thing and few businesses had yet devised policies about whether or not it was appropriate to use it during work hours. Mark had a colleague – let's call him "Dave" – who was quite taken with the ol' Facebook, and the eerie blue glow of The Social Network could often be seen radiating out from his cubicle.
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This wasn't really a problem, as Dave always seemed to get his work done and done well. Nonetheless, it was a "bit of a running joke" as Mark puts it.
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At this point it's worth describing Dave's job a little. The company used "a horribly unwieldy corporate time-booking system that took everyone ages to navigate each week on a Friday afternoon," according to Mark, so the IT staff "set up a local solution on a dev server under a desk." That solution involved a simple intranet with a web interface which wrote out everyone's time into its database.
"We could then extract the data in one go via a macro-driven Excel sheet in the correct format to be bulk uploaded to the corporate system," explained Mark. One aspect of Dave's job was to run the extract spreadsheet every Friday and do the upload.
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So every Friday, like clockwork, Dave would open the spreadsheet. And, of course, he would see a warning message asking if he was sure he wanted to use macros – a favorite tool of miscreants, then as now. And, because he knew exactly what these macros were for, he always hit "OK"
And therein lay his mistake.
For unbeknownst to Dave, Mark and his buddies had decided to play a prank on him by modifying the routine slightly. They added an additional macro to the spreadsheet – set to autorun – which simply added a new line to the hosts file of the PC on which it was executed.
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That new line in hosts was a dummy DNS entry for Facebook which pointed, not to Zuckerberg's Curse, but to a website the IT team had set up on their internal dev server. The site consisted, Mark told us, of "one page which (in corporate branding) informed the user that their IP address had been flagged as spending excessive time on social media, and that their manager had been alerted."
Mark et al laid their trap … and waited.
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Come Friday, Mark returned from a meeting to discover that the trap had been sprung, but with unexpected chaotic results. Dave was in his manager's office making all manner of excuses for spending time own social media and pleading not to keep his job, while the manager was trying to figure out what in the world was going on.
Realizing that perhaps a line had been crossed, Mark intervened – interrupting the conversation to reveal the prank.
Dave did not see the funny side and kicked an office chair "with such force that he almost broke his leg" according to Mark.
Numerous heartfelt apologies and attempts to make amends had little effect on Dave, who hobbled about the office furious with his colleagues for some time afterwards. At least until he was quite certain he wasn't really going to lose his job.
OK, time to 'fess up: has a bit of harmless fun ever gone a bit too far at your work? If you've crossed a line and never admitted it, [10]tell us about it in an email to Who, Me? and we may share it on some future Monday – anonymously, of course. ®
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[6] https://www.theregister.com/2024/07/15/who_me/
[7] https://www.theregister.com/2024/07/08/who_me/
[8] https://www.theregister.com/2024/07/01/who_me/
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Re: Flying office chair
Ah, the Doom editor. Didn't use it on Doom but for Doom II, I made quite a few extra levels with that and still play them today occasionally. Imagine starting the level and there is a Cyberdemon stood right behind you giving you about a second to move before you get a rocket in the back of the head. Fun.
In our office it was Quake
We were doing "network stress tests" during the lunchbreak. It became such a success that our little room, fir for three, was often occupied by six howling monsters during lunch hour.
One day, we were really getting on with the destruction and the howling glee. Unfortunately, that day, one of our colleagues in the next room had scheduled that time for a business call.
Needless to say, we were soon relocated to the basement, and that was the end of our network stress tests.
Re: In our office it was Quake
"We were doing "network stress tests" during the lunchbreak."
We used to run similar tests in the wee small hours (working for an international parcel delivery service it was either insanely busy overnight or dead quiet) - 4 of us used to play in various hubs including London, Brussels and the Midlands. Great fun!
Re: In our office it was Quake
And what a great "network stress testing" tool Quake was/is LOL
Ah.... But did you install the "bombs" wad pak and neglect to tell one particular colleague - who then wondered what the f*** was going on when he was hit by homing missiles and gib gun rounds from everyone else as we strained to keep straight faces.
Sales Manager Hell
Years ago, the company I was working for was moving premises but the actual move date kept getting delayed for various reasons. The sales manager had spent a fortune on mugs, notepads etc. with the new address, phone number etc. on for giveaways at an upcoming international expo. In my youthful wisdom, I decided to fake a fax from BT saying that as the move was taking so long, they had had to reassign the phone numbers and new ones would be generated.
One of the directors was in on the joke. He hauled the sales manager into the boardroom and gave him a real earful about wasting so much money. The SM turned an interesting shade of red and would have rung the poor chap at BT (who's name I had found and signature forged) to give him a real earful if he hadn't been restrained and let in on the joke.
He was never the same again.
This was also the same sales manager who never actually went out of the office but was always demanding a car phone (yep - it was that long ago). He was presented with a new mobile at the works Christmas do, all wrapped up. His face was a picture. Even more so when he unwrapped in and it was a box of Smarties in the shape of a phone.
Re: Sales Manager Hell
We had an obnoxious loud, shouty finance director. Who once walked out of his little corner office into the main office swearing and shouting and smacking his hand into the big echoey filing cupboards with several massive bangs while I was on the phone right next to him. Proper toddler tantrum. Guess he'd had an annoying phone call.
That Christmas "secret Santa" bought him a megaphone. I couldn't laugh too much because he was absolutely furious!
Which of course made it even funnier.
This being a "Who Me?" article, I have to confess that it wasn't me - although I sort of wish it had been. I drew someone I liked, so they got a nice present from secret me.
Re: Sales Manager Hell
About a billion years ago in Internet time, call it roughly 1985, my Boss and I were in my office talking to the company owner on the speaker phone. The guy in charge of Advanced Manufacturing slammed into the office, making all kinds of demands, threatening us with firing and worse of we didn't drop everything to do his bidding. Until the owner's voice came out of the telephone, saying three magic words: "Dave, you're fired." ,,, My Boss was given the newly vacated AdvMan seat the following morning, and I took over his position. The owner cautioned both of us separately "Play fair with everybody, I don't like assholes". Needless to say we took him at his word.
I was expecting a regonimised Crowdstrike (ex) employee this morning.
The ones not chained to their desks covered in blood sweat and tears are hiding in a filing cabinet in a basement with signs on the door saying 'beware of the leopard'
I had a little bit of fun putting a program named CRASH.EXE in the directory of the executables of an image processing system I was developing back in the days of MS-DOS. The more inquisitive users of course wondered what this program did. What it did was redirect the keyboard interrupt to my own interrupt handler, which did nothing whatsoever with any key press. It then caused the screen to flash and put a message in the centre stating the system had crashed. No key press could stop the program, so a hard reset was the only option.
On a single-user, single-tasking OS this could be done safely because no other program could be running. It did cause some consternation with people sheepishly admitting they had crashed the system, and could I, being both admin and developer, set things right. Generally I got very evasive answers when I asked them what they had done to cause the system to crash. Some owned up they had run CRASH, whereupon I would ask them what they had expected such a command to do. Some mumbled they thought it might be a game. Some bolder ones asked why such a program was on the system in the first place, and I said it was there for testing purposes.
Testing users, that is, not the system.
I'd have thought it was a bit risky upsetting the person who uploaded your time-sheet. You might expect to end up having to explain that you weren't late in, early out 3 morning this week and didn't have a 2 hour lunch break on Wednesday.
Sure but not as risky as running MSExcel in the context of a user with permission to write to HOSTS….
When Facebook was that new, a lot of places still had people running XP in admin mode.
Icon because it was obviously a dumb thing even back then...
And the places that really hated their staff might have been running Windows ME
And businesses that were (are) serious about doing business had (have) the likes of Facebook blocked at the routers/firewalls ... except for people who can show a business case for using it at work.
Rather different
At one place I worked our favourite was wheely chair races along the office, which had a long wide corridor between the desks and the windows. One day we were gobsmacked when the boss appeared unexpectedly, grabbed a chair and joined in. It transpired he had known all along we were doing it, but wasn't bothered as long as the work got done on time.
Re: Rather different
Not relevant to the original article but to your comment: in one previous workplace in the mid-90s, we had an office unicycle. If you got bored or frustrated, you got on the unicycle and rode it up and down the office for a while.
Remarkably, no-one got seriously injured. Even more remarkably: as the department klutz, I didn't even manage to sprain anything. On the other hand, I never quite got the knack of riding it either.
Re: Rather different
Top Gear's Jeremy Clarkson drove a Peel P50, the world's smallest (footprint 54x39 in) production car, round the BBC's offices
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peel_P50
Facebook was quite a new thing and few businesses had yet devised policies about whether or not it was appropriate to use it
I was amazed when the internet became a mainstream thing , and still to this day to some extent ,that companies felt the need to give all the employees access to it.
Right now as i type this on El Reg for instance Im getting less work done than otherwise.
Obviously I need it to cut n paste everything form StackExchage, just not those other drones in admin.
Flying office chair
Back in my day Facebook was unheard of. Doom was the time waster of choice in the IT dept. I wrote some extra levels for the game and my colleagues were always up for the challenge. One colleague was tentatively exploring a poorly lit, sinister corridor when he noticed a small gap in the wall. He tried to peer through the gap and brought his face closer to the monitor. Suddenly a Boss appeared and stuffed a rocket into his face at point blank range. Startled, he flew backwards on his office chair and crashed into metal filing cabinets behind him, bashing his head and effing and blinding. The rest of us just cracked up laughing.