If a former colleague ever saw an unlocked computer, he would do a google image search for something very innappropriate but just safe enough to get through the filters, then hit Windows+L to lock the PC.

As we work in a school, and some of those computers were in classrooms, staff soon learnt to lock their computers, even if they were just stepping away for a few moments...

So, in other words, locking the PC was an essential protection against . . your own colleagues.

I had that happen to me once. I was finished eating a banana and went to the other side of the office to throw it into the bin. When I turned around, the dipshit sitting next to me was busy typing away on my keyboard.

I will spare you the verbal abuse that spewed at that point but, suffice to say, he never that shit again when I was discarding my banana peel.

Security is one thing. Bullshitting is entirely different.

he never tried .

Dammit, I gotta learn to proofread better.

Coin the jlub.

You'd have gotten a middle finger and "Then lock your damn PC, you effing moron" from me if you started yelling. Just own it when you've been dumb instead of getting pissy.

Doesn't matter if you're discarding a peel. Not in front of your PC: Lock it, or expect shenanigans.

I did some work for a certain major company whose security bods would wander around the cube farm (OK, it was not quite as bad as that, but it came close) and remove any unlocked and unattended laptops they came across. They would leave a note inviting the owner of the laptop to come to security office to recover his equipment, but only after a serious conversation with the company's Security Manager. I'd like to say that it resulted in an atmosphere of paranoia, but paranoid people only think "they" are out to get you - we knew it as a certainty.

The amusing thing is that no-one was above being targeted - this included the CEO who has the subject of these little notes at least 4 or 5 times while I was there.

A former Headmaster where I work introduced a policy for forced password changes every half term.

IT pushed back saying frequent password changes reduced security because staff would just write them down.

One day when I was in the Head's office to drop off some paperwork I noticed a post-it on the bottom of his screen with his username and password. I swiped it and passed it to the IT manager, who immediately cancelled the forced password change policy and the Head never even noticed...

At a place I worked, the endorced policy was for IT staff to rotate passphrases every 30 days.

Every first of the month, I called up the Help Desk and had them reset the passwords to my various rarely-used host- and application-accounts, writing down the new passwords (there were a dozen or so).

Then I would log into each of those hosts and apps, and change the randomly-generated passwords to something strong, yet which I had at least a slim chance of remembering.

(My primary four accounts' passwords I could easily remember, since I used them so often.)

Didn't you know that exception makes the rule? The CEO was just doing their bit!

The law binds none of us unless it binds all of us.

That has a familiar ring about it........

An obvious case for one of those laptop security cables.

When doing security audits, I used to pick the lock on those, and steal the cable ... leaving the laptop behind.

The point being to impress on the Boss that those cables were worse than useless.

Various pieces of industrial equipment running off Windows PCs, back in the naughties. I'd memorised the steps you needed to change the control software default language back from simplified, or traditional Chinese, Thai, etc after bored night shift staff had been at them.

This is where you mock up a fake email that the pranksters entire department is "being let go" due to the cost and need to replace all computers as they continually keep switching settings/languages and this is felt to be a security risk!

If you left a machine unlocked then it was usually the undying love for a colleague email, copied to everyone in the department, or (better for the rest of us) I am buying cakes for everybody.

We did have some none-it people do snapshot desktop set as wallpaper and hide icons, even better was doing it and rotating the screenshot 180 degrees…

Working in IT, we found all sorts of novel ways of reminding people to lock their computers during lunch. My favourite was a key combo which reversed the vertical orientation. Was especially satisfying when applied to one of a few Aussies we had in the office.

A fun one was to take a screenshot of the entire desktop, rotate it 180 degrees, set it as background, hide all icons and only then change the vertical orientation.

That generated very confused looks, and lots of snigger too

I've spent the majority of my career trying my hardest to avoid PowerPoint, so I'd never heard of this 'loop until ESC' function.

Now that I do, I'll be using on any computers I happen upon that have been left - against policy - unlocked and unattended.

Only issue I foresee is that PowerPoint puts the navigation icons in the bottom-left of the screen, but I'd imagine no-one is really going to notice if it's overlaying their taskbar.

Back on the Novell network at university, such "pranking" was the order of the day, and there was a period where it got really bad.

As a defense, one of the lab guys set up a "bin" dir in his path with all the common commands such as "cd", "dir", etc as batch scripts which just immediately logged you out. This meant miscreants usually immediately logged themselves out before causing any damage. He got work done by setting up other aliases beginning with "x" so the cost of his defenses was typing an extra character.

However, one of the "admins" (and I use the term VERY loosely here) was doing something requiring that she log into all the lab guys' accounts. I can't remember what, it's been nearly 40 years[1], but it was blessed from above.

For some reason, she flew into a full foam-at-the-mouth fury after getting continuously logged out, called the guy in, and absolutely chewed him a strip. He retaliated by going up the chain, and revealing the rather anarchic state of the labs, and the result was several almost-lost jobs, including the original "admin" who had some adverse paperwork filed. And needless to say, the pranking stopped.

[1] holy 'o f*ck. my bones.

I remember when the Blue Screen of Death screensaver first came out - long before Sysinternals became a Microsoft property.

We had a brand new server - over twenty grand's worth of equipment, destined to replace an existing SQL Server machine. When live, it would be the heart of the business and worth millions per year. So it absolutely, positively had to work.

It was being built by the boss's desk, before going into the server room. Load testing, checking networking configs, benchmarking storage, all of that kind of stuff.

Naturally, whilst the boss was out at lunch, we put the BSOD screensaver on it with a very long wait period. That afternoon, after 50 minutes of inactivity, the screensaver kicked in. The boss nearly had a heart attack as, out of the corner of his eye, this critical machine suddenly blue screened.

We did our best not to laugh too much. He was, when he discovered what had happened, distinctly unimpressed. But fortunately he did see the funny side of it eventually.