Ah hazing, you never get old (or approved)

[toxico.livejournal.com]

We have a relatively new help desk guy who likes to leave his computer unlocked. Our boss (okay, really just my boss, but due to repeated date rape of our organizational hierarchy he could be this other guy's boss - no one knows) likes to go to his computer and send an email to the Network Ops team and the help desk stating that lunch is on him. This has happened a billionty several dozen a few times.

After today's occurrence, this went out to everyone from my boss:

We're getting these often enough from $helpdesktech's email that it's time we start enforcing it. I'll be at Chik-Fil-A at 2 PM (I'm serious). If you're not there, I'm disabling your account at 2:15 and creating an out of office reply in your Outlook stating that you've fallen in love with a flea infested Water Buffalo and are moving to the Serengeti to experience true love. See you at 2. I hope to see EVERYONE there.

All domain admins and helpdesk operators now have a new screensaver GPO timeout assigned. It will lock your screen after 3 minutes of inactivity. "Suggested" by $higher_up...brought about by $helpdesktech. Everyone make sure to stop by and give $helpdesktech a hearty "thank you" and metaphorical slap on the back of the head. For those of you who don't know, metaphorical means that you don't really slap him on the back of the head while on company property. I think a Chik-Fil-A sandwich to go with the free Chik-Fil-A sponsored ice cream is in order.

He then schedules a meeting for 2 PM at Chik-fil-a and sends the invite to everyone.


At about 2:15, after a few of us had returned from procuring free ice cream, we see $helpdesktech walking by with about a dozen chicken sandwiches and a shamed look on his face.

x-posted to my lj

Comments

[wxgeek.livejournal.com]

bwahahahahaha.

[azurelunatic]

"...while on company property ... "

Thus the field trip.

[blueashke.livejournal.com]

Seriously, I wonder if I could do that to the one who forgets to lock her comp here...

[siliconshaman.livejournal.com]

well, if not there are lots of other things one can do, like set his mouse to left handed use [reverses the buttons] resize the text to something eyestraining..and so on...

Inverting the monitor is fun especially if the user is clueless.

[blueashke.livejournal.com]

Lol I've done all those. I've also got an annoyatron from thinkgeek that I routinely use on all new hires. It's grand fun.

[siliconshaman.livejournal.com]

Oh I love those little gadgets...so much more convenient than hacking those musical cards to produce annoying little gizmos.

It great fun to have more than one of those, set to different intervals, dotted around the place. [inside the computer case is perfect, we had those sort where the side panels just pop off.] I think I just about drove one of the mangers balmy as he tried to find the source of this *beep* that seemed to move around.

Evil, but oh so much fun!

[blueashke.livejournal.com]

I only have one right now, but the high pitched beep is perfect for where I put it usually - the admin who sits over there can't hear it, and it drives the supervisors batty.

[jokergirl.livejournal.com]

Bwahaha, that brings back memories from my old company (and explains why I'm so paranoid about locking my own comp...). We had some terrible tricksters who'd e-mail the whole department with something nasty if they found someone who forgot to lock.

The worst thing about it? One of them was my boss... :)

;)

[n5red.livejournal.com]

Don't forget Maudie's!

[toxico.livejournal.com]

Then I guess this (http://smittenkitchen.com/2009/01/car-bomb-cupcakes/) doesn't help, does it?

[toxico.livejournal.com]

HOLY FUCK CHUYS.

We used to go there every week (Dallas, not Austin). If there's a chance you can make it to DFW at any point, I'll make sure to schedule a dinner outing.

On a similar note, there's a chance I *may* be going to Seattle on business in a couple of weeks. I plan on hitting Taco Time and Beth's (if it still exists).

[siliconshaman.livejournal.com]

Me, I miss my Tim Hortons. Dammit, why is when there's a charfucks on every corner, do we not get a Timmies in the UK?

[tecknow.livejournal.com]

This is very funny. It has lawsuit written all over it, possibly in crayon, but it's very funny.

[toxico.livejournal.com]

Oh, we made it clear it was not in any way a serious request to buy food. He did it anyway.

[miertam.livejournal.com]

And thus we make progress.

[kostika.livejournal.com]

And that is why it is such an ingrained habit for me to lock my computer that I catch myself trying to do it at home.

Still, that's brilliant.

[siliconshaman.livejournal.com]

um.. I do. But it is a laptop.

[bamatone.livejournal.com]

This is sooo why I joined this community. :D

[teriwyn.livejournal.com]

At a prior workplace, when workstations were left unlocked, similar emails were sent out to all coworkers, promising to bring donuts the next morning. (Depending on the time and creativity of the person sending out the mail, it might ask for special orders, or include the Homer Simpson donut image.)

In general, these were jokingly enforced, meaning that the poor fool who was caught was playfully ribbed, and generally did bring in donuts.

After I'd been there a while, we hired a new tech who just could not get it right! Eventually, nobody wanted to send out the donut email because we were all sick of actually eating the donuts.

[methedras.livejournal.com]

We used to send proclamations of love from unlocked computers to Team Leaders and other members of staff whenever we came across one.

Good times.

[green-ogre.livejournal.com]

The best ones are when you have two people leaving there computers unlocked.

Then you can send love letter from one to the other and then send responses back and remove them from the inbox. Then over time build up a whole romance :)

[tjernobyl.livejournal.com]

I've seen it done with compromised IRC clients. They actually managed to generate a child...

[snyperwolf.livejournal.com]

I just ate chick-fil-a for dinner!

[brotherflounder]

Bwahahahahaha!

[arabwel.livejournal.com]

Ah, so much fun. We just ended to fuck up heir desktop into incomprehensible yet easily restorable state.. it is funny what a few print screens can do to ya... XD

[jecook]

Outstanding.

at [isp] we had a very amusing way of encouraging people to lock their workstations in our team: if you didn't get the first offender's warning, your home page generally got changed to some disgusting porn site. (We were not behind the corporate firewall at that time.)

Generally, no one did it twice to ever require it, probably because were serious.

Ah, that brings back memories of that place... like swapping one of our more annoying co-worker's network patch with a loopback plug, swapping everyone's nameplates with something a bit more creative (and since we were all geeks, in a star trek font, with appropriate ranks to match), nerf wars, the ping pong table, and putting up plastic sheeting and a biohazard sign on my supervisor's office door one morning as a practical joke.

[asbrand.livejournal.com]

My old favourite is to screen capture their desktop, set it as the wallpaper, and then move all the icons off the desktop to some folder somewhere. And move the start bar too.

*grin*

Watch them go nutz trying to figure out why nothing works when you click on it...



-Az

[jrho.livejournal.com]

This was also popular with my friends in college. Quite hilarious to watch someone's reaction.

[the-s-guy.livejournal.com]

Our HD used to simply screw around with the settings of anyone who walked off without locking their session.

The one time I did it, a guy who had been waiting for four years for me to screw up gleefully spent a quarter of an hour carefully turning everything on my desktop pink.

When I simply cold-booted back to my original profile un inder 30 seconds, he was practically in tears. Bwahaha.

[amynnah.livejournal.com]

How the hell hard is it to press Windows key + L?

Still... if he did that, we wouldn't get to read about this great story. :) I loved Chik-Fil-A while I visited Florida.... /drool... we don't have them up here.

[jimbojones.livejournal.com]

Fuck yes.

When I used to work for $seminational_T1_vendor, they only - ONLY - issued laptops. No desktop computers at all in the org, just laptops. Theft, obviously, was a big problem. So company policy was that you should never leave your laptop unattended in the office - if you left the office and didn't take it with you, you must shut it down and lock it in your desk drawer.

I DELIGHTED in doing truly, truly horrifying things to unattended laptops. Horrid neon wallpaper, entire sets of hideously animated fluffy animal mouse cursors, godawful system sound schemes (once, including a FIVE MINUTE LONG recording of some random yahoo singing and playing guitar to his two-year-old daughter as the "click" sound) - you name it.

One day one of the sales reps decided that he'd "fix me" by installing some kind of "security" app on his laptop so I "couldn't" do anything to it while he left it. Making this idea even more ridiculous... the laptops were running Win98. OK, seriously? This guy and I were friends, so I went relatively easy on him and just made a neon-green-on-neon-pink BMP wallpaper that said "OWNED"... and installed it while he was taking a piss.

Ah, hazing the staff. Those were some good days.

[piepants.livejournal.com]

We get similar crap happen here. There's a broadcasting option in our IM program so it's very simple to go on an unlocked machine and broadcast 'I'm naked' to the entire enterprise.

But we don't do that we just broadcast to our account, just to be nice on the guy.

A colleague of mine has a desktop background that says "Don't be stupid. Do your job" -- as if that's going to stop us.