Comments on: Dear Clusterflock: Do you do bad things at work?

By: Smedly McFakename

Smedly McFakename — Sun, 16 Aug 2009 00:31:06 +0000

Hmm. We make a computer product that plays videos. On April 1 all the videos it played were “Never gonna give you up.” We rickrolled the entire company.

I edited the /etc/hosts file on a colleague’s computer so that every time he went to espn.com or ebay.com or a host of other sites, he’d get rickrolled.

Back when I was a night security guard, I came to work drunk one night (I was in college) and basically spent my entire 8-hour shift passed out at my desk.

By: BaileyThePirate

BaileyThePirate — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 18:55:11 +0000

When i was in school, i would log on to library computers and edit the AutoCorrect preferences in Word. I would tell it to change the school initials into naughty words, “marketing” into “wackadoo”, and perhaps the most excellent of all, Santa into Satan. I don’t know if that last one was ever employed, but I really hope so.

By: Mark Jaquith

Mark Jaquith — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 17:40:16 +0000

Working in a doctor’s office as a teenager, the older female staff were always yelling at me for clearing paper shredder jams with my fingers. There was no danger, my fingers were not nearly small enough to reach the blades. One day, I reached in to clear a jam, and then switched the machine from “AUTO” to “ON”… I stood there yelling and convulsing as if the machine were eating my fingers. Then I pulled my fingers out, and held them up. I’d colored the tips red with a marker, of course. They screamed like in horror movies.

By: Cece

Cece — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 17:05:40 +0000

My first house in D.C. was a rental located in the high cotton — a few blocks behind the U.S. Supreme Court. People loved to walk expensive breeds of dogs and talk about them. I had a white mutt who was a mix of lab, German Shepherd, who knows what else. After a while, I started telling certain people as a lark that he was a “Viennese Salon Hound.” A surprising number of people claimed to have heard of that breed, which of course was entirely made up.

By: Sheila Ryan

Sheila Ryan — Sat, 08 Aug 2009 22:36:03 +0000

I used to do something of the reverse, Phil. I was Curator of Manuscripts in an academic library for some years, overseeing original documents penned by everyone from Albert Einstein to James Joyce to Ulysses S. Grant. Some evenings as I waltzed past the library staffer charged with halting thieves, I would say as I passed through Checkpoint Charlie, “Missed that Presidential autograph, didn’t ya?”

By: Phil Bebbington

Phil Bebbington — Sat, 08 Aug 2009 22:29:51 +0000

I did work for a book store for a while. I was kind of in charge of goods in and out. We had access to those security tags that are sometimes placed in books of high value – I used to hide them in bags and coats of co-workers so that they set off the alarms as they came in and out of work.

Juvenile, but, I have always loved juvenile!

By: Sheila Ryan

Sheila Ryan — Sat, 08 Aug 2009 22:25:28 +0000

This is nigh-on one of my fave cluster-threads ever.

By: Sheila Ryan

Sheila Ryan — Sat, 08 Aug 2009 22:22:31 +0000

Bad covers a whole lotta territory, yeah?

By: pedro

pedro — Sat, 08 Aug 2009 21:05:15 +0000

When I was a soldier, I was bored at the range. While looking through my binoculars I saw a group of wild pigs. I instantly got on the radio and said pigs in the open 150 meters. Basically I called indirect fire on some wild hogs who happened to be crossing the range. The Sergeant Major was really interested in who was calling for indirect fire on police officers. I have since grown up and would never kill a defenseless animal in that way.

Another time, when the entire battalion was working together a group of friends and I decided to steal another company’s RSOV’s (Ranger Special Operations Vehicle) and hide them on the other side of the building that company was staying in. This company retaliated by urinating on our seats. The night before we left we escalated and crapped on some of their seats.

By: Jason

Jason — Sat, 08 Aug 2009 04:25:19 +0000

I found a USB extension cord and plugged it into the back of the computer of the girl who sits opposite me at work. I then wound that extension cord through the mess of cords that services three adjacent desks. At the end of it I attached a wireless mouse receiver.

For the following two months, I had the mouse by my feet (if I was in danger of being caught, I would kick it under my set of drawers), and nudged it, moved it, clicked, etc. whenever I felt like it. Sometimes I wouldn’t do it for days, other days I would do it all day.

She KNEW it was me. She knew it, but she couldn’t prove it. One time, she nearly caught me out. She noticed the symptoms (usually tiny nudges or clicks – just enough to annoy the hell out of someone) stopped when I left my desk. She asked me to come and look. It was a test I passed by quickly putting the mouse in my pocket. The natural walking movement was enough to convince her.

She had ridiculous theories, and began recording when it happened in an attempt to find patterns. I think she thought it was some sort of GhostWriter type of mischief. I didn’t see it, but someone told me she had a spreadsheet. Occasionally, I’d leave it with another in-range colleague.

She unplugged everything and plugged it all back in. After a few weeks of this, she began to think that it wasn’t me at all. She called I.T. at least twenty times.

At this point, I played the double bluff, i.e. I came clean and apologised, and explained exactly how I did it. She didn’t believe me.

I.T. sent someone to investigate. He found nothing, and of course, I stopped the symptoms while he was standing there, and started them again when he left. He concluded she was crazy – the job remains unresolved.

After two months I grew bored, and unplugged it. Some weeks later I innocently asked her if her mouse problems had gone away, and she claimed that they were still pretty bad.

I can’t explain that.