285 articles · page 1 of 6
The Register, Sunday, October 18th, 2026
A reader trying to collect a parcel from an Irish OOHPod locker found a Windows command prompt on the screen instead.
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The Register, Friday, October 16th, 2026
On Call: after a ransomware attack, a school IT hire's password policy hit a data manager who'd used 'letmein' since 1998.
more → The Register, Wednesday, October 14th, 2026
A YouTube comedian pitted his own AI representative against a company's AI interviewer, with predictably messy results.
more → The Register, Monday, October 12th, 2026
Who, Me?: a Sperry Univac operator cancelled the wrong print job and wiped out a week-long inventory run as US bosses watched.
more → The Register, Friday, October 9th, 2026
On Call: a 1990s field engineer who turned down a promotion spent his time cleaning up after the incompetent colleague who took it.
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The Register, Friday, October 9th, 2026
In this BOFH tale, a failing basement computer tied to the waste water system gets passed up the management food chain with smelly results.
more → The Register, Thursday, October 8th, 2026
The Register's PWNED column: a small firm that refused security help was hit by ransomware and failed months later.
more → The Register, Friday, October 2nd, 2026
A UK techie sent to China without a visa endures wasp stings, police detention and a marathon sales meeting.
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The Register, Thursday, October 1st, 2026
A pen tester found a law firm CISO left BlueKeep unpatched and used a weak leetspeak password.
more → The Register, Monday, September 28th, 2026
A reader recalls following a boss's advice to delete Exchange log files late on a Friday, taking email down.
more → The Register, Friday, September 25th, 2026
A 1990s Hong Kong rollout goes wrong when a team nods along but implements its own version of the plan.
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The Register, Friday, September 25th, 2026
BOFH satirizes 'holistic' troubleshooting after the Boss demands a softer approach to fixing a virus-hit laptop.
more → The Register, Monday, September 21st, 2026
A reader recalls a boss who ordered discount 'printers' from a catalog that turned out to be just the stands.
more → The Register, Friday, September 18th, 2026
IT technician resolves Wi-Fi interference by drilling a new desk hole for monitor cables.
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The Register, Monday, September 14th, 2026
A datacenter technician held down the wrong power button to prevent an outage while colleagues laughed.
more → The Register, Friday, September 11th, 2026
A sarcastic IT administrator explains why the company's content management system cannot manage content.
more → The Register, Friday, September 11th, 2026
A support war story about an executive who blamed IT for missing files he had saved to the wrong folder.
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The Register, Monday, September 7th, 2026
A reader recalls plugging a mouse into the wrong nine-pin port on a future Nobel laureate's IBM PC and making it smoke.
more → The Register, Friday, September 4th, 2026
Meet 'Roy' who toiled at a company that did work related to tissue donations and organ transplants. 'The on-call duties were a bit hair-raising due to the high stakes involved,' Roy told On Call. 'Thankfully, things typically ran well and I didn't get too many calls in the off hours.'
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The Register, Monday, August 31st, 2026
This week, meet 'Martin' who told us about his very first job in tech. 'I had just started working as a network engineer for a very small IT infrastructure company. Since I was the only person who worked with Cisco gear, that made me 'The Cisco expert',' he told The Register.
more → The Register, Friday, August 28th, 2026
An executive mistook a photocopier for a fax machine, producing a memorable tech support call.
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The Register, Friday, August 28th, 2026
The BOFH battles petty cash bureaucracy with quantum physics metaphors and a staged laptop incident.
more → The Register, Thursday, August 27th, 2026
A Scottish digital billboard has been stuck on a Debian login prompt since its operator went into liquidation.
more → The Register, Monday, August 24th, 2026
A maintenance batch script meant to defrag Exchange deleted critical Windows NT 4 system files instead.
more → The Register, Monday, August 17th, 2026
A technician forcing a heatsink onto a CPU knocked a surface-mounted component clean off the board.
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The Register, Friday, August 14th, 2026
IT staff fabricate uptime statistics using invented jargon that management never questions.
more → TechTarget, Tuesday, August 19th, 2025
An On Call war story: a sabotaged Pick system, an emergency callout, and a fix that was plugging it back in.
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TechTarget, Tuesday, August 19th, 2025
A developer's Python 2-to-3 upgrade workaround stayed hidden in production for eight years.
more → The Register, Friday, August 7th, 2026
A highly credentialed lawyer demanded urgent IT support to learn why his email text appeared slanted.
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The Register, Thursday, August 6th, 2026
An IT department's sticky-note credential handout let a contractor access proprietary data remotely.
more → The Register, Monday, August 3rd, 2026
A nine-year-old's accidental Unix command caused 36 hours of repair work on company systems.
more → The Register, Friday, July 31st, 2026
Retired software support specialist recalled to restore archived documents for a tax audit using decades-old application knowledge.
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The Register, Monday, July 27th, 2026
A construction manager accidentally deleted all files on a colleague's PC using the DOS command DEL *.* during the 1980s.
more → The Register, Sunday, July 26th, 2026
A cunning IT administrator outsmarts a printer service engineer using his own playbook of delaying tactics.
more → The Register, Friday, July 24th, 2026
A new support hire automated overnight batch fixes, ending night calls and angering colleagues who relied on overtime.
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The Register, Thursday, July 23rd, 2026
A red teamer bypassed hospital security using scrubs, a fake badge and complaints about a difficult doctor.
more → The Register, Monday, July 20th, 2026
A developer hired for Visual Basic wrote C# instead and hit a bug that vanished without explanation.
more → The Register, Friday, July 17th, 2026
A support agent fixed an irate customer's phone complaint by pointing her to the charger still sitting in the original box.
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The Register, Monday, July 13th, 2026
A manager took down his company's entire network with a weekend-long Nmap scan, then blamed malware picked up on a business trip.
more → The Register, Friday, July 10th, 2026
A tech worker jury-rigged a server-room UPS to power a stadium control room and save a big match.
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The Register, Friday, July 10th, 2026
The BOFH and PFY endure absurd cross-department AI pitches at the pub, with chaotic results.
more → The Register, Monday, July 6th, 2026
An apprentice secretly automated a Y2K task, then later inherited support for her own buggy creation.
more → The Register, Friday, July 3rd, 2026
A VP mistook a disk error message for a hacker named General Failure infiltrating his computer.
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The Register, Thursday, July 2nd, 2026
Red teamers gained network admin access via social engineering and physical security gaps at a client site.
more → The Register, Monday, June 29th, 2026
A junior sysadmin dropped an expensive SCSI drive and fabricated a fault story to avoid consequences.
more → The Register, Friday, June 26th, 2026
The BOFH and PFY use an equipment amnesty day to dump broken gear and scheme insurance fraud, snaring their boss.
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The Register, Friday, June 26th, 2026
A security director ordered MFA rolled back, blaming it for an invoicing failure caused by buggy software.
more → The Register, Monday, June 22nd, 2026
A young programmer who fixed a dangerous file-deleting batch command got reprimanded rather than praised.
more → The Register, Friday, June 19th, 2026
A tech support worker calmly explains Word's spell-checker to a panicked colleague who had never seen red squiggles.
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The Register, Monday, June 15th, 2026
A bargain tablet purchase goes sideways when a 9-inch device arrives in a supposedly 14-inch box.
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