The Register, Friday, October 9th, 2026
Rejecting a Promotion Sent Field Service Tech Into Support Hell
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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281 articles · page 1 of 6
The Register, Friday, October 9th, 2026
BOFH: Smells Like Team Spirit
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
Cheapskates Wouldn't Pay for Security Help, Got Hit by Ransomware, and Went Bust Months Later
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
Techie Was Stung by a Wasp, Held Overnight by Chinese Police, Then Trapped in a 13-Hour Meeting
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
CISO Thought He Had a 'r3@lg00dp@$$w0rd' but Forgot to Patch
A pen tester found a law firm CISO left BlueKeep unpatched and used a weak leetspeak password.
more → The Register, Monday, September 28th, 2026
Techie Assumed Boss Knew What They Were Talking About and Killed Exchange by Deleting Data
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
Project Leader Thought His Team Understood the Plan, Ended Up Fixing Their 'Interpretation' of It
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: The Helldesk Opens Its Third Eye and Ascends to a Higher Plane of Troubleshooting
BOFH satirizes 'holistic' troubleshooting after the Boss demands a softer approach to fixing a virus-hit laptop.
more → The Register, Monday, September 21st, 2026
Boss Bought Cheap 'Printer' From a Catalog and Was Left Without a Leg to Stand On
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
Techie Fixed Wi-Fi Dead Zone With a Drill
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
Tech Team Stood and Laughed at Colleague Who Pressed the Wrong Off Button
A datacenter technician held down the wrong power button to prevent an outage while colleagues laughed.
more → The Register, Friday, September 11th, 2026
BOFH: Oh No! The CMS Ate 500 Pages of Corporate Documentation
A sarcastic IT administrator explains why the company's content management system cannot manage content.
more → The Register, Friday, September 11th, 2026
On Call: Boss Wrongly Claimed IT Deleted His Files, Refused to Learn the One-Click Fix
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
Who, Me? Techie Sent to Fix Nobel Prize Winner's PC Almost Set It on Fire
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
On Call: User Who Handled Life-Or-Death Situations Struggled With The Shift Key
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
Techie With Three Months' Experience Was Sent In As The Cisco Expert And Proceeded To Blow Everything Up
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
On Call: Exec Couldn't Identify a Photocopier, Which Made for a Fax-Inating Tech Support Call
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
BOFH: Schrödinger's Petty Cash Puts Us in a Very Awkward Superposition
The BOFH battles petty cash bureaucracy with quantum physics metaphors and a staged laptop incident.
more → The Register, Thursday, August 27th, 2026
Check Out the Width of That Debian Display
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
Batch File Automated a Clean-Up Job, Then Fouled Itself by Deleting the Wrong Directory
A maintenance batch script meant to defrag Exchange deleted critical Windows NT 4 system files instead.
more → The Register, Monday, August 17th, 2026
Part Didn't Fit So Techie Got Out His Screwdriver. Then Something Flew Off the Motherboard
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
BOFH: How Our COVID Ransomware Protocol's Y2K Blockchain Lowered Uptime
IT staff fabricate uptime statistics using invented jargon that management never questions.
more → TechTarget, Tuesday, August 19th, 2025
Five Years After Quitting a Job, Developer's Former Boss Asked for Rapid Tech Support
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
Demoralized Developer's Desperate Hack Came Back to Haunt Him on LinkedIn
A developer's Python 2-to-3 upgrade workaround stayed hidden in production for eight years.
more → The Register, Friday, August 7th, 2026
Sysadmin Summoned to Explain Italics to a User With at Least Two Degrees
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
IT Department Put Sticky Notes on the Laptops to Help Employees Log In
An IT department's sticky-note credential handout let a contractor access proprietary data remotely.
more → The Register, Monday, August 3rd, 2026
IT Boss Left Root Session Open for Bring-Your-Kid-to-Work Day
A nine-year-old's accidental Unix command caused 36 hours of repair work on company systems.
more → The Register, Friday, July 31st, 2026
Techie Lured Out of Retirement to Support Software Only He Remembered
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
Manager Showed Off His DOS Prowess - With a Command That Wiped Data
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
BOFH: This Printer Engineer Knows Every Trick in the Book
A cunning IT administrator outsmarts a printer service engineer using his own playbook of delaying tactics.
more → The Register, Friday, July 24th, 2026
Support Newbie Figured Out How to Avoid All-Nighters, and His Colleagues Hated Him for It
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
Talking Smack About a Doctor Got Him Access to Private Medical Files
A red teamer bypassed hospital security using scrubs, a fake badge and complaints about a difficult doctor.
more → The Register, Monday, July 20th, 2026
Comment in Code Read 'Dear Future Me, Sorry I Wrote This'
A developer hired for Visual Basic wrote C# instead and hit a bug that vanished without explanation.
more → The Register, Friday, July 17th, 2026
Tech Support Chap Told Angry Customer To Think Inside The Box And Solved The Problem
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
User Crippled A Network While Trying To Learn Nmap
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
Datacenter MacGyver Saved the Biggest Football Match of the Year
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
BOFH: Cross-Department AI Pitches Are Easier to Swallow with a Pint in Hand
The BOFH and PFY endure absurd cross-department AI pitches at the pub, with chaotic results.
more → The Register, Monday, July 6th, 2026
Apprentice Developer Defied Orders - Then Got a Job Supporting Her Weird Code
An apprentice secretly automated a Y2K task, then later inherited support for her own buggy creation.
more → The Register, Friday, July 3rd, 2026
User Swore Hacker Called General Failure Had Invaded His PC
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
Hackers Shoveled Snow for Company, Were Rewarded With Network Admin Access
Red teamers gained network admin access via social engineering and physical security gaps at a client site.
more → The Register, Monday, June 29th, 2026
Sysadmin Broke Hardware Worth More Than He Made in a Month - and Lied His Way Out of the Mess
A junior sysadmin dropped an expensive SCSI drive and fabricated a fault story to avoid consequences.
more → The Register, Friday, June 26th, 2026
BOFH: Amnesty Means Never Having to Say You're Sorry
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
Security Boss Thought MFA Would Be Too Much Security
A security director ordered MFA rolled back, blaming it for an invoicing failure caused by buggy software.
more → The Register, Monday, June 22nd, 2026
How Dare You Stop Data Loss - That's Not Your Job!
A young programmer who fixed a dangerous file-deleting batch command got reprimanded rather than praised.
more → The Register, Friday, June 19th, 2026
Users Claimed They'd Never Seen a Spell Checker and Panicked at the Sight of Red Squiggles
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
Chinese E-Tailer Claimed 14-Inch Box Stretched the Size of a 9-Inch Tablet
A bargain tablet purchase goes sideways when a 9-inch device arrives in a supposedly 14-inch box.
more → The Register, Friday, June 12th, 2026
BOFH: For One Ambitious Security Type, Chaos Is a Ladder
"And uh... what are you doing?" the Head of Security asks, entering the Security office as I'm making my way to the exit – with a PC under my arm.
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The Register, Friday, June 12th, 2026
This Is Your BIOS Speaking. Please Fix Me. Your PC Is Broken
This week, meet a reader we'll Regomize as "Jackson" who told us about his time providing tech support in a university's biology department.
more → The Register, Thursday, June 11th, 2026
Every Employee's Password Was Stored in a Single Excel File
A CEO kept all 2,000 staff passwords in an unsecured Excel file and refused MFA, despite prior ransomware.
more → The Register, Monday, June 8th, 2026
Consultant Mistakenly Deleted a Ton of Data - But Reported It as a Bug
A consultant's faulty deletion script wiped hundreds of files, but he escaped blame by reporting it as a bug.
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