The IT stories enterprise IT pros actually laugh at.
Volume 341, Issue 3 · 20 articles from 8 issues
A junior sysadmin dropped an expensive SCSI drive and fabricated a fault story to avoid consequences.
In this installment of The Register's Who, Me? column, a reader named Hank recounts an accident from the 1990s when he worked as a systems administrator at a poultry factory. While handling a pair of newly arrived 750MB SCSI drives, worth more than his monthly salary, Hank accidentally dropped one.
Facing potential job loss and a move back with his parents, he called his supervisor claiming the drive made a suspicious noise and might be faulty. His boss approved a vendor replacement, which arrived overnight, letting Hank complete the storage upgrade without facing consequences for his mistake.
Red teamers gained network admin access via social engineering and physical security gaps at a client site.
Two offensive security consultants ran a penetration test by exploiting social engineering and physical security gaps.
After offering to shovel snow, they gained building access and planted a Raspberry Pi on an unprotected network port, remaining undetected for two weeks.
During that time they found the company used weak passwords like winter2023! across 50-60 accounts and multiple Active Directory Certificate Services vulnerabilities.
They ultimately obtained domain administrative access. The incident highlights inadequate security awareness training, unrestricted network ports, and the absence of strong password policies and multi-factor authentication.
IT staff fabricate uptime statistics using invented jargon that management never questions.
The BOFH column describes how IT personnel create fictional performance data with pie charts and made-up units like Terafloptules to satisfy management reporting requirements.
Over the years they have cycled through Y2K, blockchain, COVID and quantum computing as excuses for data inconsistencies.
When the Boss questions a suspicious metric, the PFY bluffs with pseudo-technical explanations about Google indexing new terminology. The result demonstrates how rarely management scrutinizes the numbers it receives.
Retired software support specialist recalled to restore archived documents for a tax audit using decades-old application knowledge.
Roger, a retired UK software support technician, was contacted years after his 2021 retirement by an American company that acquired his former employer.
A German customer needed help recovering digital archives from their old backup disks to provide documentation for a tax audit. Using his memory of legacy software systems, Roger successfully converted raw ASCII data into readable PDF documents.
When auditors discovered discrepancies suggesting duplicate invoices, he identified the error and resolved the crisis. Despite lucrative compensation, he declined further work and donated his fees to his care home.
A support agent fixed an irate customer's phone complaint by pointing her to the charger still sitting in the original box.
Steve, working tech support for a supermarket's mobile service in 2006, took a call from an irate customer convinced her new phone was defective.
She had bought three replacement batteries in two weeks, assuming batteries were disposable items to be thrown away when depleted.
When Steve asked whether she was using the included charger, she revealed she did not know such a device existed.
He directed her to look in the phone's original box, where the charger was nestled beneath the cardboard packaging.
The story illustrates how customer misunderstandings about basic included accessories can be resolved with simple guidance.
A VP mistook a disk error message for a hacker named General Failure infiltrating his computer.
Lee, a sysadmin at a retail company headquarters around 2000, received a distressing call from a vice president claiming a hacker using the alias General Failure had compromised his PC and locked him out of files.
The executive reported an error message reading General failure is reading Drive C, which he believed indicated unauthorized access. When Lee asked for the exact wording, the VP realized the message actually stated General failure reading Drive C: without the word is.
Lee delivered the good news that no hacker was involved; the error simply meant the hard disk had failed. The company proceeded with hardware replacement rather than a security investigation.
A construction manager accidentally deleted all files on a colleague's PC using the DOS command DEL *.* during the 1980s.
In this Who, Me? column, a reader recalls a 1980s incident on a Swedish construction site when, as the most junior manager, he asked to try a junior engineer's PC during lunch.
Having only one DOS command in his arsenal, Clay typed DEL *.* and deleted everything in the directory. Thankfully, his colleague was very relaxed and forgave him, so he got to keep his job.
The anecdote serves as a cautionary tale about granting computer access to non-technical users, especially those in management positions.
A cunning IT administrator outsmarts a printer service engineer using his own playbook of delaying tactics.
When a squeaky printer requires service, the BOFH and PFY encounter a printer engineer skilled in classic delay tactics like requesting multiple serial numbers and scheduling inconvenient appointments. The BOFH counters each ploy by being equally well-prepared, anticipating tricks like the upsell for end-of-line equipment.
After bribing the engineer with a small cash incentive to swap printers, the administrator discovers the engineer simply moved the same machine upstairs, and the squeaking persists-ultimately meeting a mysterious demise involving a white van.
A developer hired for Visual Basic wrote C# instead and hit a bug that vanished without explanation.
Johnny was hired as a Visual Basic developer but chose to write a new project in C#. A complex string manipulation routine for task routing exhibited intermittent failures he could not diagnose.
After making essentially random code changes, the bug disappeared on its own. Years later, promoted to senior developer, he encountered his own old code carrying a comment that read 'Dear future Johnny, I am very, very sorry.'
An apprentice secretly automated a Y2K task, then later inherited support for her own buggy creation.
In this Who, Me? column, an apprentice called Kara worked a 1999 Y2K supplier audit, manually retyping data from a Unix minicomputer into an Access database. Denied permission to automate it, she did anyway, building a telnet-based script that populated Access automatically, but it froze the PC it ran on.
She spent a month jiggling the mouse to dodge the screensaver and still earned a glowing review. The ironic twist: after moving into full-time employment, her first third-line support ticket was for that same problematic Access database, so she inherited her own creation.
A new support hire automated overnight batch fixes, ending night calls and angering colleagues who relied on overtime.
In the 1990s, Lionel joined an IBM mainframe support team handling overnight COBOL batch jobs. Nightly emergency calls required him to fix malformed input data over slow remote connections, disrupting his sleep and family life.
Rather than endure it, he wrote an automated pre-process program to handle the data reformatting. The solution eliminated the overnight emergencies, but a colleague who depended on overtime pay strongly disapproved. Lionel kept looking for permanent fixes to other overnight issues despite the friction.
A manager took down his company's entire network with a weekend-long Nmap scan, then blamed malware picked up on a business trip.
Roger, who managed teams designing electronic shop tools, decided to explore his company's internal network with Nmap on a slow Friday afternoon.
He launched an ambitious scan across the mid-sized organization spanning engineering, sales, marketing, administration, and manufacturing, and left it running all weekend.
By Monday the network had failed completely, with the IT director and COO unable to establish VPN connections, and troubleshooting traced the problem to Roger's laptop. Rather than admit fault, he claimed he had likely picked up a virus on a recent trip to the company's China office.
IT spent nearly a week scanning the machine, found nothing, issued a warning about safe travel, and returned it with Nmap still installed.
A red teamer bypassed hospital security using scrubs, a fake badge and complaints about a difficult doctor.
Security tester Dahvid Schloss gained unauthorized access to a hospital records room by wearing scrubs, carrying a non-functional badge and bonding with a nurse over shared frustrations about a real physician.
He later found that hospitals often lack basic network security, with unencrypted medical device data accessible over guest Wi-Fi.
The incident illustrates how hospitals prioritize operational continuity over security controls, creating vulnerabilities that malicious actors could exploit just as easily.
A tech worker jury-rigged a server-room UPS to power a stadium control room and save a big match.
In this On Call column, a tech worker named George saved a high-stakes derby when power failed to a stadium police control room as crowds arrived, knocking out radios, CCTV, and exit gate controls. With an electrician saying repairs would take days, George proposed repurposing a newly installed 4U UPS from the club's server room.
After quick napkin math, volunteers hauled the heavy unit through crowds and jury-rigged it to power essential systems.
The UPS held throughout the match and about 10 minutes past the final whistle, enabling safe evacuation. George's reward was a gift voucher, which the club taxed as income.
The BOFH and PFY endure absurd cross-department AI pitches at the pub, with chaotic results.
In this BOFH column, the narrator and PFY attend a cross-department AI pitch session at a pub, using mock detection gadgets to spot tedious colleagues proposing absurd AI schemes.
Users pitch things like AI-controlled air conditioning via Excel macros and AI that offers constant positive reinforcement, prompting jokes about a lift praising your button-pressing. After heavy drinking to endure the presentations, the pair vaguely recall coding something for the PA system.
The next morning the Boss angrily reports the toilet now offers encouragement over the building announcement system, satirizing corporate AI enthusiasm versus reality.
An On Call war story: a sabotaged Pick system, an emergency callout, and a fix that was plugging it back in.
In this week's On Call, a developer named Wade recounts writing software in the 1980s for a mail order business running the Pick operating system.
In early 1990, five years after he had left, his former boss called him in an emergency after hastily firing the clerk who operated the system.
The disgruntled employee had sabotaged it by unplugging the machine while it was printing the day's orders. Wade's fix was to plug it back in, after which he spent hours verifying data integrity and restarting operations, and he charged accordingly for the lost sleep.
A technician forcing a heatsink onto a CPU knocked a surface-mounted component clean off the board.
In the early 2000s, a biology department technician at an American university used excessive force with a screwdriver while installing a heatsink on a CPU. A tiny component flew off the motherboard and the PC failed.
Rather than admit the mistake, he claimed the part was dead on arrival and obtained a replacement from tech support. He installed the second one with considerably more care.
An IT department's sticky-note credential handout let a contractor access proprietary data remotely.
During an office relocation, an IT department attached sticky notes containing usernames and initial passwords to new laptops stored in a conference room.
A contractor photographed the credentials and later used them to remotely access proprietary data and planning documents on shared drives.
The article emphasizes that even the IT department should not know a user's password, and that credentials should never be left exposed. Secure alternatives include encrypted channels and temporary passwords accessible only to the intended recipient.
A nine-year-old's accidental Unix command caused 36 hours of repair work on company systems.
An IT manager at a 1990s company running an IBM RS/6000 Unix system left a root-level terminal session open while his children visited for Halloween festivities.
His daughter, inspired by a movie scene, typed the SHUTDOWN command at the terminal. The resulting damage required the boss to spend 36 hours performing repairs.
The incident illustrates the security risk of leaving privileged sessions accessible to untrained users, even inadvertently.
A highly credentialed lawyer demanded urgent IT support to learn why his email text appeared slanted.
A sysadmin at a Wall Street law firm was urgently summoned by a lawyer who complained that all of the letters were slanted in his email client.
The sysadmin identified the issue as italicized text formatting and showed the lawyer the italics icon.
Despite holding degrees from an Ivy League university plus law and business credentials, the lawyer became angry on learning how the formatting had happened. The secretary's barely concealed laughter underscored the gap between educational credentials and practical technology literacy.