The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

Prank'd

by Remy Porter in Feature Articles on 2011-03-29

That Saturday, a fierce debate raged in the high school auditorium. Well, it was actually a match between debate teams, so the ferocity level matched an annoyed squirrel, but it was fierce enough for debate club. Since Bill's school was playing host to the match, he volunteered to help run things. During the day, he had plenty of idle time to find mischief.

In an unlocked classroom, Bill found a Macintosh LC, unsupervised, unattended, and equipped with a microphone. In the actual computer lab across the hall, Bill and his classmates constantly pranked each other's machines, and it struck him as a good idea to play a prank on this one. Quickly, he recorded himself proclaiming, "This computer has been hacked. I am in complete control of this computer. BWAHAHAHAHA." Bill placed the audio file in the machine's Startup folder, shut the machine down, and went back to the debates.

167 comments - Last comment @ 2017-12-14

Dirty Laundry

by Remy Porter in Tales from the Interview on 2011-03-15

"Your one o'clock is here," the receptionist said.

Roberto glanced at the clock and saw that it was 11:30. "Does his watch work?" Roberto muttered. "Put him in one of the conference rooms. The boss isn't going to be back until 1:00." He hung up the phone and got back to work.

130 comments - Last comment @ 2020-01-27

Hard Deadline

by Remy Porter in Feature Articles on 2011-03-01

Lawrence walked through the lobby of his prospective employer. It was loaded with the trappings of a giant government (military) contractor; large glass gew-gaws signifying compliance with industry standard X₂₉-Q hung on the walls beside pictures of the CEO smiling and shaking hands with various Presidents and Secretaries of Defense.

He was shown to a conference room where he met the head of IT. Smalltalk and background questions eventually led into the details of the job opening. "It's a pretty vanilla project. We want to move our old Honeywell system over to an AS/400 relational database before our old 5-digit date overflows on us."

300 comments - Last comment @ 2011-05-23