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texmaster · Tue Jun 05, 2007 1:16 pm

My all time favorite happened a few years ago. I was downstairs shooting the breeze with the local tech guys when a guy in his 40s came in with his laptop saying it was really slow and he had popups everywhere.

So they looked at it and found a hidden folder FULL of porn. I mean full. Mostly traditional stuff along with some women who played on the same team if you know what I mean.

The timeline was interesting too. Most of it was downloaded after 1am till about 3 am.

Now of course we are laughing our assess off. I knew the guy who brought it in and he's a straight shooter, no need for this and I knew he had a son

Sooo they clean it up and call me so I can be there to witness the momentous exchange. He comes down and we are all beat red from laughing.

He must have thought we were nuts and asked what I was doing there and I said I was just visiting.

So my friend comes up to him and says

"Got it all fixed up for you"

"Great thanks. What was wrong?"

*snickers fill the room*

"Well that can be answered pretty easily. How old is your boy?"

"13"

That did it, everyone lost it and we explained what happened. Ohhh boy was that kid in for a beating

king_kilr · Tue Jun 05, 2007 2:02 pm

haha, doesn't that kid know to stream everything and then use the firefox clear all private data :wink:

and my favorite story is that during chemistry class our teacher was talking with another teacher about an external hard drive, so I go up to turn in my test and then tell him that the maxtor external is a good drive, then I end up helping him spec out a new pc!

UberGerbil · Tue Jun 05, 2007 2:42 pm

My favorite story was the guy who wrote a little app to display one of the panoramic Mars photos from the Pathfinder/Sojourner mission, with buttons that enabled you to pan left and right. This was in 1996, in the early days of the WWW, so when he told gullible non-techies that it was a live video feed and they were actually controlling the camera on the Mars probe over the internet, they believed him.

Corrado · Tue Jun 05, 2007 2:57 pm

I used to work for my school district full time after I graduated high school and mind you, I graduated at 16 so I'm still young. I'm sitting in the office and our shop teacher comes in. Now, he's a good guy, but he's like 'F**K! My wife is pissed at me cuz she THINKS i've been surfing porn and I swore up and down I didn't. I need you to clean this thing off for me so she can't find anything if she looks. I'll throw you a 50 spot if you can get it done by the end of the day.'

Sure enough, this guy had TONS of porn on this machine. Just kinda weird that a teacher would ask a student to get rid of his porn for him.

GeForce6200 · Tue Jun 05, 2007 3:02 pm

That is really wierd. How did you graduate at 16. Are you super smart and just skipped some grades? My friend skipped the fourth grade.

boogle · Tue Jun 05, 2007 3:10 pm

Heres mine.
Our physics teacher is a prick. He teaches decent, but he's just an all around jerk to you if you're one of his students. The man yelled at us for correcting him WHEN HE WAS WRONG. He uses one of those smart boards with a projector to teach. We immediately saw the flaws in this system and screwed with him. First, we covered the two lenses in his projector with polarized sheets. We worked it out so that at perfect focus they were perpendicular (it blacked the thing out). He figured this one out after a week of teaching out of focus.
Next we jury rigged pressure switch of the eraser so it was defaulted in the on position. This meant that he would pick up a marker and it would still erase. We got a fairly good tongue lashing after that one.
Our final prank was probably the worst. We opened up the PC and disconnected the USB's where the mouse and keyboard plugged in. He was royally pissed after that one.

texmaster · Tue Jun 05, 2007 3:11 pm

UberGerbil wrote:
My favorite story was the guy who wrote a little app to display one of the panoramic Mars photos from the Pathfinder/Sojourner mission, with buttons that enabled you to pan left and right. This was in 1996, in the early days of the WWW, so when he told gullible non-techies that it was a live video feed and they were actually controlling the camera on the Mars probe over the internet, they believed him.

lol thats great

Tue Jun 05, 2007 3:12 pm

Corrado wrote:
Just kinda weird that a teacher would ask a student to get rid of his porn for him.

He probably figured you had experience hiding porn from your parents. :wink:

Glorious · Tue Jun 05, 2007 3:36 pm

boogle wrote:
Our final prank was probably the worst. We opened up the PC and disconnected the USB's where the mouse and keyboard plugged in. He was royally pissed after that one.

If you desoldered my USB connectors from my motherboard I'd be royally pissed off too, and rightfully so.

Tue Jun 05, 2007 3:41 pm

Glorious wrote:
boogle wrote:
Our final prank was probably the worst. We opened up the PC and disconnected the USB's where the mouse and keyboard plugged in. He was royally pissed after that one.

If you desoldered my USB connectors from my motherboard I'd be royally pissed off too, and rightfully so.

He didn't say "desoldered", he said "disconnected". I assumed they were plugged into ports that went to a pin header.

Regardless, messing with the teacher's computer is not a good way to improve the student-teacher relationship. :-?

ludi · Tue Jun 05, 2007 4:34 pm

Hmmm...my favorite computer moment came when I was working at a RadioShack store years ago, and got to see an ISA modem that had taken lightning. The MOV supressors were gone, the Line-In port was gone, the Phone-Out port was half melted away, and the board was missing PCB material about the size of a dime. Around the edges of the gaping void were these picture-perfect blast marks

steelcity_ballin · Tue Jun 05, 2007 4:41 pm

The Sr. Programmer where I work told me what he did when he worked for a company on VAX machines. He was using the dummy terminal on his buddies station, and (forgive me, I don't know the exact commands here) over-wrote the command that normally would give you a list of all files in a directory (think DIR in CMD Line) to instead report "NO FILES LISTED".

He prefaced the day to that co-worker by telling him that their backups had failed last night, something catastrophic! I bet that guy about **** his pants when he went to list his files and got that message. It's the modern day screenshot + hide icons gag!

Tue Jun 05, 2007 4:41 pm

ludi wrote:
Hmmm...my favorite computer moment came when I was working at a RadioShack store years ago, and got to see an ISA modem that had taken lightning. The MOV supressors were gone, the Line-In port was gone, the Phone-Out port was half melted away, and the board was missing PCB material about the size of a dime. Around the edges of the gaping void were these picture-perfect blast marks

In a similar vein, Apple II floppy drives which had their ribbon cables plugged in backwards were always good for a laugh. The cables were not keyed, and the power was provided on the same ribbon cable as the data (no separate power connector). Plugging the cable in backwards let the magic smoke out of the floppy drive in rather spectacular fashion -- 2 of the chips on the floppy drive logic board would literally explode.

I worked at a store that sold a fair number of Apple IIs.

We saw an awful lot of exploded floppy drives.

Tue Jun 05, 2007 5:14 pm

pete_roth wrote:
The Sr. Programmer where I work told me what he did when he worked for a company on VAX machines. He was using the dummy terminal on his buddies station, and (forgive me, I don't know the exact commands here) over-wrote the command that normally would give you a list of all files in a directory (think DIR in CMD Line) to instead report "NO FILES LISTED".

He prefaced the day to that co-worker by telling him that their backups had failed last night, something catastrophic! I bet that guy about **** his pants when he went to list his files and got that message. It's the modern day screenshot + hide icons gag!

Do you know this guy;

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BOFH

or these devices?

http://www.fiftythree.org/etherkiller/

diamond2a · Tue Jun 05, 2007 5:28 pm

this could become such an awesome thread, keep it up...

I can't believe I dont have a funny story to share...

texmaster · Tue Jun 05, 2007 7:23 pm

Ok here is another one.

Back in college we pulled this one while working in the computer lab. One day a super hot chick walked in and started working on a paper. Being the coward I was when it came to striking up conversation with chicks while sober I had an epiphany. Why not share all floppy drives with our computers? That way when hot chicks would come in to work they would pop in their floppy drives and we would copy the files over to our computer then erase their disks. This way they had to come up and ask for help!

We used this as pickup time since we could easily save the day by copying the info back to the disk and if things were going well we would volunteer to check the computer in their door room to make sure it wasn't a virus. Granted it didn't end up with a date 100% of the time but it worked out enough times to make it worthwhile.

And if one hot chick came in and more than one guy wanted her it would be settled with Queensbury rules of course. A GTA2 deathmatch

Hance · Tue Jun 05, 2007 7:44 pm

This is one that I pulled on a buddy of mine. Back before Windows 98 came out he some how got his hands on a cracked copy of it. We had the same ISP at the time and I just happened to be good friends with the owner. I had them type up an email and send to him that said they knew he had been on the internet with an illegal copy of windos 98 and because of their ties with microsoft if he didnt buy and register his own copy with in 3 days they would be forced to take legal action against him. The string of cuss words that came out of his mouth was amazing. I actually thought he was debating loading up his computer and throwing it in the river so he didnt go to jail.

Saint Zero · Tue Jun 05, 2007 9:27 pm

Some Observations:

I almost had a bird build a nest in an old computer.
I had a deliciously naive co-ed blankly ask me why her basic program didn't run. Funny thing was the other lab tech was sooo eager to help her, but got stuck helping someone with COBOL. Thank god I didn't take it that year.
I really owe the guy who invented Tetris a couple of bucks. I got 25 people addicted to it in the computer lab.
Slightly unplugging anything in a computer will scare the crud out of anyone.
Moria is Evil.

bhtooefr · Tue Jun 05, 2007 9:49 pm

Worst would probably be when the hard drives failed in our server. First, it was the boot drive that died. OK, at least the data's safe.

I popped the data drive into another machine, got some weird errors (that I assumed were related to its configuration as a server drive,) got in, and pulled the accounting information off, as it was needed ASAP.

Next day, I booted the machine that I had the drive installed in for more data recovery... and the drive was dead.

Scarier part was, when we recovered everything from tape, the accounting information WASN'T INCLUDED IN THE BACKUP.

Moral of the story? Check your backup policies, and RAID is your friend. :lol:

Can't believe how lucky we were there that I pulled the info off the day before the drive died.

texmaster · Wed Jun 06, 2007 1:00 am

Dumbest thing I ever did was accently pick up the wrong floppy for a bootup. Of course that floppy had the Monkey B Virus

smakkythecamel · Wed Jun 06, 2007 1:32 am

texmaster wrote:
Dumbest thing I ever did was accently pick up the wrong floppy for a bootup. Of course that floppy had the Monkey B Virus

Sounds nasty! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_B_virus

How'd the monkey's get the floppy in the first place?

paulWTAMU · Wed Jun 06, 2007 1:37 am

I do not have many good stories but have some stupid ones. Dealing with the public does that for you really. I've seen a guy come in irate as hell...he'd purchased a standard internal DVD RW drive for a laptop--and had actually tried to take the laptop apart to install it. He hadn't ever mentioned having a laptop or we coulda told him it wouldn't work. He'd just said he a normal PC running windows XP. He wanted us to cover cost of the machine, but we refused. Idiocy is not our fault.

njenabnit · Wed Jun 06, 2007 2:47 am

I guess the best thing I got was last semester. I was a tech for the library computer lab at the university and got a call that someones ID card was stuck a machine while trying to print. I found that odd, as the cards simply slid through a magnetic strip reader. I get there and the dude stuck his card in the floppy drive. :lol:

too bad he didn't stick around so i could heckle a little!

Stripe7 · Wed Jun 06, 2007 3:00 am

Ok, I have been in this business way too long. Quite a few stories.

One time I was called in during Christmas to a one of the major telephone companies. Their system disk crashed they needed to do a recovery and did not have their system tapes. ( This is way before CD's and DVD's ) Well the Field technician replaced the HD and I reloaded the OS from tapes I had brought from my office. After all this we can begin to load their data from their tapes. To my astonishment it only takes a few seconds to retrieve the data. It seemed someone had "fixed" their backups to speed things up. The fix resulted in only the filenames being written to tape. I told them what they had and left. They were on their own after that.

At one time I was put into a customer support role for a couple of weeks. I got a call from a customer who said that the newly purchased modem did not work. It was opened and put next to the computer. Their problems first turned out to be;
1. power to the modem was not turned on
2. Serial cable was not plugged in.
3. Software to talk to the modem was not installed.
4. Phone line was not plugged into the modem.
5. The thing that really capped it for me was he could not get a dial tone no matter what he tried to do. Turned out he was using the modem's phone line to talk to me!

texmaster · Wed Jun 06, 2007 8:23 am

smakkythecamel wrote:
texmaster wrote:
Dumbest thing I ever did was accently pick up the wrong floppy for a bootup. Of course that floppy had the Monkey B Virus

Sounds nasty! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_B_virus

How'd the monkey's get the floppy in the first place?

The monkey B virus is a boot virus that can destroy your motherboards' connection to the hard drive

Glorious · Wed Jun 06, 2007 8:32 am

texmaster wrote:
The monkey B virus is a boot virus that can destroy your motherboards' connection to the hard drive

Eh? You mean that it can corrupt the boot sector?

texmaster · Wed Jun 06, 2007 8:54 am

Glorious wrote:
texmaster wrote:
The monkey B virus is a boot virus that can destroy your motherboards' connection to the hard drive

Eh? You mean that it can corrupt the boot sector?

It did mine. I lost everything

TheEmrys · Wed Jun 06, 2007 9:39 am

Monkey_B was a very, very bad virus. All data would be trashed. It was a royal pain in the derrier to get rid of, too.

Corrado · Wed Jun 06, 2007 9:45 am

GeForce6200 wrote:
That is really wierd. How did you graduate at 16. Are you super smart and just skipped some grades? My friend skipped the fourth grade.

My guidance counselor knew I knew how to operate the scheduling computers, and I took all the advanced classes in 9th and 10th grade. In 11th grade I ended up taking 3 or 4 classes at a community college with the school accepted but I took them all at night and by the end of the fall semester of 11th grade I had all the necessary credits to graduate.

Wed Jun 06, 2007 9:51 am

Many years ago (back when 5.25" floppies were still fairly common) one of the secretaries where I worked came to me one day and said, "Can you help me? The computer ate my disk and I really need this document I was working on."

Thinking she meant that the disk was unreadable, I went over to her desk see if I could help her recover her file. I noted that there was no disk in the drive, and asked her to give it to me. "No, you don't understand!", she replied. "I don't have the disk any more. When I said the computer ate my disk, I REALLY meant it ATE my disk. I put the disk in, and when I tried to open the file, the disk was GONE!"

Well this was certainly a new one.

My first thought was that she'd lost her mind...

After a few moments of head-scratching, I noticed that there was a small gap between the floppy drive itself, and the front bezel of the computer case. The gap was just barely wide enough to slip a 5.25" floppy into. Aha!

So I grabbed a screwdriver and popped the case open. Sitting in a stack at the bottom of the case, on a rather thick carpet of dust bunnies, was not one, but several floppy disks. Apparently her computer had quite an appetite! :lol:

I blew the dust off her disk and handed it back to her, warning her that she should copy her files to a fresh disk ASAP since the dust which managed to get inside was probably going to destroy it in fairly short order.

I then went and checked the front bezels of all of the systems in the office, and covered any gaps large enough to shove a 5.25" disk into with Scotch tape.

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