What trouble can I get into today?

[lummy 4]

So it's my last day here at good ole University of California. Luckily for me, I hurried into work (10:30) for my last two meetings. The first being lunch and second my exit interview.
So, here I sit for another hour with full network admin priveleges, wondering what trouble I can pull off so that they'll NEVER forget me.... LOL...

List your suggestions... make me laugh ;)

I promise not to TP Davis under canopy.. I promise not to TP Davis under canopy.. eat sushi, get smoochieTTK#1

[lawrocket 3]

UC's motto is "Let there be Light"

Why not cause a power outage or something? That would be fitting...

And let me say, I miss UCSB...

My wife is hotter than your wife.

[pilotdave 0]

Shit, can you get me a masters degree? How about a PhD?

Dave

[turtlespeed 226]

Oh the possibilities

I'm not usually into the whole 3-way thing, but you got me a little excited with that. - Skymama
BTR #1 / OTB^5 Official #2 / Hellfish #408 / VSCR #108/Tortuga/Orfun

[freeflyz 0]

Use the company credit card to buy freeflyz a new camera!

[Sebazz1 2]

Quote

And let me say, I miss UCSB...

Gaucho!!

But Lummy is at Bezerkley... Hey Lumm walk around with a pro-republican banner. Everybody in bezerkley will remeber you... or just show up to your exit interview with your rig on and look really despondent. When they ask waz uppity just say how you plan on jumping off something... Ask them which handle to pull

[Cornholio 0]

Enjoy this story. Maybe it will give you some ideas:

---------------------------------

So there I sit. It's my last day in the place. For the first time in a long time I'm in early. I've got a lot to do. Before I've even got my bike stuff off and have a chance to sit down to see who else is in the building with my trusty VNC Viewer, the phone rings.

This pisses me off. I'm pissed off. It's early and I'm pissed off. Why is the phone ringing? Do they expect someone to be here? More out of sick fascination rather than an effort to provide a service I pick up the phone.

"What?"

"Is that the IT Office? I have a problem."

"What's your problem?"

I'm not admitting anything without checking the line for recording devices. Every week I swap our phone cable with one of the spare hundred and fifty spare in the building, sometimes more often if many people get through.

"Who is this?" the voice on the end of the phone asks. I drop the phone and give the impression of cursing while I run a quick scan to see which machines are logged in. Bingo. As Darth Vader once said "I have you know."

"I'm the PFY, and even though it's very early in the morning you've caught me on my last ever day in the job. What can I do for you?" I even manage to end on an uptone, it's something I've been asked to work on.

He sounds reassured and proceeds to spout what sounds like a whole week's list of problems. While he's going I connect to his machine and run a scan on his files. Yup, he's right, his network connectivity has dropped because someone is using his machine and _my_network_ to send denial of service to... another computer in the building.

What's this? Inter-lab wars? I won't have it. Not on my network. Not with my cabling. Not on my watch. No wonder my game of Delta Force was jerky last night. Given the time I left after killing three guerrilla leaders, not even the BOFH can blame me for failing to check that stuff before I went home, though.

I do the normal helldesk 'grunt and agree to check things out' noises on the phone and then hang up.

Steepling my fingers I stare into the green flashing lights of the packet analyser and think.

...

Time passes. When I break from the trance I've been holding I rise in a smooth motion and leave the room. When I come back I have a box full of solid core Cat5.

I quickly run up a list of the machines involved, both knowing and unknowingly used and send it to the printer that was supposed to go to the graphics section. No-one _needs_ an A3 colour laser printer. Luckily I was on hand with a small room to which only I and the BOFH have the key to wheel it in straight from Goods-In.

Placing the box of cable under my desk I pick up the laptop, go back out and walk over to the comms room with the list. Entering the inner sanctum I'm surrounded by the hum of the kit and the flashing of a million lights. I don't turn the overheads on straight away but breathe in the smell of my network and the feel the power I hold over the lusers.

It's a heady feeling sometimes and reminds me why I felt much more at home with knives, soldering irons and wireclippers as a child.

Moving by memory I walk among the hubs and switches pulling cables free with barely a conscious prompting from my brain. Damn, I know this place too well. It's going to be a shame to go.

I suppose I should explain. I've been the PFY here for a good few months now. I was here before everyone but the BOFH. We set the network up from the beginning. It is our network. Unfortunately I was only hired as a temporary worker, but being paid at what's known as a BOFH level 3. This pissed off the PHBs who wanted to get me on board me at some piddlyshit salary when the full-time job finally came up. Because I wasn't going to take a pay cut. No way.

Unluckily for them the BOFH couldn't have run the place on his own at that point, there was just too much legwork to do. So I had them over a barrel. Or so I thought. It took them seven months to come up with the contract, all the while whining and complaining about the cost of paying me.

It took so long I actually upped and applied for a number of other jobs. By the time they got round to offering me something approaching a proper salary I was at interview stage and three days after I signed the contract for this job I was handing in my resignation.

But back to the lusers in hand.

With a few more deft moves of the Hands of Doom (these hands have caused Master's, Ph.D.s and research papers to be lost, sometimes by accident, too) I jam all the lusers' machines into the spare hot-swappable switch, plug the laptop into the serial port and fire it up. A few quick configuration commands and a bit of a hack of my own and I can let them fight it out among themselves. I'm guessing they'll spend most of the morning trying to break each other's machines enough that they shouldn't start to wonder why they can't see anyone else until at least lunchtime.

While I'm out of the office I pop over to Goods-In and pick up some mains timer switches, the ones you can set to supply power to your percolator ten minutes before you're due in in the morning. As there's no one there I take some from the box nearest the back of the shelf and don't sign for them. It's not as if they're leaving the building.

By the time I get back from making it look like no-one's been into the stores the BOFH has arrived. He greets me with a smile and points to the packet analyser which is still showing 70% traffic.

"Are you running Seti@Home on all the machines again?"

I sit down and turn to my computer without saying a word. A quick connect to the hub and I issue the command to shut down the fibre port connecting it to the world as we know it.

*blink*

The packet analyser gives one least flurry of activity and then goes back to 3% usage. Back where we like it.

He gives me a look and settles down to sleep.

...

The door opens and one of the secretaries pokes her head in.

I'm about to issue the standard implied threat about asking if she saved her files before she left her computer when she hands me an envelope.

"We're sorry to see you go. Have fun in your new job." I open it. It's a card with the design of a cartoon duck about to repartition a computer with a felling axe. "We thought this might be appropriate." she grins nervously.

I am actually touched, as they've all signed it with comments like, "Sorry to see you go", "Hope your new job keeps you busy", "We don't expect you'll have much time to come back, but we'll be thinking of you...", "I'm sure you'll have much more important things to think about than us!"

They're all heart.

I thank her and smile until she's left the room.

Quickly I trawl the mailserver for emails relating to 'leaving card' or things of that nature. Results show that most people were hoping I'd not even have time to clear my desk, let alone stay to the end of the day.

I sit back, fingers to my lips for a long moment, then wander up to the top floor and have a quick word with the BBTFH. When I get back to the office I have in my possession a bag of spare mains plugs. Before the BOFH sees I slide them under the desk with the cable and the timers.

The phone rings. I look at the BOFH, he hasn't answered the phone in over a month now and I feel that on my last day I should be allowed some respite. We flip for it (with my coin), he loses.

"What?" he growls down the phone. It's a luser, of course.

"Hallo." he burbles loud enough for me to hear, "I was wondering if you could come and show my new lab technicians how to use the internet?"

...

The BOFH pauses.

...

"Sure thing!" he say, full of false enthusiasm, "I'm a bit busy right now but my assistant is on his last day today so he'd be happy to come up and do some good deeds. Give him two minutes." The BOFH looks at me and grins toothily. I smile slowly and shrug.

He leans back but only closes one eye until I turn back to my computer. Doing caller-ID I find out which computer my enthusiast was from and change the priority on all the active ports near him. There's no way I'm being stuck with a slow connection while I demonstrate how to click on the "Go!" button. While I'm there I swap his bookmarks for another set and head on up in the lift.

As the doors close I fish out an old TV remote and point it at the speaker grille and press 'mute'.

Silence.

As the doors open on level 4 I press the button marked '4' and hold down the 'volume+' button unil the doors close on the IR signal. An evening's work is about to pay dividends.

Counting down from ten I walk into the lab and smile. Conversations cease. You don't get that kind of response without work and attention to detail, but it's a beauty to behold; the sudden whir of harddiscs as files are saved and backups are made, the furtive sliding of discs into drawers.

"Three... two... one."

...

"LEVEL ONE! Doors opening... ERROR! Cable failure!" screams the lift from three floors down, the mad laughter that floats up the stairwell was a small indulgence, but I always find it pays to innovate.

"So, who wants to learn about the Internet, then?" I say jovially, pronouncing the capital 'I' with barely a hint of sarcasm.

An uberluser I know well draws my attention by waving. He's surrounded by posse of freshfaced lusers who are crowded around his machine with the expressions of rabbits trapped in a searchlight.

I recognise the signs of the technically disadvantaged.

I'll gloss over the details of the decision to start with using a web browser, the attempt to use the uberluser's bookmarks as a good starting point, the random selection of a link entitled 'Premier pages' the speed of connection, the gasps of astonishment at the 'content'. Needless to say, I was forced to have a word with the luser and a reminder not to waste my time before I left to let him face the women of the group.

Before I go back to the office I wander round to the labs marked as issuing DoS attacks and wander through with a thoughtful look on my face. Despite the fact No one is getting any work done _no_one_ looks up from their screens until I'm out of the other end of the room.

It's going to be a shame to go.

Back in the office I challenge the BOFH to a final game of head-to-head Delta Force and load up my new version courtesy of my coding friend. Not many people have the skill, or desire to code Quake weaponry into Delta Force, but anything is possible given time and effort.

The Boss soon finds that not even the sniper rifle can complete with the lightning gun with a high-power sniper sight.

Lunch, when it comes is a pleasant affair. The unclued sysadminschen from the other site come over and treat me to a three course meal in the local public house. The drink and the stories flow freely, and, plied with enough alcohol one of them lets slip the private community name for their network. I write it down on a napkin and slip it into my pocket. Something to play with once I'm settled into the new job.

Lunch tails off as the BOFH and I leave the others in a pool of stale beer and head over to their office to remove some choice bits of booty; my 'going away present' that they forgot to give me.

Leaving the BOFH to do something nasty to their OS/2 server (I just suggested telling it it had bigger drives that it actually possessed and 'watching' it try to write into thin air) I head back.

Back in our the office I pull the things I've been accruing out from under the desk and spend a busy thirty minutes stripping, crimping and setting timers.

The BOFH returns with an evil look on his face and drops something into my lap. It's a fibre transceiver, 100Mb/sec.

...

I look on the shelf where we keep out own fibre modules. The old, flaky 10Mb/sec transceiver is missing. I look thoughtful.

"You know, we really should have fixed that intermittent problem with that transceiver. You know it drops out randomly."

"I thought it was best to just get rid of it." he says. "It wasn't fit for one of our small hubs... let alone connection to the backbone."

"Mmmm." I say. "If anyone used it to connect to the backbone with. Well, they'd be looking at a single point of failure of extremely high probability. It's just a shame it's a twenty minute job to get to it, given the comms room layout of somewhere like, say, our friends'."

"Especially if both the heads and the threads of the locking screws had been stripped by the last person to do anything to it."

"Why, it would take hours to deal with that!" I cry. "Coffee?"

...

The day winds on with the BOFH and I reminiscing about the good old days when X.25 was the way we were headed and PAD was your connection to like-minded souls. We drink some of his special reserve coffee which he keeps in a Kryotech case under the desk. Once the addition of a generous amount of whisky had been added and a few mugs drunk, the BOFH drifts off into the land where gigabit ethernet is free and you don't have to come to work.

I take a quick trip to the comms room and plug in a few of the cables I've been working on.

Back in the office I set the BOFH's computer to shut down after five hundred keystrokes while he's asleep (he's become altogether too trusting recently, time to give him back that edge) and wander off to have a last look round the place. I go up the stairs as the lift seems to be stopped on the ground floor.

The reason, it seems, is that someone has dropped their passcard down the crack between lift and shaft on being shouted at from an empty lift. I pity the lift engineer who goes looking for it. Someone got access to the lift pit during the last day of construction and covered the floor with contact adhesive.

I ascend to a random level and wander along the corridors glancing every now and then into a lab. Going into labs known to be issuing DoS attacks, I wait till a quiet corner is clear and install one of my cables, set the timer and move on.

While I'm on the level I go to the comms riser and pull out a few more cables from my pocket and plug them in. Feeling cheerful I whistle as I work, causing two female lab technicians to almost run past me as I have my head buried in the comms cabinet.

Locking the cabinet and the riser door I jam a Phillips screwdriver into the lock and wiggle it back and forth enthusiastically. After a while I ascend to the top floor and wander into the silent auditorium. Both the machines used for presentations seem to be on. Something I'm constantly asking the lusers not to do when not using them. As retribution I extract 112Mb from both machines and switch the resolutions to 640x480 16-colour. As a final reminder of my time here I plumb the sound back into the machines (after I was ordered to turn all multimedia effects off), turn the volume in the theatre up to max and replace all the system events with a selection of new and 'amusing' sounds.

As I close the door I note that the next presentation is a submission for an international conference on gastroentomology or something. How apt.

...

All too soon it's the end of the day. It's been fun, but all good things must come to an end. Even today the BOFH leaves early, after wishing me good luck in the new job and promising to come round and help me 'settle in'. We both grin and know that he'll not get in without a fight, and my account will be gone from here by Monday morning. But that's O.K., I already have five backdoors installed.

Alone in the office I clear up my computer. Shutting down, I remove the case and extract the memory and the hard disc (no evidence) before replacing them with a 171Mb drive and 32Mb of RAM I liberated from an ageing Viglen. Once the OS has been reinstalled I pack up the parts I've removed and take out a new lock from the desk drawer.

Quickly and efficiently I take out the old office door lock and replace it with the new one. I close and lock the door, slipping the key underneath so that it's visible through the window.

Entering the comms room for the last time I flip a big and aptly red switch marked 'Riser socket power' to ON and quietly close the door.

Butthead: Whoa! Burritos for breakfast!
Beavis: Yeah! Yeah! Cool!
bellyflier on the dz.com hybrid record jump

[Swoopyswoop 0]

Quote

UC's motto is "Let there be Light"

Why not cause a power outage or something? That would be fitting...

And let me say, I miss UCSB...

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOO then I will get called into work to fix it. LUMSTER WHAT EVER YOU DO, PLEASE DONT SCREW WITH THE POWER LMAO

"when I die, I want to go like my grandfather while im sleeping, not like the passengers riding in the car with me
Swoopster
A.S.S. #6 Future T.S.S holder

[lawrocket 3]

Gaucho! Hell, yes!

I miss my house on Del Playa. And the oh so cute and naive freshmen cuties. :o(

You also a Gaucho?

My wife is hotter than your wife.

[Sebazz1 2]

Quote

You also a Gaucho?

Was A bit too hard to study for me at that school... Ya know... Distractions

[Sebazz1 2]

Did anybody understand that? Anyone? Bueller? hello....

damn that almost shorted my brain out...

[BikerBabe 0]

No...I'm sure it would be funny if it were in English...


Just give us the bottom line...what did all that messing with the network DO???

Never meddle in the affairs of dragons, for you are crunchy and taste good with ketchup!

[lummy 4]

Huh??? You mean I should pull the screwdriver out of the sockets? BUT it's making such a pretty POPPING sound....


Ya know tho, I always kinda wondered what would happen if someone put this into a login script


at /every Monday 08:15 net start messenger
net send domain ""Your computer is infected , shut down immediately , Pl,ease call the Help desk"

I promise not to TP Davis under canopy.. I promise not to TP Davis under canopy.. eat sushi, get smoochieTTK#1

[Cornholio 0]

Quote

Did anybody understand that? Anyone? Bueller? hello....

damn that almost shorted my brain out...

Sorry, I forgot about the technically challenged people on this forum.

Butthead: Whoa! Burritos for breakfast!
Beavis: Yeah! Yeah! Cool!
bellyflier on the dz.com hybrid record jump

[Sebazz1 2]

Yeah so anyway a pipe bomb flushed down the toilet might be a bit juevenile but fun at the same time...



I was fully kidding if any Gov't officials are reading this...

[skyesspot 0]

I don't know about at work... but I can think of some trouble we can get into tonite.

Hang in there!!!

Luves

Life is too short. Don't sweat the small stuff.

[nubain1 0]

switch the grades of the valedictorian with whoever has the lowest gpa.

[Keith 0]

Hey Lummy:

Howd the interview go?

Keith

Don't Fuck with me Keith - J. Mandeville

[lummy 4]

Quote

Yeah so anyway a pipe bomb flushed down the toilet might be a bit juevenile but fun at the same time

LOL.. nah, but how about stoppin up all the toilets?

so, I took everything home already except for my Mickey mouse hat and my headphones... Me thinks I need to go out in style ;)

Hey Keith,
The first half of the Interview(s) went ok I think. I'm one of 7 candidates. I am scheduled next week for the second half. They'll pick the top two and invite them back. Funny thing is that I saw two of the people I interviewed with today, one made sure to say hello (even remembered my name) and the other ignored me.

I promise not to TP Davis under canopy.. I promise not to TP Davis under canopy.. eat sushi, get smoochieTTK#1

[Katzeye 0]

Your writing style reminds me of "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy." Very amusing, but what does BoFH and BBTH, PFY stand for?

Is a chicken omelette redundant?

[happythoughts 0]

Go to Wal-Mart:

* Take shopping carts for the express purpose of stranding them at strategic locations.

* Set all the alarm clocks to go off at ten minute intervals throughout the day.

* Start playing football -- see how many people you can get to join in.

* Try on bras over top of your clothes.

* Make a trail of orange juice on the ground, leading to the restrooms.

* While walking around the store, sing in your loudest voice possible ''Sex and Candy''

* Tune all the radios to a polka station, then turn them all off and turn the volumes to ''10.''

* Walk up to complete strangers and say, ''Hi! I haven't seen you in so long!...'' etc. See if they play along to avoid embarrassment.

* Put pairs of women's panties on your head and walk around the store casually.

* Leave small objects in the hands of the mannequins.

* Move ''Caution: Wet Floor'' signs to carpeted areas.

* Drape a blanket around your shoulders and run around saying,''...I'm Batman. Come, Robin -- to the Batcave!"

* TP as much of the store as possible.

* Look right into the security camera, and use it as a mirror while you pick your nose.

* Take up an entire aisle in Toys by setting up a full-scale battlefield with G.I. Joes vs. Barbies.

* While no one's watching, quickly switch the men's and women's signs on the doors of the restrooms.

* Attempt to fit into very large gym bags.

* Attempt to fit others into very large gym bags.

* Add a box of condoms to others carts when they aren't looking.

* Set up a ''Valet Parking'' sign in front of the store.

* Two words: ''Marco Polo.'

* In the auto department, practice your ''Madonna'' look with various funnels.

* Test the fishing rods and see what you can ''catch'' from the other aisles.

* Relax in the patio furniture until you get kicked out.

[lummy 4]

I think he actually copied it from someplace else. There's a british website that's devoted to the "Angry tech support guy"

Okay... TIme to Fdisk this PC...

Thanks All n talk to ya later...

I promise not to TP Davis under canopy.. I promise not to TP Davis under canopy.. eat sushi, get smoochieTTK#1

[lawrocket 3]

You could have planned a flash party if there had been more notice.

My wife is hotter than your wife.