I once worked with this truly arrogant waste of space. He was bright and knew how to play the game, but he did little and was always backstabbing people. One thing he did do was play Solitaire ALL FUCKING DAY LONG, but whenever the bosses would come around he’d close it and pretend like he was working. Of course there’d be a good dose of sucking up. At the time I was working the help desk and did a little network administration.
One day he tangled with us over something stupid that got us in trouble, so we decided to fix him.
(warning: computer lingo ahead, but an explanation will follow)
I changed the properties of his Solitaire shortcut to launch sol.bat. I made sure the icon itself was that of sol.exe. I also disabled his workstation from receiving network broadcast messages.
In sol.bat:
@echo off
net send “James Smalls is playing Solitaire again!”
c:\windows\sol.exe
What it did:
Whenever James decided he was going to play Solitaire, it launched a broadcast message to everyone’s (I mean everyone, except for James) desktop with the above announcement. As far as James was concerned, Solitaire was loading and he went on playing as usual, not suspecting a thing.
We let it go for the next couple of days with numerous stall tactics (“I don’t know why those messages are popping up!” “I’m on the phone with Microsoft trying to figure this out.” “Have you talked to James?” and so on). I know they talked to James about his activities, but he didn’t slow down. He kept on playing. After a couple days we turned the messages off. But in the end, there were something like 35 instances of his workstation launching the message.
James got canned a few months later for something unrelated, but I like to think that this had something to do with it.
Unfortunately, or maybe fortunately, while I work in a department with many intelligent, and even creative people, none of them have embraced the dark side.
Unfortunate, in that when something like this happens, there are no other suspects.
Fortunate, I suppose, in that I really have nothing to worry about. Someone unplugged my keyboard and mouse once. Though I suppose it could be part of their evil plan to lure me into a false sense of security before executing the coup de grâce. I really hope that’s the case.
And thanks everyone! Cash and PayPal are accepted!
