I got a verbal spanking at work today...

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Posted: Sun Feb 04, 2007 5:42 am

reprob8, I am going to be a lone dissenter here. I think that putting Go Steelers was out of line. I think you should appologize and make things right.

Now, if you had put Go Broncos, that would have been a different story!

Posted: Mon Feb 05, 2007 2:11 pm

For me the most awesome thing of a similar ilk was the man who worked for the Royal Australian Mint and put the word "POM" underneath her majesty's head on all the coins.

"Pom" being an affectionate or derogatory term (depending on who you ask) used in Australia to describe English people.

He lost his job for it, but any coin produced there between 1985 and around the mid 1990s (approx 1996?) has "POM" written underneath her shoulder (any Aussie or Kiwi with some coins and a magnifying glass can check - it shows up best on the Aussie 50cent piece though). Very Happy

Sadly, the more recent coins have put an updated (ie older) version of her majesty's head on, and have used the boring old "ER" underneath it... (maybe it's her favourite tv show! Wink

)

Baiting Guru Joined: 04 Jan 2006 Posts: 3193

Not a lot of people know this, but when you boot off an "unbootable" floppy disk, the message that gets displayed is actually due to a program running from the floppy disk. It has a boot sector on it that just puts up a message saying "Remove disk and press any key". Using the "Debug" application that came with DOS, you can load in the first two sectors of the disk, find the message text and change it to something else - "Virus Installed OK" for example.

Very, very scary, even if you're the one that did it.

A colleague of mine once changed the label of the Software Director's hard drive to "Cowboy". It stayed like that for ages because he didn't know how to get rid of it. We thought that proved the point.

Posted: Mon Feb 05, 2007 8:05 pm

breadcrumb wrote:

one of my colleagues, who is in IT for maybe 30 years or so, told me this story:
Back in the old days, he was working with Siemens Nixdorf and was doing assembler programming on their machines. One time he wrote a little piece of software that let the harddisks get accessed in the rhythm of the blue danube waltz at a certain time of the day and rolled it out on the workstations Laughing

Back in the old DOS days, we had a piece of software that did a 3 minute simulation of a spin dryer running through a fast and loud spin cycle. All the while, it flashed a message at the user saying 'CLEANING DISK - DO NOT TOUCH THE KEYBOARD'. Then it would stop and make gurgling noises, and flash the message 'Disk cleaned and drained. Now get some work done'.

Bosses never found out - PCs were new, and most users thought it was a real programme.

(The original of this was written for an IBM-XT, but it ran OK on a Compaq Deskpro!) Laughing

We also had some good early virus simulators, like Italian or others of that vintage. Always good for a laugh!

Posted: Mon Feb 05, 2007 10:29 pm

^^^^^ I still have a copy of that one!!! Laughing

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