Did You Hear The One About The Help Desk Chap Who Abused Privileges To Prank His Mate?

Who, Me? Welcome, dear reader, to another instalment of Who, Me? in which Reg readers share tales of techie woe to remind you that your day could, in fact, be worse.

This week's hero is someone we'll Regomize as "Don" who worked the help desk at his county's largest employer some twenty or so years ago.

Like many help desks of the time, Don's employer used Microsoft SMS for remote management. Just to avoid confusion, that stood for Systems Management Server – not the Short Messaging Service for which those initials have become much better known. In fact Microsoft changed the name of the software in 2007, to avoid the same confusion. It's gone through more changes since, and is currently known as Configuration Manager.

Anyway, history lesson aside, what you need to know is that SMS allowed help desk staff to remotely operate any computer on the network for troubleshooting purposes. Techs could watch users work, and control their PCs if need be to help fix problems. Nifty stuff.

Obviously this also had great potential for hijinks.

One fine afternoon, Don noticed his colleague – we'll call him "Phil" – working intently on something in his cubicle not far away. Sensing an opportunity for mischief, Don found Phil's name on the list of managed machines and double-clicked.

Up came a screen with an open Word document – obviously the important whatever-it-was that was commanding Phil's attention. Sneakily, Don inserted a few well-placed obscenities and smears upon Phil's character into the Word doc, then quickly disconnected and waited for hilarity to ensue.

And waited. Then waited some more.

When the hilarity stubbornly refused to ensue, Don cleared his throat.

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"Um, Phil?"

"Yeah?"

"Haven't, um, seen anything pop up on your screen, have you?"

"No, like what?"

"Like, maybe, some unexpected words in your Word doc?" Don was straining with all his might not to burst out laughing at his clever subterfuge by this point.

"No mate, I haven't got Word open. I'm writing an email."

Hilarity ceased. Color drained from Don's face. Whose Word doc had he just defaced with defamatory and desultory remarks about Phil?

It turned out that Microsoft SMS, back in those days at least, had a habit of failing to update its entries when a PC on the network rebooted. So a user name on the directory could in fact be pointing to a completely different PC that had simply grabbed the same IP address.

Thankfully, quite a few people were away from the office at the time, so it didn't take long to figure out whose Word document had been vandalized.

The victim was, predictably, unimpressed – both at the content of the Word document and the unauthorized intrusion into his PC. It ultimately took the intervention of Don's manager to calm things down. And at least the altered document hadn't made its way to anyone else's eyes.

Don tells Who, Me? that he's now very, very, careful about making sure things are what he thinks they are before jumping in.

Microsoft obviously takes a bit of the blame for this one. Have you ever had a lapse of judgment compounded by technology that made things much worse? Click here to tell us about it in an email to Who, Me? and we might share your adventure on a future Monday. ®