I’m pretty sure this is only funny to me. In fact, I’m just about positive, but I’m going to post it anyway, because it’s really funny to me.

Really. This turned out a lot longer than it should have, so I’ll spare most of you the suffering and use the extended text.

We play the usual office hijinks around here. You know, if you leave your desktop and don’t put a passworded screensaver on it, you’re going to end up with gay porn or childrens cartoons or some other obnoxious and inappropriate image as a background, or find out you sent a mean or stupid email to the wrong list of people. From my perspective, it’s a good thing because hey, it teaches everyone to have good security and lock their machines when they’re not at the desk. Well, my officemate has a bad habit of leaving his machine unprotected. A couple of months ago another guy came in the office and was trying to figure out the best way to mess with the machine (he wasn’t as familiar with linux), so I walked up and offered to ‘help’ after which I quickly clicked the button to lock the machine and ran away cowering. Before I could be attacked, I defended myself by explaining to the would-be defacer,

“If I don’t protect the machine, he hurts me.”

Of course, that’s the kind of trick that only works once, so the next time that someone came by to do something, there was nothing I could do. So we worked up a handy little short-cut. I’ve got an icon on my desktop that I can click that automatically locks his machine remotely. Today was the first chance to test it out. Two other network engineers sauntered in the cubicle, and I realized that the other machine was unlocked. I tried to keep typing, remain calm, and above all relax from the sudden nervous tension that swept through me. This was it, for real. The first engineer sat down, began to click an icon and I could resist the temptation no more. I subtly clicked the icon (a small red [poison?] apple) and resumed nonchalantly web surfing. The adrenaline rush was huge. As they began to be very perplexed about what had just happened, they ask me if I had seen it. I responded with what I thought was the lamest bit of dialog ever. I was positive they would realize I was involved in the plot, but for some reason they seemed not to notice and went away.

They asked my officemate later what had happened, and he merely explained that he had a new all-purpose security system that was foolproof about detecting invaders. They actually came back up to ask me about it, and I responded truthfully, “if he’s got any security software installed, he didn’t tell me about it.”

Wow, that completely made my day.

Posted by Jordan on Thursday, July 17th, 2003 at 3:29 pm.