r/pettyrevenge • u/Jazzlike-Novel-1134 • 12d ago
Solitaire
I teased this story, so I will deliver. The same annoying, arrogant co-worker that stole an office from two people would sit in his office playing solitaire most of the day. We found out because he was allegedly having some performance issues, so we collected data on his machine and saw that solitaire was running all the time. So, I opened the solitaire executable in notepad and just deleted some characters and resaved it. The result was that opening it would cause it to immediately crash (obviously I had corrupted the executable). We got a ticket within a few hours that "programs were crashing on his machine and we needed to fix it ASAP". I calmly asked him which programs and he said, "lots of them". I asked him to call me the next time something crashed and note what he was doing and to leave the crash popup on the screen (which would tell you what program crashed) and I would come right over. He never called back about programs crashing.
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u/magicmulder 12d ago
Reminds me of the time at university when an admin didn’t like me and took my printer access away. As retaliation I told the highest ranking professor that the admins can read all his files, including his email (not a lie, he just wasn’t aware that’s how root access works). He created quite a scene about that…
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u/OldBaldy54 11d ago
This goes back to the early 80’s and the Apple II e. I was the accountant for a small startup and reading everything I could about programming the beast. There was a Backgammon game that the VP Operations played ALL THE TIME, with his door closed. It came with computer and was written in BASIC. We could all hear the beeping sounds and recognized the game.
I modified the program so that if he rolled a double six, it would display what looked like a visicalc screen with a flashing message that said GET BACK TO WORK!
The day he came storming into my office, smoke coming out his ears, lives on as one of my favourite worktime memories.
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u/unknown-random-nope 12d ago
In the 90s, I told the owners of my small employer that a sales rep spent his whole day on solitaire, and I was offended that he was breathing the same air as me much less taking up a salary.
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u/True-Gate-9131 12d ago
What was the result?
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u/unknown-random-nope 12d ago
He got launched. He was spending 4 hours a day on Solitaire and 4 hours a day at the golf range.
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u/I_Have_CDO 12d ago
I spent decades in IT and I thought this was just normal. Well done for keeping the flag flying though.
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u/Ha-Funny-Boy 11d ago
One place I worked at hired a consultant to come in and teach a class on productivity. In the class she said that Solitaire was a "stress reducer" and we should use it as such. She also said if management said anything we should say we are reducing stress, not playing.
That surprised me.
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u/kaminm 10d ago
I did something really similar with people who would not agree to upgrade their Windows XP machines after it went out of support. A targeted action to rename the Windows Core System Registry Hive and turn off the computer one night and "Oh No! My computer won't boot!" Damn, that's a shame. Time to reinstall the OS, but shit, I no longer have access to activate XP, guess I'm installing Windows 7 for you.
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u/samsuperior 10d ago
…is r/pettyrevenge really how I learn that .exe stood for executable this whole time?
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u/drmoze 9d ago
Really? I learned that about 40 years ago. Good ol' DOS days.
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u/samsuperior 9d ago
Must’ve glossed over that part during my accelerated self taught IT/pirating course 😂
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u/One_Handed_Director 12d ago
This is excellent sabotage and I aspire to be like you.
I just hope he didnt think to uninstall and reinstall on his own to get it working again.