Thursday, August 09, 2007
IT Practical Jokes
When I was at Fiserv, we had a senior vice president that nobody seemed to like, including my boss. This was back in the days of Novel 4.0, a good eight or nine years ago. Somebody had set the VP’s password to expire every few days. And then, they set the password change prompt so that it would prompt him five days before the password was due to expire. On top of that, his account was set so that he couldn’t use the last hundred or so passwords. This annoyed the shit out of the VP. When he called the helpdesk, nobody could seem to figure out what the problem was. But with this setup, he was somehow being prompted to change his password every time he logged into the network.
My boss called the whole team together and wanted to know who the hell did this. He tried to yell at us because that’s what was expected of him. As he tried to be upset, he just couldn’t keep a straight face. It was quite possibly one of the best IT pranks any of us had seen to date…. or since.
I don’t remember which one of us did it. I’m sure neither Bob nor Asif remember, either.