gotjenkins.com

A couple of years back, I had a job working for a relatively large corporation, and I had the unfortunate luck of working under a supervisor we’ll call P, on the off chance she can actually access this web page. (Although, upon reading this, it can be assumed that the day of that happening may never come.)

P, although being in a position not considered managerial, considered herself a manager. This was the rough equivalent of me walking outside my house and declaring the entire block a succession from the States. It ain’t gonna happen any time soon.

P and I did not get along over the course of the year and a half I was there. This could have been due to the fact she wore excessive eye makeup (which I could overlook), she was excessively flitty (very hyper), or that because my cubicle was so close to her office, I was stuck with a fair deal of excess work. Luckily, I was only to be rewarded with attitude later on. Thrills, thanks so much.

Well, for one reason or another (which we still haven’t discerned yet), I was let go on a Sunday afternoon, of all times, from my job. (I was a contract hire at this job, and I came home from a COMPANY OUTING, of all things, to find a message on my recorder saying I was let go, and not to come in on Monday.) Bastards.

(Actually, since the time of me writing this, it has been discovered that I was let go because I was supposedly talking about marijuana on the phone. Never mind the fact that I was talking with CUSTOMERS on the same phone. A 1-800 number. This is, of course, water under the bridge.)

Let me stop for a second and give you a quick rundown on how accessing our computer system worked. You would turn on the computer and get a DOS prompt for a username and password. Your standard Novell NetWare fare. Upon entering the correct password, you would then get into Windows 95, and could enter passwords for whatever else you had password protected.

Keep this in mind when I reference it later on in the story.

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Upon letting me go from my job (the highest paying one I’d had in my life), the agency rep and I met to let me know that she knew things were kinda funny with the reasons I’d been let go. One reason she was told is that I didn’t follow dress code. Funny, I wore a tie every day. Did I have suits and coats and whatnot? At that time, no. Apparently the company wasn’t issuing these.

The second reason was that I didn’t get along with my coworkers. Well, that was partially true, coworker. This talk of me not getting along with other folks was bullshit, since the rep followed this with “…but 6 or 7 of your coworkers have already called me to be references for you.” I instantly thought of P and I did a slow burn, knowing full well she had a hand in this. That’s okay, I thought, there must be another reason I’m in the office, talking with this rep.

The agency rep asked me for my password. See, one of my duties at my old job was to track a lot of different things by graphs, charts, etc. and use them for presentations…computer things I knew full well P had no clue how to operate. So naturally they had to get on my computer to gain access to all these charts; I hadn’t given this to anyone else.

I smiled. “boss’s name” was the password. The rep froze. “What?”

“Yep”, I said, “boss’s name”, knowing full well this would piss off P to no end. Hey, it was easy to remember, what do you want? It was her name, and I couldn’t stand her, so it was easy to remember.

That afternoon, I called up a friend of mine who worked with me at the company (and still worked there!), knowing he’d give me the inside scoop. I’d already given him the password, so he’d delete anything I thought she shouldn’t really look at.

“Shep, when she heard that the password was her name, she FREAKED. You should have seen it. Classic.” I was rather proud of it myself. I figured it was pretty funny, but who do you brag about your password to? Right?

“She called INSERTtechrepcompanyHERE and she’s doing something with your computer.” Hmmm? Doing something with the computer? Well, I knew SHE couldn’t do anything with it, so I figured something had to be up.

Now, before I tell you what happened, here’s a little more background info. I was subscribed to five mailing lists: one for Phish, one for the Dave Matthews Band, one for Barenaked Ladies, one for They Might Be Giants, and an independent rock one, all in Brazilian, that I couldn’t unsubscribe from. The average message count PER DAY was somewhere around 500, easily.

Here’s what she did:

* She called the tech support group on Friday, and had them download all my current email to her hard drive. This numbered ROUGHLY 2000 messages.

* She didn’t get to work until Monday, so add another 1500 messages (approximate) onto the emails already loaded over.
* She also had all of my email coming in FORWARDED so she was still receiving messages.

On Monday, according to my friend, she powered the computer up, and it shut right down. Apparently the volume of messages slowed her computer to a STOP. She then had to call the tech rep to have him/her UNLOAD all the messages and discontinue my email account. Brainiac. Way to go.

(You’re probably saying, “Wait a second. My computer gets that many emails and there’s never a problem.” Keep in mind this was 1996, and computers weren’t nearly as bad-ass as they are now. And we didn’t have top of the line stuff here; we’d just upgraded from Windows 3.11.)

Now, you’d THINK that would have been enough to satisfy me. Nope. I was still peeved, and some sort of vengeance had been wrought, but not by my own hand. Oh no. I just wanted to sneak something in. And I knew, by the grace of God, that the opportunity would present itself…and it did. With a big “same company” logo on it.

Roughly four weeks or so after I was let go, I was rehired by a different branch of the same corporation. Word got back to my old coworkers (I talked to the right people, apparently) that I (a) was making MORE money than before and (b) getting to wear jeans and sneakers to work. P’s manager, apparently instrumental in my firing as well, called up the contract agency and tried to get me fired, only to find that she couldn’t. Yes, hello, go fuck yourself.

So here I am at the new job, and I’m working, and I’m using a computer, and it turns out I have a computer with Windows 95, and I can log into OTHER NETWORKS. Translation for the laymen: I can network back into my old company network. And I wondered. Would it be possible that P, in her smug state, didn’t bother to change the password?

Yup. Some people can be read WAY too easily.

With a few keystrokes, I changed the password. And hit the enter key. And sailed through the rest of my work day with a big grin.

I called my friend around 4 pm or so, before I was ready to leave, to see what havoc I might have caused.

“Shep, it was the weirdest thing. P came over to your computer to get on and she couldn’t log on. So she called J over and the two of them tried to log on and they couldn’t log on. Other people came over thinking P didn’t know what she was doing, and no one could log in.”

Perfect. Exactly what I wanted. A small victory, but a victory nonetheless.

The next day, they had another tech rep in, who went into my computer, and then the network, to figure out the password.

It was “gotcha”.

many thanks to r.w.shepard, who doesn’t seem to have a website right now, for letting me reproduce this here.