[ale] OT: Pranks are out

[Robert Story]

On Mon, 09 Jan 2006 13:27:20 -0500 Jeff wrote:
JH> The worst that *I* ever did, if you can call this a prank, was to use a 
JH> school computer (Data General Nova) to find a girl's unlisted phone 
JH> number by process of elimination (thankfully, it was a phone exchange 
JH> that was barely over a page in the phone book); once all the numbers 
JH> were entered in an array, it was easy to identify whole swaths of 
JH> invalid numbers and after that, I was left with a manageable amount of 
JH> numbers to cold-call.  Yes, I got her number; no, it didn't get me
JH> anywhere.

While I was in college, I had a part-time job working for the university's vet
school, which used an IBM System 36 for their patient records and
administration. The machine, which was a little bigger than a deep-freezer,
was in a small room with a tile floor and painted cinder-block walls, which
made the system fairly noisy.

The vet school assigned one of the residents to perform the backups, and I was
on-call in case of problems. I took a liking to one of the cuter residents, so
one day when I knew she'd be running the backups, I altered the backup script
to turn off the machine once all the applications had been safely stopped. I
tested the script before I went home, and the room went from rather noisy to
dead silent in less that 10 seconds.

I when home smiling, imagining the knight-in-shining-armor rescue I'd be
performing later that evening. Everything went according to plan, except that
when I showed up for the rescue, she was hanging out with a friend, and
basically said "It's broken. Call me when you get if fixed.", and the left.

No, I didn't get anywhere either, beyond the "I'll be nice to you and call you
when I need something" type friendship that I'm sure many of you know all too
well.