Day of the Office Assault
by MRGALAXY
The names have been changed to protect the guilty!!
I work at a software company in its Technical Support department. We answer a whole gambit of calls each day ranging from amazingly simple things to unbelievably difficult calls. When one takes calls all day, it becomes very easy to get burned out...
A while back, we hired a new guy. Let's call him Joe. Joe was real gung-ho, like a marine. Each day, day after day, we listened to him tell each and every customer (loudly) how he was an expert, a hardware technician of 16 years. We always wondered how that had anything to do with software support. But we shrugged our shoulders and moved on.
Over time, though, we got sick of hearing him brag. We soon found out that he treated almost all his customers the same way. He would tweak their CONFIG.SYS, run ScanDisk, and then pronounce them cured. We would snicker in the back at this so-called hardware technician of 16 years, and one day we decided to see how he would react to a technical problem of his own!
I conceived of a plan. It would be a plan of mind manipulation and deception. It was evil. It was devious. I couldn't wait to get started!
At that time, our department used a DOS-based call tracking system. I won't mention its name here, but I can tell you it wasn't very good. Anyway, each day, we would boot up our systems into Windows 95 and then we would run our call tracking system from Shortcut icons. We decided to benignly sabotage his computer...
One thing you need to keep in mind is that we had lots of trouble running this DOS-based call tracking system under Windows 95. In fact, we had so many errors occur that we almost never questioned the weird error messages we saw on our screens. We hoped this fact would make all of our lives interesting...
I began the plan by writing a very simple program in PowerBASIC 3.0. Its purpose was to load itself into memory as a TSR and then at various times move the location of the cursor on the screen. Since the program would only work when running in the same DOS box as the call tracking system, we changed the shortcut icon of his call tracking system to run a batch file which first ran our TSR followed by the call tracking system. We disguised the name of the TSR to look like BREQUEST.EXE which we often used for other programs. If he ever noticed our batch file, he would probably not be suspicious.
Anyway, the next day we copied our first "attack" program onto the network. When Joe clicked on his call tracking icon, our TSR loaded. We waited with bated breath. He never noticed that the cursor would move around! We could not believe this! Thinking something was wrong, we tested the TSR and batch file on our machines. It worked like a champ! Still, he never noticed our subtle manipulations. What to do, what to do?
We decided to take more drastic measures! As the day progressed, in addition to moving the cursor around, we would have the TSR print the word "OINK!" at random locations on his screen. This time he took notice. "Oh my god! Oh my god! Come here! Come here!" he yelled. We ran over. "Look at this!" he said. It took all our strength to keep from laughing. We acted very serious and recommended he run McAfee Anti-Virus as soon as possible. He did so. No virus was found. He began to panic. The next time we walked by, he was running Norton Disk Doctor, then ScanDisk, and then Speed Disk. We all laughed at his idiocy. We were his masters. He would bow to us!
Then we went in for the kill. We changed the TSR and batch file on the network. When Joe left for lunch, we closed his call tracking system and ran it again so that the new TSR would load. This time, when messages began to appear, he saw: "I am an alien trying to communicate to you from the Oort cloud!" We laughed and laughed as never before. For another whole day, he ran ScanDisk, Norton Disk Doctor, McAfee Anti-Virus, Norton Anti-Virus, etc... Two days later, we finally filled him in on the secret. He was quite shocked, but to this day, he still tells every customer that he is a hardware technician with 16 years experience! Ugh! I guess we won the battle but not the war!
Below is a sample program like the one I used against Joe. Please note that it will only work in PowerBASIC 3.0. Please don't try to make it work under QBasic. Increasing the value for the B variable will increase the amount of time between the Oort cloud messages.
Code: office.bs