At first, everything went smoothly at the small vending services company. I quadrupled the speed of the ASCII terminals, and the data-entry people no longer needed to sit and wait for each screen to refresh. But all would not be well forever. The Unix server kept crashing, and I discovered that it happened when the number of running processes exceeded 100. My boss didn’t understand any of this, and refused to let me “screw around” with the server (i.e., increase the max activity parameter from the default 100). Instead, he told me to replace a perfectly good workstation.
The best I could do to help was write a program that told the users how close the system was to crashing so they could save their data. It was unerringly accurate. When the boss found out about it, he grudgingly let me reconfigure UNIX, which solved the crash problem.
Another time, he told me to order a new CRT to replace one that didn't work. I said I'd troubleshoot it first, but he angrily replied, "Don't waste company time. I told you to order a new one!" About a minute later I showed him that the monitor's contrast had merely been turned all the way down.
You'd think he would have been happy... But I was on a roll -- a downhill one.
I routinely scanned incoming diskettes for viruses. One time a virus alert went off, saving the company network from infection. My reward was everyone assuming that the beeps and whistles were a computer game I was playing on company time.
After I picked up a job from the network printer, the secretary screamed at me in the quiet office: "I printed a minute ago and it worked okay. Then you went over and did something to the printer, and now it doesn't work!"
The printer had run out of paper.
One day, to my horror, I found out that the server had run continually for seven years and had never once been backed up. I pleaded with the owner to buy a tape backup unit. Though he owned the $12 million company and wore a heavy gold chain around his neck, he refused to buy a $100 tape backup unit. A few weeks later, the server disk died, taking with it all the company records: personnel, finance, correspondence ... everything except the warehouse system.
I was very depressed. Could I have found someone else to tell him he needed to back up the server data, I wondered? What else could I have done to prevent this?
But they assumed I broke it to prove my point about backup, and I was fired.
Thinking that this couldn't possibly become more surrealistic, I came in a few days later to pick up my last check and discovered that I had sabotaged the warehouse system too, so I left through the warehouse to witness the damage. The PC case was too hot to touch. It was on top of an industrial space heater. The warehouse guy told me he had moved it there the day before.
If I had wanted to sabotage the place, I would have done it after I was fired by calling 1-800-PIR8 and collecting a huge reward. Every single piece of software in the entire company was pirated.
But I didn't do that either.