So, I promised Badger I would post the story about the “porn cable”. Feel free to post any humorous work experiences here. I bet no one can top this one though! It goes something like this:
One of the state agencies that my group supports had a whole building of third-party consultants for a huge programming project. Most of the folks were ok, even with the ancient tablet PC’s the state provided them.
Of course, a large group of programmers needs a smaller group of project managers. These folks didn’t hardly complain at all about their ancient computers. I mean, really, a 5 year old tablet for reading web mail worked just fine for them.
One day, one of my coworkers got a high priority work ticket that “Bill” has a virus on his computer. We call the user and tell him to turn it off and we’ll come over and pick it up and bring it back to the shop to be re-imaged. For fun, we boot it up offline and see what we can see in the history. The dude was getting all sorts of porn pop-ups. Lovely - re-image it is.
The tablet is returned to Bill that afternoon and the work ticket is closed. The next morning, we get another emergency call ticket that we need to fix Bill’s computer again. Upon arrival, Bill is being bombarded with porn pop-ups in IE. Bill is questioned about where he was surfing that he was getting this virus infection/porn on his computer.
“I was just on site XYZ. It’s that darn cable - it infected my computer with porn again.”
After this, my co-worker grabs the computer and gets out of there fast before they explode with laughter. Just to make Bill happy, we brought him a new CAT5 cable back with his newly re-re-imaged computer and he never had a problem with porn again.
And within a couple of months, Bill was off the project and back in the home office for the consulting company. 