This reminds me of one of my favorite old tech stories.
A long while back (seems like this was the late 90s or early 2000s) I was working on a script that did some data processing on a remote machine. It had to loop through a bunch of text log data and generate some reports. Being as that I had no idea if the script was actually working until it completed awhile later, I decided to put in a neat little ASCII spinner in it when you ran it with verbose options.
At the time I was on a slow dialup connection as I was on break from school, and something weird would happen. Every time I ran the script to test it, my Internet connection would become nearly unusable. But as soon as the script finished, it would suddenly start working again.
As you can imagine, this was very confusing since the script was running entirely on a remote system. What the hell is going on?
This stumped me for an hour or so until I ran it without the verbose option ... and it didn't happen. Then I finally realized what was happening: I was refreshing the spinner on EACH ROW and remote machine was going through the rows so quickly that sending refreshes for the spinner saturated my tiny dial-up connection. Changing this to only update once a second fixed it entirely.
And that's how I DoS'd myself with a spinner.
