41–50 of 379 posts
I spent 6 months commuting between France and Germany flying on a Sunday night in one direction and a Friday night in the other. To avoid waiting in airports for any length of time I hacked my boarding passes. I was always flying in economy but I would check in on line and print my real boarding pass, then modify the PDF of the boarding pass and change it to a seat in business with whatever other indications where ne…
So a year in, I only managed to find 35 hours of work one week, so I called up HR and got that overhead number to put down for those extra 5 hours. Next day, I found myself in a meeting with my boss and his boss, being put on some form of probationary "hourly" status, working part time until I could get my workload back up to speed. I could work as few as 24 hours per week, and I'd only get paid for the hours I worked.
So naturally things picked up and soon I found myself working 50 and 60 hour weeks again, and amazingly, my new "hourly" status meant I was getting paid for all of them. HR sent up the necessary paperwork to get me back onto "Salaried" mode and I told them I'd get it right back to them.
1 month later, they sent that paperwork again, and I apologized for letting it go on so long.
Next month, my boss delivered it by hand and I promised to "get right on it."
Finally, after 180 days of billing 60 hour weeks and getting paid for all of it, I found myself back in that same room with my boss, his boss, and now his boss, all of whom wanting to know why I hadn't filled in that paperwork.
I laid out the math for them. Silence... Then uncontrolled laughter from all hands. Congratulations, son. But how about we fill out that paperwork right now?
Having built the site (technical cofounder, translated as: free coder) I have a backend to all of the user's email addresses (10,000 or so, having been collected since the time I started working on it).
Soon to be ex-partner is kind of a volatile jerk, and I am by nature a little paranoid, so I sent the list to a couple of friends and family members, in case I needed someone to orchestrate a mailing. Kind of like being in a thriller with smaller stakes.
Anyone else leave a time bomb or easter egg?
TL;DR: Take care of your technical co-founders. Better yet, understand how to code for yourself.
Pretty minor, but while working on FedFunds/Eurodollar trading software at a big bank, I came in on the weekend and reconfigured my cubicle walls so that the entrance was in the same aisle as my coworkers, rather than being on the opposite side and having to walk all the way around to talk to them. Normally I believe that sort of thing involved the maintenance staff, etc, at who-knows-what expense.
Egads man. Keep it safe for work.
Another time I started looking through a cardboard box that had been sitting outside my cube for months. It had office supplies and things in it. I started eyeing items like a stapler.
The guy in the next cube pops out and says "those are her personal effects!". Apparently the older woman in the opposite cube (I never met her) popped her clogs at some point, and this was her unclaimed stuff.
Oops!
(Okay, that's unintentionally-cringe-inducing-naughty, not hack-naughty. But I find it amusing these days.)
Free sodas freshman year. Chem lab + NaCl + soda machine + Russian roomate.
When I was in 6th grade ('94) I scanned articles from our encyclopedias onto our 386 and then used OCR software to make it usable as a class research paper. You can imagine what happened the following year when I got dial up. _________________________________________ I also had a computer hardware class in high school that the teacher would often leave for extended periods of time. The other students and I get enough…
For a while we'd fly back and forth between the US and England every few months, and we did a bunch of traveling to allow the return restrictions to expire.
Finally we got fed up and simply moved to Spain, where neither one of us is allowed to live, but they just don't check very hard. Lived there for a little over a year, coming and going as we pleased with never an issue with immigrations.
I am a 25% partner of website X, which earns in the low six-figures. The 75% partner has a majority rules attitude, and all accounts and passwords, and when he decided unilaterally to take a nice salary, and then reneg on a buyout agreement, I could see things turning wrong. Having built the site (technical cofounder, translated as: free coder) I have a backend to all of the user's email addresses (10,000 or so, havi…
By doing something illegal (like stealing proprietary information) you're severely decreasing your chances things working out well.