Tell us your naughty stories • Hacker News Board

Re: Tell us your naughty stories

#221

Post by doki_pen » Sat, Oct 23, 2010, 5:58 PM UTC

Once upon a time I was a linecook. At the end of every night the manager would inspect your station for cleanliness. Most managers felt that they should at least find one more thing for you to do before you leave, or they weren't doing a good job. It was really arbitrary and there was always a risk that it would be something time consuming.

I started a practice of messing my station with something really easy to finish up before inpection. Maybe a blob of mayo on the counter. Worked like a charm.

I've also applied this concept to software for clueless clients. I've only recently learned that it's called a Duck[0].

[0] http://goo.gl/yDgC (stack overflow)

Re: Tell us your naughty stories

#222

Post by mattmaroon » Sat, Oct 23, 2010, 6:00 PM UTC

wallflower wrote: post #35

bvi wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok, I don't get it.

By glancing back, he is implying that the person behind him is something like a plain-clothes security officer (who should not be bribed)

I got that part, but why would you have to give bribes to African airport officials?

Re: Tell us your naughty stories

#223

Post by zohaibr » Sat, Oct 23, 2010, 6:02 PM UTC

Six months ago I decided to quit my day time job and move to Austin. I worked in Finance and there is no way the banks let you work remotely. I had been in my position for three years and in the last one year, almost all my managers left the group. I was the only one which had knowledge about all the critical processes.

I told my boss at that time that I am moving to Austin and if you really want me which you do, let me work remotely. They could not give me a contract and thus decided to keep on my same salary. I worked less and less hours every month until last month, when they decided they did not need me. I worked on my startup while getting paid and working barely 1-2 hours a week.

Re: Tell us your naughty stories

#224

Post by iloveyouocean » Sat, Oct 23, 2010, 6:03 PM UTC

Free airport long-term parking hack. Upon returning from your trip, walk through the long-term parking gate and grab a new ticket from the machine. As you are leaving the lot, hand the attendant the new ticket. Tada, free parking.

Re: Tell us your naughty stories

#225

Post by Terretta » Sat, Oct 23, 2010, 6:10 PM UTC

wallflower wrote: post #15

In a dorm, in the pre-digital cable days and before our dorm officially had cable, we bought hundreds of feet of cable and some signal amplifiers and gained access to the basement/maintenance areas and spliced the cable feed from the Dean who had it and ran cable up through the ducts to the ten or so rooms in our wing. Over Winter break, we came back and found the signal lost (someone had removed a segment to tell us…

In my dorm the extra run had to go from the ceiling above the dean's office, room to room above the drop ceiling tiles, through the built-in closets' top cabinets, and through cinderblock between every other room.

Students were not allowed to have TVs, so the other part of the hack was to be in a video production class to be allowed to have a monitor, but open it up and splice a tuner to a BNC input then use a coax to BNC coupler, so the monitor looked absolutely normal from the outside.

Awfully complicated to end up watching USA's "Up All Night" B movies hosted by Gilbert Gottfried.

Re: Tell us your naughty stories

#226

Post by middus » Sat, Oct 23, 2010, 6:17 PM UTC

randomtask wrote: post #61

I lived in Germany for a bit. While there I really wanted to learn to speak German properly, but when I first arrived my spoken German was pretty awful. Since many Germans speak English pretty well and could evidently tell from the way I was pronouncing things that I was an English speaker they would often switch to speaking English with me mid-conversation. This annoyed me because I'd gone to a lot of effort to move…

A friend of mine is from Ireland and went to a Scandinavian country. Same story there: people would switch to English as soon as they found out that she's from Ireland. Her trick: "Sorry, I come from the Gaeltacht. My first language is Gaeilge."

Re: Tell us your naughty stories

#227

Post by cma » Sat, Oct 23, 2010, 6:17 PM UTC

McP wrote: post #70

Back in the day when you had to pay for games, I really wanted Wing Commander III but it cost a whopping £39.99 which was far more than I could afford with my few savings. Solution: I designed a voucher for PC World giving £25 off the price of the game, and printed it off on an inkjet. I went to the shop, handed the game and the fake voucher to the cashier, who looked at it with obvious suspicion and told me "I'm goi…

Until I read your last sentence I was going to add: the joke was on you.

Re: Tell us your naughty stories

#228

Post by zimbu668 » Sat, Oct 23, 2010, 6:17 PM UTC

At a previous company the software engineers also had to answer the tech support line for our product. This was not a popular activity so all calls had to be logged and if your numbers were too far below the average you got chewed out at the end of the month.

Now some calls were really easy to handle, like if there was a deadlock in the database, you'd just pull up the db manager and pick one of the processes to kill. Now the database didn't have enough information to detect when a deadlock occured, because technically the deadlock was in the java code it was just easiest to clear it up by killing one of the db processes.

I modified how we created our db processes, giving them a name which contained enough information to detect a deadlock automatically, add in an eclipse plugin that polled the db every few seconds and I became the king of tech support. The light would go red and my hand would hover over the phone just waiting for a call.

I was kind enough to give my boss a copy of the software when I left the company.

Re: Tell us your naughty stories

#229

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Oct 23, 2010, 6:18 PM UTC

asnyder wrote: post #67

Six years ago my brother rented out a beach house in another state for the summer and would let me stay there with some friends. One fun summer week a good friend and I were enjoying the house to ourselves and decided to make a 7-11 run to pick up some much needed snacks and other provisions. When we got back from our adventure my key wouldn't open the door. Unbeknownst to us, this was the one time that closing the d…

[deleted]

Re: Tell us your naughty stories

#230

Post by petercooper » Sat, Oct 23, 2010, 6:19 PM UTC

doki_pen wrote: post #221

Once upon a time I was a linecook. At the end of every night the manager would inspect your station for cleanliness. Most managers felt that they should at least find one more thing for you to do before you leave, or they weren't doing a good job. It was really arbitrary and there was always a risk that it would be something time consuming. I started a practice of messing my station with something really easy to fini…

I've heard of something similar being done in accounts in order to give any auditors or tax inspectors something to find. Nothing big, of course. I'm personally not convinced this would help get rid of them quicker but who knows.