I cat about 100 man files together and slop them in his girlfriends account under then name "rsrch.j"
"How do I do that?"
"Ok; can you login yet?"
"Yeah, I think so..... Ok, I'm logged in"
"Ok, You need to run the file thru the mailer to clear the eigth bit, otherwise the journal recovery will probably choke with an instruction error"
>DUMMY MODE ON<
"Oh... How do I do that?"
"Well, you have to type in `mail root < rsrch.j'"
"Ok!"
"HANG ON! You have to type it with your nose."
"WH..? WHY?"
I flip the excuse card till something appropriate pops up. "HARDWARE STRESS FRACTURES"
"Well, it's got to do with hardware stress fractures. You probably type too hard with your fingers which upsets the internals of the keyboard. It's got to do with dry joints and electromagnetic inductance"
>DUMMY MODE IRREVOCABLY ON<
"Oh. Ok"
"Now, you've got to type it in 20 times"
"Sure, ok"
He hangs up.
I ring campus security
"Hey, we've got another crazy in the lab. Apparently he's typing with his nose. He might be armed..."
3 minutes later I hear the shots. I close his account, he won't be needing it any more..
The phone rings. It's my Mum.
"Hi Ma, what can I do for you?"
"Simon, I've got a problem at work, the floppy disk with all my personal stuff on it is failing I think"
"Oh. Ok. Well, have you got any nail polish remover and some cotton wool buds?"
"Yes"
"Ok, take your disk out, and clean that brown stuff off the inside of the disk. That's what gets the heads dirty. You should just have a nice clean plastic disk when you've cleaned it completely"
"Oh, Ok Simon, Thanks"
"You're welcome. Oh; remember that time you wouldn't let me go over to Graeme's place to watch videos when I was 11?"
"Yeah, why?"
"Oh, No reason.."
It's a warm afternoon in the computer room. I dunno, maybe I should turn the chillers back on, but what the hell, I've got a cold and I need to keep warm.
I flip today's excuse card. Magnetic Interferance from Money/Credit Cards. Hmmm, vague enough to be plausible. The phone rings
"Hello, Computer Room" I say.
"Hi!" the caller says "I want to fit some RAM to my machine to upgrade the memory. I just bought some 8 meg chips off a guy in town and wanted to know if you guys would fit it."
"Well," I say "normally we would, but today the technicians are busy trying to gas axe open our tape safe to see why it smells – You could probably fit it yourself though.."
"Really? I thought that was dangerous?" she says.
"Nah nah, it's safe as houses, just remember to get the chips out of those stupid plastic bags before they stuff them up altogether"
"Really?! How do they do that?"
"Well, you've heard of static RAM right?"
"Yes..."
"Well, Why pack static RAM in an antistatic bag? Sounds really suspect if you ask me!!! Yours might even be stuffed already, so you'd better remove them.."
>D.M. ON<
"Oh >crinkle crinkle< Ok. Now what do I do?"
"Ok, you'll need to get rid of the charge those bags have probably given your RAM, after all, you don't want to blow up your computer, do you? Get rid of any woolens that you're wearing and switch to nylon. Run round some cheap carpet, then comb your hair a couple of dozen times and then plug the chips into the comb to keep them steady. Turn your machine on, then plug the memory in and out about 10 times to get the slots warmed up. Then slop them back in, flick the power switch half a dozen times and that should do it!"
"Hey thanks!"
"Don't mention a thing, all part of the service"
I leave for lunch – after all I have been here for 10 minutes solid – and walk past the student labs. I hear a mass of beeping and look round to see a user's screen full of garbage. They've either typed an image file or fingered my account and got the core file I renamed as .plan. By the time he gets his terminal sorted out, his allocation of connect time will be all used up. A tragic shame.
I get back from lunch early a couple of hours later and slip into the Usenet news directory tree, slide on down to alt.binaries.pictures.erotica, then start deleting parts 3 or 4 of the really long gifs. (After taking a copies myself and overwriting them to the last user backup tape, of course).