I work in IT. Most people are nice and reasonable, but every now and then, there are jerks.
For the most part, everybody gets equal treatment from me, but if you are a super polite and friendly person, I’ll bend the rules for you. I’ve given a few people unauthorized hardware upgrades, boosted their ticket priority, helped them bypass company restrictions, etc. Little favors for being so chill and easy to work with.
But in the other side, a handful of folks have gotten my evil side. One guy in particular, a real douchebag. Super angry all the time, a jerk to me and other employees, was always spamming us angrily to fix his stuff. He would constantly lock himself out of his account because he would angrily type the wrong password over and over and then call us all pissed because he was locked out and couldn’t get any work done.
One morning he did it again, called the help desk and I was the lucky one who picked up. He ranted at me about how he had an important meeting in less than an hour and his account was locked out again, (because he kept typing his password wrong like an idiot.) He swore at me and yelled about how the password policy was bullshit, blah blah.
I had enough and told him that, while I could reset his password, unfortunately we recently updated our servers and it would take roughly half an hour for the change to take place. He yelled about how he was going to miss his important meeting and all that, but I just kept gently apologizing and reminding him that I didn’t come up with the password policy and all of it was above my pay grade.
He hung up furious and I smiled, made a mental note to reset his password in half an hour, and marked the ticket as resolved. Still don’t feel bad about that.
Second story: In college, whenever there was paper due that I had procrastinated on, if it could be submitted to an online portal, I would create a fake Word document, fill it with random characters, and save it with the proper name.
Then, I would use a hex editor to corrupt the document, just enough so it would still get recognized as a legit Word doc, but if you tried to open it, Word would throw an error and not be able to open it.
Then I would submit that the night it was due, so it would look like I had submitted my paper on time. Even with small classes, it would usually be at least 2-3 days before the professor or TA would get to my paper, sometimes up to a week, and that whole time, I would be working on my real paper.
I would get a message or email from the professor a few days later letting me know that for some reason, my paper wouldn’t open, and requesting that I resend it.
I would then respond with something like, “oh hmmm, that’s weird, not sure what happened. Sure thing, I just uploaded it again, please let me know if that worked.”
Of course, the second time I actually uploaded my real paper. Did that trick a half dozen times or so, never got caught lol.
It constantly amazes me how many people haven’t caught on to the fact that just always preemptively being nice to people makes your life so much better because people tend to treat you decently in return.
For sure. I always try to be extra kind to service folks, first, because it’s good to treat people well. But also because you never know what strings they can pull for you in a pinch.
Years ago, my connecting flight got canceled a few minutes before it was supposed to depart, obviously a ton of people were screwed trying to get where they were going.
I was in line for the service desk to get rerouted and saw the main service desk gal getting chewed out over and over by different pissy passengers, as if she had personally canceled their flight just because she was bored.
She kept telling everybody that all the flights were booked and it would be at least 10 hours before anything would be available.
When it was my turn, I could tell she was exhausted dealing with all the angry people ranting in her face. I just apologized to her about how sucky the whole situation was and said very nicely, “I’ll take whatever flight you can get me, but I understand things are crazy right now.” she thanked me and started to give me the same speech, then paused and told me to wait outside of the line while she, “checked something real quick.”
A minute or two later, she came back out and motioned me quietly back over. She leaned in and said she had, “found me a seat on a red-eye leaving in a few hours to my destination if that worked.”
I thanked her a bunch and was home early the next morning while all the other people were still crashed out in the airport waiting for all the other flights.
Two stories:
I work in IT. Most people are nice and reasonable, but every now and then, there are jerks.
For the most part, everybody gets equal treatment from me, but if you are a super polite and friendly person, I’ll bend the rules for you. I’ve given a few people unauthorized hardware upgrades, boosted their ticket priority, helped them bypass company restrictions, etc. Little favors for being so chill and easy to work with.
But in the other side, a handful of folks have gotten my evil side. One guy in particular, a real douchebag. Super angry all the time, a jerk to me and other employees, was always spamming us angrily to fix his stuff. He would constantly lock himself out of his account because he would angrily type the wrong password over and over and then call us all pissed because he was locked out and couldn’t get any work done.
One morning he did it again, called the help desk and I was the lucky one who picked up. He ranted at me about how he had an important meeting in less than an hour and his account was locked out again, (because he kept typing his password wrong like an idiot.) He swore at me and yelled about how the password policy was bullshit, blah blah.
I had enough and told him that, while I could reset his password, unfortunately we recently updated our servers and it would take roughly half an hour for the change to take place. He yelled about how he was going to miss his important meeting and all that, but I just kept gently apologizing and reminding him that I didn’t come up with the password policy and all of it was above my pay grade.
He hung up furious and I smiled, made a mental note to reset his password in half an hour, and marked the ticket as resolved. Still don’t feel bad about that.
Second story: In college, whenever there was paper due that I had procrastinated on, if it could be submitted to an online portal, I would create a fake Word document, fill it with random characters, and save it with the proper name.
Then, I would use a hex editor to corrupt the document, just enough so it would still get recognized as a legit Word doc, but if you tried to open it, Word would throw an error and not be able to open it.
Then I would submit that the night it was due, so it would look like I had submitted my paper on time. Even with small classes, it would usually be at least 2-3 days before the professor or TA would get to my paper, sometimes up to a week, and that whole time, I would be working on my real paper.
I would get a message or email from the professor a few days later letting me know that for some reason, my paper wouldn’t open, and requesting that I resend it.
I would then respond with something like, “oh hmmm, that’s weird, not sure what happened. Sure thing, I just uploaded it again, please let me know if that worked.”
Of course, the second time I actually uploaded my real paper. Did that trick a half dozen times or so, never got caught lol.
It constantly amazes me how many people haven’t caught on to the fact that just always preemptively being nice to people makes your life so much better because people tend to treat you decently in return.
For sure. I always try to be extra kind to service folks, first, because it’s good to treat people well. But also because you never know what strings they can pull for you in a pinch.
Years ago, my connecting flight got canceled a few minutes before it was supposed to depart, obviously a ton of people were screwed trying to get where they were going.
I was in line for the service desk to get rerouted and saw the main service desk gal getting chewed out over and over by different pissy passengers, as if she had personally canceled their flight just because she was bored.
She kept telling everybody that all the flights were booked and it would be at least 10 hours before anything would be available.
When it was my turn, I could tell she was exhausted dealing with all the angry people ranting in her face. I just apologized to her about how sucky the whole situation was and said very nicely, “I’ll take whatever flight you can get me, but I understand things are crazy right now.” she thanked me and started to give me the same speech, then paused and told me to wait outside of the line while she, “checked something real quick.”
A minute or two later, she came back out and motioned me quietly back over. She leaned in and said she had, “found me a seat on a red-eye leaving in a few hours to my destination if that worked.”
I thanked her a bunch and was home early the next morning while all the other people were still crashed out in the airport waiting for all the other flights.
Same Word document trick! I usually use zero-byte files instead as that corruption is more common, but sometimes corrupted files are useful.
I imagine these online portals would cotton on quite quick and start rejecting zero byte files. But good idea while it works
An oldie but a goodie lol.