Welcome to Geek Girl's Chronicles

Hi! Welcome to my new blog.

Since today is April 1st, I thought I would start things off by sharing my favorite prank...

The first occurred back in my college days. I was working as a computer tech on work study, and part of my job was to be the first level of tech support. It wasn't April Fool's, just a Sunday evening, things were slow, and I was...well, I was bored.

One of the problems people faced was people stealing their terminal. If you walked away to the restroom, or to otherwise take a break, someone might log you off and then log on. To prevent this, someone wrote a program called "Scope Saver."

The program made it look like the terminal had timed out, like you had walked off and let it log off by itself. Well, I went down to the terminal room, and put the program on all the available terminals.

It was only a few minutes before my victim appeared. A freshman came to my window, his eyes as big as saucers. I knew what up, but I played dumb.

"There is something wrong with the computer," he muttered.

"No, everything is up and running fine," I said, pointing to the larger status sign in the middle of the machine room behind me.

"Really, there is something wrong," he repeated.

I followed him down to the terminal room, looked at the one he was trying to log onto, and in my most patronizing voice said, "It is just timed out. You need to enter the site ID."

"I did that," he said.

I sat down, and entered the site ID. The machine responded normally. I started to get up, but he repeated that he had done this. I asked for his account and password. I typed those and again, everything appeared normal, and I again started to get up to leave...

"No, wait," he insisted.

It was getting hard to keep a straight face, but I waited.

After a moment, the words flashed across the screen:

I remember you, you're the idiot who was banging on my keyboard yesterday. I don't like you, and I am not going to speak to you anymore!

"See! See! I told you there is something wrong with the computer," he practically screamed.

I gave him my most piteous look, shook my head, and said, "Well, the computer just doesn't like you."

Tears well up in his eyes, as he pleaded, "But I've got to do my homework!!!!"

At that point, I just lost it. Laughing uncontrolably, I cleared the program, gestured at the screen to indicate that it would work know, and then removed the program from all the other terminals.

Anyway, in coming posts, I will be talking about various and sundry geeky things. Feel free to leave a comment.