Who, Me? It’s another Monday, dear reader, which means the working week has begun anew. On the bright side, it also means another dose of the reader-submitted tales of IT hijinks we call Who, Me?

This week our hero – if we can call him that – is a jokester we’ll Regomize as “Mark” who once worked for a huge corporate in the kind of busy office you see in the movies where everyone’s always busy doing business of some sort.

This was in the early days of social media. Facebook was quite a new thing and few businesses had yet devised policies about whether or not it was appropriate to use it during work hours. Mark had a colleague – let’s call him “Dave” – who was quite taken with the ol’ Facebook, and the eerie blue glow of The Social Network could often be seen radiating out from his cubicle.

This wasn’t really a problem, as Dave always seemed to get his work done and done well. Nonetheless, it was a “bit of a running joke” as Mark puts it.

At this point it’s worth describing Dave’s job a little. The company used “a horribly unwieldy corporate time-booking system that took everyone ages to navigate each week on a Friday afternoon,” according to Mark, so the IT staff “set up a local solution on a dev server under a desk.” That solution involved a simple intranet with a web interface which wrote out everyone’s time into its database.

“We could then extract the data in one go via a macro-driven Excel sheet in the correct format to be bulk uploaded to the corporate system,” explained Mark. One aspect of Dave’s job was to run the extract spreadsheet every Friday and do the upload.

So every Friday, like clockwork, Dave would open the spreadsheet. And, of course, he would see a warning message asking if he was sure he wanted to use macros – a favorite tool of miscreants, then as now. And, because he knew exactly what these macros were for, he always hit “OK”

And therein lay his mistake.

For unbeknownst to Dave, Mark and his buddies had decided to play a prank on him by modifying the routine slightly. They added an additional macro to the spreadsheet – set to autorun – which simply added a new line to the hosts file of the PC on which it was executed.

That new line in hosts was a dummy DNS entry for Facebook which pointed, not to Zuckerberg’s Curse, but to a website the IT team had set up on their internal dev server. The site consisted, Mark told us, of “one page which (in corporate branding) informed the user that their IP address had been flagged as spending excessive time on social media, and that their manager had been alerted.”

Mark et al laid their trap … and waited.

Come Friday, Mark returned from a meeting to discover that the trap had been sprung, but with unexpected chaotic results. Dave was in his manager’s office making all manner of excuses for spending time own social media and pleading not to keep his job, while the manager was trying to figure out what in the world was going on.

Realizing that perhaps a line had been crossed, Mark intervened – interrupting the conversation to reveal the prank.

Dave did not see the funny side and kicked an office chair “with such force that he almost broke his leg” according to Mark.

Numerous heartfelt apologies and attempts to make amends had little effect on Dave, who hobbled about the office furious with his colleagues for some time afterwards. At least until he was quite certain he wasn’t really going to lose his job.

OK, time to ‘fess up: has a bit of harmless fun ever gone a bit too far at your work? If you’ve crossed a line and never admitted it, tell us about it in an email to Who, Me? and we may share it on some future Monday – anonymously, of course. ®