And did he get 'educated' after all?

It's the 1990s, and this company's IT offices are split into three levels, according to a pilot fish on the scene.

"We mainframers were at the bottom, on the ground floor," fish says. "The Unix lads were on the middle floor, and the bosses were at the top.

"One of the Unix lads used to gel and shape his hair, and heaven help anybody who touched it. If you did, you'd get a right bashing from him -- physically, not verbally.

"One day the receptionist, on her way down to her desk on the ground floor, decided to ruffle his hair up a bit. Big mistake.

"The following day, everybody on the ground floor had bad headaches. Nothing would clear it up. We ended up turning machines off, one after another, to try to find out what was causing it.

"Turns out it was the receptionist's computer -- as soon as we turned that off, all the headaches disappeared.

"It seems our clever Unix gel-hair chap wanted to get back at the receptionist for touching his hair, but he knew he couldn't really thump her or we'd have, um, educated him. So he installed a program on her PC to emit a very high-pitched noise through the sound card to give her a headache.

"But in getting his revenge on the poor girl, he forgot about the rest of us. The mainframers lost a day's work -- and that nearly cost him his job."

Don't forget about Sharky -- I really need your true tales of IT life right now. Send me your story at sharky@computerworld.com, and you'll snag a snazzy Shark shirt if I use it. Comment on today's tale at Sharky's Google+ community, and read thousands of great old tales in the Sharkives.

Get your daily dose of out-takes from the IT Theater of the Absurd delivered directly to your Inbox. Subscribe now to the Daily Shark Newsletter.

Related:

Copyright © 2016 IDG Communications, Inc.

Bing’s AI chatbot came to work for me. I had to fire it.
Shop Tech Products at Amazon