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It's the late 90s and I was working in IT for a small (200 employees) company.
One of my tasks was performing daily data backups, which ran for about four hours and started after everyone else had left for the day.
We had an intercom system in the building, where if you picked up your phone and dialed a specific extension, you could page someone, or make announcements so everyone could hear.

One night I was in the process of running Ethernet cable from switches on the second floor down to individual terminals on the first floor, so there was a lot walking around the building.

I like to have music when I'm working, but I didn't have an MP3 player at the time, so I thought... "I have music on my PC and no one is around. Why don't I just...", and I went around and cranked the volume knob on every ceiling intercom speaker in the whole building. Then I dialed into the intercom from the phone in my office, put the handset up as close as I could to my PC speakers, and boom, music throughout the building.

Cut to a few hours later, it's late, I'm tired, the backup is finished, so I close down the system, hit the lights, lock the doors, and go home.

The next day, I come in, not thinking about anything from the night before, and get to work. About 11:00am, the owner's secretary got on the intercom to page someone.... and blew everyone out of their seats. There was an almost collective, "What the fuck??!!" from everyone, and an "Ohhh, shiiit" from me, because of course I immediately knew what happened.

I ran around like a madman, turning the volume down on all of the speakers that I had forgotten the night before, while saying, "No idea... Yeah it's crazy... No no, it's fixed now..."

No one ever found out exactly why the volume was so loud that morning.

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[โ€“] Murse@slrpnk.net 81 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

Decade or so ago, logging into a work computer and suddenly the screen is just tiled with the word "virus", but a bit janky looking like it was a screenshot of the word that was enlarged and tiled with no thought to whether the right side of the image lined up with the left and such - it was a very 90s cheesy movie like depiction of what happens to your comp when you get a virus, like you'd expect the next scene to be some shady hacker on the other end exclaiming "I'm in!"

Then again, I don't know jack fuck about viruses, and the machine is behaving super weird, so I unplugged the internet cable from the back, and called my manager over. He had a similar "...is this for fuckin real?" reaction that I did. Mind you, this is a hospital, so if one of our computers is fucked, this is a big deal for potentially leaking patient info, so even though it had that kind of slapstick appearance, no one was fucking around with it: so, manager pushed it up the chain, and after a few mins a fucking SWAT team of IT guys comes in and starts doing their own assessment.

After some deliberation, they start troubleshooting - keystrokes and whatnot don't seem to be responsive. One of them eventually reaches back behind the monitor and 'poof' the screen pops back to the normal login screen.

So, that facility had a fancy custom login screen, which was some generic desktop background type scenery and a wall of text that none of us ever put any thought into. One of the snipits on that wall of text was instructions on what to do if you suspect your machine has virus (which was basically what I did - leave it running, unplug it from the internet, and call IT... hooray, I'm not completely stupid!). What ended up being the cause of the "virus" tiling was the fucking VGA cable slowing worming its way out of the back of the monitor - when I got to it, that thing was hanging on by a thread, and touching the desk it was on was just enough of a bump to make it cross that line between having enough of a connection to do its job vs not. That micrometer of pull of on that cable wasn't enough to completely cut its signal, but it wasn't enough to produce a normal display either: it just picked a random spot on the screen, and filled the monitor with that repeating image. The spot it just happened to do this to was the word "virus" in the custom login text explaining what to do if you think you have a virus, lol.

TLDR, got my management chain from my dept to the top dogs running the hospital, and the entire fucking IT department to swarm to my unit over a potential data breach that ended up being a wiggly VGA cable.

Whoops.

[โ€“] W98BSoD@lemmy.dbzer0.com 11 points 1 week ago

Better safe than cryptolockered.