In any workplace, every now and then, you come across that one colleague who seems to have an inflated sense of self-worth. In this case, it was a PhD who managed to steal an office that could’ve comfortably fit two people. He had a knack for getting under everyone’s skin, spending a significant portion of his workday playing Solitaire while the rest of the team put in actual hours. It was obnoxious, but more than that, it was unprofessional.
The situation escalated when this PhD began complaining about performance issues on his computer. Naturally, our IT team decided to investigate. After gathering data, we were less surprised and more amused to discover that Solitaire was running continuously in the background. The irony wasn’t lost on us; here was a guy with a doctorate who couldn’t figure out that he was spending his work hours engrossed in a card game.
One day, fueled by a mixture of annoyance and a desire for a little harmless revenge, one of the IT workers hatched a plan. He opened the Solitaire executable file in Notepad, tinkered with it, and deleted a few key characters before saving it. The result? A corrupted executable that would crash the moment anyone tried to open it. It was a stroke of genius, or perhaps a stroke of sheer pettiness. Either way, it was too tempting to pass up.
A few hours later, the ticket came in. “Programs are crashing on my machine and we need to fix this ASAP,” read the alarmed message from the PhD. The IT worker, trying not to chuckle, calmly asked him to specify which programs were crashing. His response was vague at best: “Lots of them.” It was clear that he hadn’t bothered to keep track of what he was doing right before the crashes happened.
The IT worker saw an opportunity for a laugh. He told the PhD to call him the next time something crashed, making sure to note what he was doing at the time and to leave the crash popup on the screen. This popup would detail exactly which program had failed and why. As everyone in the IT department exchanged knowing glances, the PhD nodded and promised to keep an eye on things.
Days went by, and miraculously, the PhD never called back about crashing programs. It was almost as if he had suddenly come to terms with the limitations of what his computer was capable of—or perhaps, he was just too embarrassed to admit that Solitaire, of all things, was causing him grief. Meanwhile, the IT worker found immense satisfaction in watching the PhD pretend that he was dealing with a myriad of technical issues when, in reality, it was just one game that was sabotaging his productivity.
The beauty of it all was the unspoken camaraderie within the IT team, sitting back and knowing that their small act of rebellion was making a difference—not in functionality, but in the morale of everyone else who had to put up with the PhD’s arrogance. His unaccommodating nature had finally met its match in a way that didn’t require confrontation but rather cunning ingenuity.
Eventually, the PhD may have come to terms with his “crashing programs,” but there was a certain satisfaction knowing that the IT team had pulled one over on him without breaking any rules or escalating the situation. It served as a reminder that sometimes, a little bit of playful revenge can make the monotony of office life a bit more bearable.
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