OK, I have two that might humor someone
I work for a Heat Treat shop and at the time I was the production manager. The owner's brother (IBM retiree) created a software package that managed our inventory and tracked everything through the process. It was at that time running on OS/2. The guy that handled the support and setup was our employee and worked in an upstairs office he was always very arrogant and sure of himself. When the package was to a useable stage, I was then appointed to handle the system so that he could continue to test updates and take customer calls. Since we had seen problems with certain updates in the past, I specified that nothing gets updated without testing it first. I also started doing my own backups which at the time was being done by the support guy. One day he called me upstairs to help him test a new update. When I walked into his office he had everything set up and started showing me the changes. Since I recognized some new data from our database I immediately became upset and asked him why he was testing an update on our database. He said "I'm not, I did a backup of the database earlier and restored it to my machine". I said you couldn't have, that information was what I was working on before you called me up. He immediately went into DB/2 and decided to show me how he cataloged his database that he created. When he saw that he had made a mistake he said I'll be right back and left the room. When he came back he said "there, I fixed it." I thought he was just being funny so I laughed and started to help him set up for the tests. He said, "What are you doing? I told you I fixed it" I then looked puzzled and asked how because everything had to be done at his machine. He said "I had to drop the database on the server" At this point I probably turned very white because he then realized just what he had said. About 30 seconds later the intercom rang in with someone asking why they were unable to access the database. Now the funny thing is when he was doing his backups he quickly discovered that he was backing up HIS drives database and not ours. I let him sweat for a few minutes before I finally said "Well, good thing I was doing my own backups" Needless to say, he was completely cut off from our network that same day, and I do mean cut off, I used the wire cutters myself :)
Ok... now for the next one...
After the system was a couple of years old and things ran pretty smooth. This same guy had less and less to do each day. Support calls would come few and far in between so he had plenty of free time on his hands. He got to where all he would do was play on the internet. One day I decided that it was time to have a little fun with him so I wrote a small VB program that would intercept Internet Explorer or Netscape opening and would immediately close it and display an error message. I also set a remote file that I could set to enable or disable the program. When I would see that all he was doing was browsing the internet, I would open file, set it to true and the next page update would result in the error, completely stopping him. It wouldn't even let him open a page. Now keep in mind, this guy knew everything there was to know about computers (in his mind). So after a couple of days of this he came to me and asked me if I had ever experienced anything like this. I told him to try defragging his drive (thorough) because it could be that IE is fragmented so bad that it is timing out. I admit he did question it but decided to try it. While he was defragmenting it, I set it back to false and when it was done, lo and behold that fixed the problem :) I continued to do this for a little over a month. At one stage he was so fed up that he reinstalled his system. Well, that fixed the problem until he went to lunch and I was able to put the program back on. I never told him any different even when he left the company but I did hear him tell his buddy one time "Make sure you keep your hard drive defragged or you could end up not being able to run anything on your system". I just chuckled softly to myself and set the file back to "True".
