Troublesome Coworker

I work the IT department of a pretty good size company, and I work in the same area as our help desk guys... well we just hired on a new contractor, 6 months. His main job is supposed to be answering phone calls and passing them on to the 3 other guys that work the phones and physically go fix things.

I can't even begin to think of where to start and try to explain this kid to you. He is younger, and stupid. I don't know how he passed the interview questions, someone had to prep him or he was using google. (eg: I was out on the floor troubleshooting some devices and wanted to see if an IP was available for me to use, I call him up and ask him to ping this, now as i ask i do the steps in my head of what should be happening... start>run>cmd>enter>ping xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx.... a minute later i hear an umm uhh so I ask well? hold on.... mmmkay not sure why then he answers, 2 minutes to ping something)

Well this past week, his boss doesnt seem to care that this kid is an idiot, and he usually lets the phone ring 3 times before he answers it (the rest of us answer after or during the first ring) HIS SOUL JOB IS TO ANSWER THE PHONE.... well whatever, well the last 2 days he has been talking on the phone for like an hour at a time and searching for a new car.... well this infuriated me cause now im answering phone calls and crap..

Time for some fun....

I started my editing his hosts files so all the stupid websites hes spending time on either default to our blockpage or back to his computer... looking for more ideas here (we have websense so a lot of the fun sites are blocked anyway)

Then I decided this wasnt enough I fired up command prompt and typed the following

shutdown -s -m \\hispcname -t 01

I hear him try to read it and boom his computer shutsdown... I hear him in astonishment trying to figure out what happened.

For tomorrow I plan on disabling his port on the switch and making him tone it out to figure out why its not working then when he comes back (inevitably a few HOURS later) ill reactivate it walk over to his computer and act like hes retarded (ill do a ipconfig /release and renew) :D

Now i am looking for any more NONdestructive ideas for what I can do to discourage this kid from screwing around since they wont can him

ps: this is like a real life BOFH

Hi Spyrus,

Sounds like a case of nepotism...or he's going out with the bosses daughter and he wants to make sure he's got a job :D

Eg ;)

Can you get in trouble for that kind of stuff?

Spyrus

Please be careful my friend sounds like it might be the illegitimate brat of some senior exec...........you HAVE to have dug that dirt FIRST ;)

:D

Spyrus,

If you happen to have somthing like "Timbuktu". Catch him working on a document and do some autocorrecting for him. He'll load up his shorts. :D

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he's going out with the bosses daughter

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Can you get in trouble for that kind of stuff?

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Only when you get her pregnant.

~cheers~

Laxative chocolate?

Does anyone regualrly audit the Websense logs? Could you hint to them to check this guys browsing habit i.e. he spends 6 hours a day on FHM.com

change all shortcuts on his desktop or in start menu to point to 'shutdown -t 00'
then watch as he tries ot figure out why everytime he attempts to start up a program his computer shuts down

take a screenshot of his desktop and set it as the wallpaper, remove all icons and watch as he clicks again and again on an 'icon' which is actually just a picture on his desktop.

go to an empty terminal and create a batch file with a never ending loop - using the net send command to constantly send him messages. See how long it takes him to track down which terminal messages are coming from.

set all his windows sounds to short wavs from ripped from a porno (ohs, ahs etc) make sure volume is turned up really high on his speakers before he comes in.

Set all his mouse pointers to a blank cursor graphic (will include one in zip for you) just go into control panel >> mouse >> pointers
sit back and watch as he checks mouse connection to PC, changes mice, downloads new drivers for mouse, etc etc

If you have any old wornout case fans lyign around office replace all fans in his computer with those - the noise should drive him mad :)

If he uses Outlook/Thunderbird/other mail client create a batch file to delete his prefrences/local mail folder on every start up.

just a few ideas for ya

or... you could just walk up to him and tell him that you think he's a flippin idiot.

I know that would hurt if I ever heard that from one of my coworkers :p

have you tried talking to his boss about how you think he isn't experienced enough for the current job that he has?

Have you tried talking to him about his shortcomings and /offered/ to help him correct them by teaching him? Have you thought about mentoring him? Maybe he needs guidance. It sounds like he landed a job that is a bit out of his league.

valhallen: you're just evil... now off to have some fun! :) lol

Im affraid i have to go with nihil on this one. He has to be with an exec somewhere (or havesomthing on them?) if he isnt toast and is bad as you say he is.

The problem with this type of job is that he has no individual responsibility. he is there to help out the team, so when he slacks the team has to pick up the crap and keep going. Send him friendly emails asking him to not spend so much time on the phone for non job related tasks becasue it is causing you to not be able to do your job. BE NICE about it. CC the boss(es). Keep doing this. Talk to the bosses explaining where he lacks. Remind them that they are wasting money by having him there (nothing gets to an exec faster than a threat to his bankroll).

Is it ever just you two covering the desk? if so call in sick one or two days. that way no one is there to pick up his slack.

now if all that doesnt work...smack the guy with a baseball bat.

Spyrus:

Set his host file to point to www DOT sex DOT com,playboy, hustler, etc. Then let websense do the rest.

valhallen:

What can I say but BRA- F***ING-O!

thank you, thank you

/me takes bow

:rofl:

open a shell on his computer and net send him messages form his own box when he's doing something he shouldn't. like "Browsing the net on company time?" or "Stop talking on the phone and get to work".

or you could be less constructive and change his default font to white

To those of you showing concern... thanks, the kid is more or less filling well filling a position i guess is the best way to put it. I've done some research and he have any connections to anyone here and I know his boss (was also my boss) pretty well. He answered all the interview questions pretty solid but I'm thinking he was prepped.

I love some of these ideas and will definitely use them. I really like the mouse pointer idea. Its just hard to catch his computer unlocked.

I am now on the same level as his boss so I am stressing that his boss (friend of mine) go ahead and give him the come to jesus talk to get him rolling in the right direction.

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take a screenshot of his desktop and set it as the wallpaper, remove all icons and watch as he clicks again and again on an 'icon' which is actually just a picture on his desktop.

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Bah. That was mine, lol. Once a guy deleted the folder that I had moved all his icons to after resetting the wallpaper, and in doing so deleted all his important documents a a bunch of other stuff. Then he *still* didn't realize what had happened and figuring that his computer was broken, called me to fix it (oh the irony). I told him what had happened (conveniently omitting the part about who had done it out). He was less than happy...

Another time I took all the keys off my roomate's keyboard and switched them all around and he had fits trying to fix it. He's a horrible typist anyway, and he borrowed mine (which also had the keys all switched around) to use as a reference to fix it. Three hours later I told him that wasn't the best of ideas. You could try that one. ^_^

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Another time I took all the keys off my roomate's keyboard and switched them all around and he had fits trying to fix it. He's a horrible typist anyway, and he borrowed mine (which also had the keys all switched around) to use as a reference to fix it. Three hours later I told him that wasn't the best of ideas. You could try that one. ^_^

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Great idea but most people who spend long times behind a pc know how to type without even looking at the keyboard so it won't be a big problem putting them back on.

Here are some of mine (harmless):
-At my school they use some program that lets them monitor the pc of the students. I am sure that someone here will know some similar program. Install in on his pc and take control over it. Let it go to some pages your not allowed to go on during work time :D

-Switch the big button on the back of his pc to off so it doesn't get power (that what it for right?¿)

-Delete windows or configure it that way that you need a boot disk.

-Delete al his character type's expept the symbol ones.

-Unplug his keyboard.

Just some harmless ones, we don't want to get caught now do we :rolleyes:

keezel I did the screenshot one on a mac in college once.
i was off the day it was discovered (thankfully dont think i could have kept a straight face) apparantly tho the lecturer was trying to fix it for 30mins before calling a tech - tech tried for another 30 before calling down _another_ tech

the pair of them tried different things for an hr before taking it away for 'repair'
which prolly means a full format and reinstall - oops

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the pair of them tried different things for an hr before taking it away for 'repair'

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Yeah, I was downright amazed when I learned that such a simple prank like that could cause so much damage. I really did feel badly about the guy's loss of documents... I haven't tried that particular one since then. The scary part is that I wonder if I would have done the same if it had happened to me. Assuming I'd never heard of it before, there's a good chance I would have freaked out and done something equally retarded.

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great idea but most people who spend long times behind a pc know how to type without even looking at the keyboard so it won't be a big problem putting them back on.

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True, but it worked well in my dorm. :) Surprisingly few people could type without looking at their keyboards. I made a ton of money from typing and proofing papers for people. I rearranged the keys on my own keyboard for my own good (to break my own habit of looking down every now and then) and as a simple extra security precaution. Sometimes I'd forget to put the pw up and walk out of the room, and people would pretend to be me on AIM. :rolleyes: Rearranging the keys on my keyboard helped a bit because it typically increased the time it took people to type a message and could even double the number of typos, and anyone that knew me at all from IM's would catch on pretty quickly that it wasn't me. :D

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Originally posted here by Spyrus
I work the IT department of a pretty good size company, and I work in the same area as our help desk guys... well we just hired on a new contractor, 6 months. His main job is supposed to be answering phone calls and passing them on to the 3 other guys that work the phones and physically go fix things.

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Hire me.

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Well this past week, his boss doesnt seem to care that this kid is an idiot, and he usually lets the phone ring 3 times before he answers it (the rest of us answer after or during the first ring) HIS SOUL JOB IS TO ANSWER THE PHONE....

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I'd unplug it but, you know.

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well whatever, well the last 2 days he has been talking on the phone for like an hour at a time and searching for a new car.... well this infuriated me cause now im answering phone calls and crap..

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Re-Attach your ****ing balls man. Set up something so no matter what he looks for online it goes straight to tubgirl. And if you can make management want PDAs or something wireless. This is real fun.

What you do is track the boss so that when he goes near this new guy, you force a picture of his Wife's head pasted over a porn star's body (You can do this in a lot of image editing suites.) and then sit back and watch.

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Then I decided this wasnt enough I fired up command prompt and typed the following

shutdown -s -m \\hispcname -t 01

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Pffft, Iwould have his box set up to send email to his boss every 200 key strokes by now.

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For tomorrow I plan on disabling his port on the switch and making him tone it out to figure out why its not working then when he comes back (inevitably a few HOURS later) ill reactivate it walk over to his computer and act like hes retarded (ill do a ipconfig /release and renew) :D

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Get new hardware, have him set it up. Wear gloves and stuff it with a petrol soaked rag and blaze it.

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Now i am looking for any more NONdestructive ideas for what I can do to discourage this kid from screwing around since they wont can him

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Pussy, set his house on fire.

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ps: this is like a real life BOFH

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No it's not. You said NON desctructive. That little bastard's chair would be hooked into a mains outlet by now and his testicles would be twitching by now.

Get a metal ruler, they are common on desks and conduct electricity very well, if you need more info than this, you're going to have to pay for it.

Gore, thought I'd mention that tubgirl doesn't work anymore :( Tried using it on some people, they said they were getting a "couldn't be found error".. I got pissed and wondered if they were on some kind of network with websense or something... tried the URL myself, didn't work...

Be nice to the guy...fix him some home made cookies. Substitute chocolate exlax for chocolate chips, flush a complete roll of T.P. down each toilet (leave the urinals intact) and enjoy the rest of your workday.

A very simple one is just to change the country of his pc (the "locale" in Regional Settings) You need to find something close to English but different so it isn't too obvious. In particular /, @ and inverted commas should be relocated.

Swedish might be one to try, there are 3 A's and three O's and a lot of the symbols map to different keys :D

Obviously this works best if their font does not support accents.

:)

I don't want to kill the guy gore.... ;) just piss him off a little bit. If I off him Ill have to go back to the how to remove blood from places thread and start studying.

Thats just too much work!!!

Instead I assigned him to cleaning the back room, thats almost worse than anything else. He started out thinking this was a month long project, i got someone to ride him so it got done in 2 days. it was actually rather comical.

The hard part about messing with his pc is he locks it almost 99% of the time when he walks away. If anyone knows anything fun I can do with just an admin share that will be twice the fun. I have access to his pc just not to his account(without resetting his password but he might figure that out)

Spyrus:

Do you have admin rights to websense?

If so there are lots of fun things you can do.

Now, grab a laptop and use arp to assign a static ip to the kids box. (No network logs)

Copy a key logger into the admin share.

Now use arp to change the subnet of his ip. Make it 255.255.255.254

Plug his nic back into the wall.

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Originally posted here by Spyrus
ps: this is like a real life BOFH

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When your done teasing him write it down so we can al have a laugh about it.

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If anyone knows anything fun I can do with just an admin share that will be twice the fun. I have access to his pc just not to his account(without resetting his password but he might figure that out)

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Try to get a remote desktop control program. You know what i mean, a program that lets you watch what he is doing and use his mouse and stuff. I know one called netbus or something. Its in the book hacking for dummies. They even put it on the cd you get with it. Swing by the library and borow it. I have to warn you, most virus detectors react to it.

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Originally posted here by Spyrus
I don't want to kill the guy gore.... ;) just piss him off a little bit. If I off him Ill have to go back to the how to remove blood from places thread and start studying.

Thats just too much work!!!

Instead I assigned him to cleaning the back room, thats almost worse than anything else. He started out thinking this was a month long project, i got someone to ride him so it got done in 2 days. it was actually rather comical.

The hard part about messing with his pc is he locks it almost 99% of the time when he walks away. If anyone knows anything fun I can do with just an admin share that will be twice the fun. I have access to his pc just not to his account(without resetting his password but he might figure that out)

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get to his registry remotely and add an entry on this registry key: HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run

create a string value to run any program you want ie, play a wav file. :D

Spyrus:

Any updates? Need any more ideas?

Oh how I wish I could get away with some of these ideas. (Without the killing or bodily injury of course). I have a similar problem within my department. This individual loves to gossip and cause trouble, so I stay away from her and the drama. Problem is, she now feels it is her responsibility and duty to ruin my career. A career that has been spotless with no problems for almost 20 years.

Problem is, if you say anything, you are deemed the trouble maker and it appears in your next review as being 'too emotional, needs to work on professionalism'. If you do anything to them (ie: lose documents, mess with computer, etc), you can be terminated for harassment.

My goodness...It sounds like I am in Junior High again! And the class bully is getting away with murder!

create a batch file with the shutdown command and put it in the startup folder. (its real easy to bypass and you will look real smart for fixing it in a matter of seconds when he might spend hours on it)

or you could move all/some of his *.cpl files to a folder out of the search path.

I did that in a call center I used to work in because they had 98 boxes and everyone used the same login and I got tired of people changing the color, screen resolution, etc... Had the admin stumped for days on that one... he felt stupid when he saw how simple it was to fix, but it did force them to upgrade to 2k.. so it was a win win situation

I had many people like that at a place i used to work at but shall remain nameless so you don't feel like ur taxdollars are going to waste ;)

Anyway, as their supervisor their work reflected upon me, and I'll be damned if I'm gonna look incompetent. I always talked to new people and gave them my own interview to find out what their strengths/weaknesses were and what their background was. I then used this information to setup several OJT scenarios. Yes, I was breaking things but it wasn't in a mean way. I told them upfront that everything I did was for training and I wouldn't give someone something that would be impossible for them to fix. If a person didn't know alot about basic things like what hardware needs to be present and functional for a computer to boot, then i'd do something small like dislodge a ram stick just enough to where it wasn't completely obvious but still failed post. Once they figured out all those beeps meant something, i'd have 'em google up a list of beep codes for that bios, etc.

There are many ways to OJT people up to speed and be productive without being a complete a-hole or making them feel stupid. If your boss thinks that he doesn't have to know a whole lot about basic stuff because all he does is answer the phone, then you need to explain to the boss in a way he can understand. Even if a person's only job is to answer the phone, he's still the face of whatever department he's answering calls for. And believe me, people aren't going to say "wow that guy on the phone is stupid", they're going to say "man those people at the help desk are retarded." Not to mention that the person answering the phone should be smashing small problems right then and there so little things like an unplugged CAT5 don't get passed to the techs, thereby lowering their workload.

Either way, there bottom line is, you need to sit down and talk with someone, him or your boss. Hope that helped...

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Try to get a remote desktop control program. You know what i mean, a program that lets you watch what he is doing and use his mouse and stuff.

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Fastpush VNC on the box remotely. Fastpush stealth installs VNC on there, just go to the directory you save fastpush to and type "fp82 <ip address> /user <domain\administrator> <admin password> /pw <desired VNC password>". More times than not it works. Then ejoy.

I have always had a paranoia that a boss would see me as "that" guy. Partly because evidently the guy I just replaced was one such worker.