"Help, He's Hurting Me!"

When I was a Junior attending college, I accepted a job as the Computer Lab "Help Desk". I liked working there as my boss and two other assistants were nuts and we constantly had fun playing jokes on each other and all the unsuspecting lab users.

After a year, my boss graduated and I was the senior Lab Tech and took over the supervision and training of the lab staff.... Well we got a new lab assistant, John, who was an Art major and knew nothing about computers. So along my best friend "Tif" and co-worker I started to train him to reset printers, get blonde air-heads disks out of the computer, and "how to logon to the VAX mainframe".

The cardinal sin in our lab was leaving your terminal with your account still logged on. With another coworker Sue, I decided to initiate John as one the "Lab Geeks". John left his account logged on at the helpdesk and we decided to have fun with him on his next shift at 9:00pm. We wrote some VAX command scripts to control his terminal and all the lab printers when he next logged on.....

That night Sue and I left him to his shift. He logged on and started our scripts..... His screen went black and then blinked "John I don't like you touching me!". When he typed any key (and he did) it stopped all the printers, which immediately got all the users attention. Then his terminal started madly beeping, and the printers started printed a page saying "Help he's hurting me!".

It only lasted about 2 minutes, and then the scripts quit and everything went back to normal. Except for poor John. We went back in 5 minutes later and the look on his face was priceless! He truly thought he made the computer mad! We started laughing, along with some of our computer friends who happened to be in the lab too. We told John that he was now an initiated "Computer Geek".... Last I heard he was still working in the lab after I graduated.

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