At one building, friends and I rigged every machine to have hidden copies of Alien vs Predator and Everquest. I modified the system software to intercept keystrokes before they got to the game. One command crashed video, audio, and then whole system. I also set others to randomly crash around same time people walked in to supervise what was going on. Friends and I griped our machines were down about every day. Person in charge ordered us to keep using them and get no replacements because that served wiseasses like us.

Oh, yes it did. Served us well. (evil grin)

Note: Also embedded web browser into our business application in development-mode only. The GUI forms and such. Policy had IE locked down but embedded browser still worked lol. So, fast coders got the job done quickly then were bullshitting around on Internet till someone approached. One key stroke and back to boring UI testing. ;)

Since I alternate between developer and system admin jobs[1], you message hits me both as "Righteous" and "Dammit you $^%& developer". I am so conflicted.

1) welcome to the wonderful and horrible world of a journeyman in the middle

I try to stay in those grey areas where people sort of want to stop me but find my antics too useful or entertaining. :) Far as that setup, sysadmin was a pal of mine who hated the unreliable crap he had to manage. He had already made sure all the work sync'd to their Novell network's central storage. I also told people to make CD backups with the CD burners on the machines. With my help, people just lost time here and there with him not having to do any extra work.

So, sysadmin was thanking me for helping him deal with machines that were inexplicably always crashing "because Acer machines are garbage." You feel more or less conflicted now? :P

Sadly, these days, the Acer machines are the least problematic of the machines (looking at you H "100 hard drive failures out of 120 machines" P) I have to deal with.

[edit] I feel about the same, as a system admin, I get bit in the /\$$ way too often by good intentions. I hear they pave a road with them (I think I worked there).