Techie 'forgot' to tell boss their cost-saving idea meant a day of gaming

One keypress turned a tricky Windows NT balancing act into a life of leisure

Who, Me? After a weekend of R&R, The Register welcomes you back to the working week with a new installment of Who, Me? It's the reader-contributed column in which you confess to workplace errors and indiscretions and reveal how you survived to tell the tale.

This week, meet a reader we'll Regomize as "Hannah" who told us about a job she had in the early 2000s at a workplace that mostly used PCs but still relied on thin clients to access some Windows NT workloads.

The thin clients were an anachronism, but not a problem unless the system image on their internal storage became corrupt.

This happened often enough that Hannah's employer kept a few spare thin clients handy. Once that cache of kit ran low, the company would send dead devices to an external service provider who reimaged them for £600 apiece and took six weeks to do the job.

"It was a balancing act," Hannah explained. "We would send them out when stocks of working thin clients were low, but not so low we thought we'd run out before the turnaround was finished."

Hannah decided she could do better.

"I was young, and naive, and 20-ish," she told Who, Me? "And I had also fit a tower PC into my car to play MP3s, so I thought I would tackle the thin client problem using the little I knew."

Over the next couple of weeks, Hannah made good progress.

"I figured out how to boot the units from floppy to DOS, and reflash the units over a serial interface," she wrote. "But there was one problem: flashing the thin clients took around three hours, and after two hours the software would prompt for a keypress or the process would fail."

If someone pressed that key, the thin client would emerge with a fresh and functional system image.

"I explained this to my boss but might have 'accidentally' forgotten to mention that I didn't need to be present after the single key press," Hannah confessed to Who, Me?

Her boss did some mental arithmetic and concluded that even if Hannah spent a day each week doing nothing but watching thin clients reinstall a system image, the company would still save money and time compared to the cost of outsourcing repairs.

Hannah then asked if she could bring something to work to keep herself amused while overseeing this process, and the boss approved of that plan.

That "something" turned out to be the new Nintendo GameCube Hannah had recently acquired.

"So almost every week I'd pick up a new game and spend all day playing it at work, with management's blessing," she admitted. "And all because that single key press was worth £600 to the company."

Have you found a way to work without really working? If so, make the effort to click here to send email to Who, Me? If we like your story, we'll rouse ourselves for long enough to tell it. ®