[asolove]

This part is so important:

> The adults in my life were largely not mad at me. They asked me to knock it off, but also made me a t-shirt. I don’t think I’d be doing what I do now without the encouragement that I received then.

Teena need a place to be moderately mischievous, with semi-real social outcomes, but also some boundaries and help to not take it too far.

And adults who aren’t authorities over them except insofar that they have cool talents the kids want to learn.

[Sohcahtoa82]

Back in 1999 while I was in high school, I played a goofy harmless prank on one of the school computers.

I created a 2-page slideshow presentation. Both of them had the same black background with grey text that appeared to be a DOS session indicating that Windows was deleted, except one had an underscore at the prompt. By telling the program to automatically advance the slides every second, and to loop the presentation, it gave the impression of a blinking cursor. It looked like a broken computer, but simply pressing Escape would get out of it.

Of course, it's worth mentioning that these were Macs, so they didn't even have DOS or Windows.

Anyways, a teacher saw it and thought I had hacked/broken the computer and sent me to the principal that didn't think it was funny and punished me by making me spend the second half of my lunch period with the school IT guy for the next 2 weeks so I could shadow him and see how much vandalism he has to deal with.

When I saw him the first time, he was like "Wait, what did you do?" and I recreated it. He thought it was funny as hell and thought it was ridiculous for them to act like I broke a computer.

We had a lot of fun hanging out. Even after my punishment was over, I still frequently went to his office to chat or walk around and fix computers.

[Klathmon]

I love that story, and that's actually such a fantastic punishment IMO (even if it was a bit unwarranted).

I did some similar harmless "hacking" in my high school that accidentally ended up crashing a major switch causing the whole schools network to die for the day. I told my programming class teacher right away, but unfortunately in my case the superintendent decided to press charges.

In the end all it taught me was to never never trust anyone, not exactly the best lesson for an already introverted teen to internalize...

[johnnyanmac]

Yeah, pretty sure I would have simply been suspended for pulling off the GP's prank. Maybe even expelled, but then parents would talk it down. Your event would definitely have me gone. Sorry your experience was like that.

[seattle_spring]

Heh. I made a Visual Basic 6 program that showed a static screenshot of the desktop. I did this because I only got a few hours in the evening to use the family computer, but if i ever got up to use the bathroom my dad would "play one game of bejeweled real quick" that would sometimes end up taking the entire evening.

When I tried using it, he lost his fucking shit and went berserk.

At least it taught me how to be a better parent

[ddingus]

Yes! That IT guy got you. So many of us, myself included, can trace our love of computing and free spirits to people like your IT guy.

Remember kids. It will be your turn to free a young soul one day, and you should give same as you once received.

And having already a turn or two myself, I can report it feels great!

[eythian]

Yes, I had a similar experience in high school. I ended up modifying a virus that infected a bunch of computers and causing problems, so I got kicked out the lab until the next year (but this was late September, so no biggie.)

The next year I mentioned to the teacher that I had something I wanted to play with, can I please get access to a PC (the lab computers were Acorns), and so he gave me after school access to the accounting classroom, more storage on the network drive (50MB when everyone else had 5!), and basically free reign if I didn't break things. So I didn't, and was running Tierra on piles of machines overnight, just to see it doing cool things, and getting in in the morning to save everything and reboot them. It certainly set me up well for the future.

And didn't break things, because I didn't want to kill the golden goose!

[jszymborski]

Our high-school had an intro to programming class which taught folks how to use VB6 in a computer lab. It was exceptionally self-driven and gave me a lot of rope to do whatever I wanted.

The PCs in the lab were very slow, and a known prank (taught to everybody at some point by virtue of being a victim) was to hold Win+E, spawning hundreds of Explorer windows and bringing the PC to its knees. Sometimes you could wait it out, but a stealthy pranker could hold it so long a restart was required.

Well, I created a little VB6 programme named "DoraTheExplorer.exe" which would do exactly that when you clicked on it. I put that on the schools shared drive (where you could sometimes find portable executables of the original Halo game until the admin found and deleted it).

My prank was successful for a short while until, however, it became quickly evaded by folks just hitting Alt+F4 quickly and exiting the Dora Programme.

I then discovered you could get the programme to launch another instance of itself on exit, but this was also countered by spamming Alt+F4 rapidly.

Finally, I hit my magnum opus. A hydra. Everytime you'd close dora.exe, it'd open two more. It was an ICBM in the Explorer prank wars and defeat was declared.

The admin knew about this the whole time, and they were generally chill. They made it clear that if anyone lost work or if it caused harm, then I'd be held responsible. But that never happened because everyone knew what dora.exe did, I was too proud not to tell folks :P People only clicked on dora.exe for the dumb pleasure of crashing their PCs and trying to see if they could evade it.

Very grateful for that class and the generally chill environment I was in.

[bjackman]

I did almost exactly the same thing at my school (brought down the system with a VB6 script that wrote infinite text files to networked storage). They sent my mum a letter accusing me of terrorism.

At the time I thought I was pretty ridiculous and unfair (lucky my mum agreed), but now looking back with adult eyes I also see it as an almost criminal level of disregard for the job of raising children. Just absolutely irredeemably small-minded, truly pathetic, it makes me so angry to think that there are still young people growing up in that environment and being taught by those people.

[diggan]

People are afraid of what they don't understand - Someone, at one point

The adults in that situation didn't understand the full (or rather, how small) scope of what happened, so for them it looks wildly different than to you or me. To them, computers are black boxes that are not to fuck with, and the ones who do, are only out after destruction and ruining things. That's why they react like they do.

Not to excuse the behavior, they should of course have talked with people who understand what happened before trying to address it, but lack of resources, knowledgeable people and understanding often leads to being able to.

Similarly, I at one point (before I'd consider myself a programmer) worked as a customer support agent contracted out to a popular fruit technology company, saw efficiencies in how things were done manually and hacked together a browser extension. At first just me and my colleague next to me was using it. Eventually, it spread and eventually management found out.

Instead of trying to elevate the processes and seeing that things could be better, they decided to eventually get rid of me, too risky they said.

[mauvehaus]

I wasn't screwing around with the network in high school, but got called in to the principal's office to answer some uncomfortable questions because (and I swear on my life I am not making this up) I knew how to change the desktop background on my account. This apparently made them suspicious of me. Simpler times, I know.

It was an early lesson in the fact that there are a lot of people doing IT in schools who, frankly, suck at their job. Most of the good IT people are getting paid way more elsewhere. The crappy ones are working in an environment where easily 1 in 50 of the students know more than they do and some of them feel threatened and lash out when someone is outing them for being lousy at their job, intentionally or otherwise. Like you did (disk quotas much?). Like they suspected me of.

Fixing the structural problem would require paying IT people in schools a rate that more closely matches what they'd make in industry. Fixing the social problem would require hiring people who understand what you and the author figured out: that nurturing people and directing their impulses productively yields better long-term outcomes for everyone.

[seattle_spring]

Yup, absolute insanity. My good friend was expelled because he used "net send" while our teacher was giving a presentation. Wasn't even anything vulgar.

[jszymborski]

The first time I heard a Chuck Norris joke was via "net send" in a high school computer lab.

[metadat]

This is very sweet, and I'm sure I'd have responded infinitely better to this than what I received growing up..