u/_keyboard-bastard_

I once worked as the IT guy for an HR company where the founder and president became convinced that the sales call center was wasting too much time on the internet.

These were already the lowest-paid people in the company, but apparently the solution to that problem was finding reasons to pay them even less.

In order not to single out any one department, he wanted browser history reporting on everyone in the company so managers and HR could review it during weekly performance meetings.

So I complied.

I wrote a scheduled task that scraped browser history from every Windows machine on the company domain, stored it centrally, and fed it into a management portal along with the employees information.

The first reports came in.

The call center employees were... surprisingly boring.

Sure, there was Facebook, YouTube, Amazon, and the occasional person apparently conducting extensive research into things that definitely weren't part of their job.

But overall, they were pretty tame.

Then HR started looking at everyone else's reports.

That's when things got interesting.

The browsing history of the founder, owner, and president was absolutely spectacular.

So much porn. Like, this man has a sickness level.

And while I wasn't particularly surprised, I had worked on his home computer before and already knew about his rather enthusiastic browsing habits, I had never expected to see it neatly categorized in the same productivity dashboard he'd demanded for his employees.

A few days later, HR asked me if I could exclude certain people from the reports.

I asked who.

They gave me a list.

The president was at the top.

Funny how quickly the company's commitment to objective productivity metrics disappeared when the metrics became objective.

I was a System Administrator at a company and the domain admin, meaning I could manage user profiles and startup scripts.

One of the directors asked me to do something I absolutely wasn't comfortable with: alter invoices after they were generated so clients would be billed for work that wasn't actually performed. The extra money helped make his department look more profitable. He knew I was one of two people in the company with access to Photoshop, and assumed I was morally bent in his favor. I was not.

I refused. I told my boss, and when my boss did nothing, I put in my notice.

A few weeks later, I was already in my final two weeks with the company, and he pushed again to alter a bunch of invoices this time claiming it was an approved thing from accounting. I refused again, but this time I also decided he could experience a small "IT mystery."

I wrote a simple batch script that randomly rebooted a computer between 5-10 minutes after startup and added it to his profile's startup script through Active Directory.

He knew I had access to everyone's machines, but he assumed it was a hardware issue because they were experiencing them for a full year across his department.

After about five random reboots, he called me into his office to fix it.

The director went to lunch and I sat down at his computer, stared at the screen, and began my extremely advanced troubleshooting process:

I ate the Skittles from the jar on his desk for around five minutes.

I told him I'd keep an eye on it.

He never figured it out.

The funniest part is that my own IT manager had no idea what startup scripts were, so a file named something boring like cmosupdates.bat was enough to fly under the radar.

I left the company.

A week later, this old director started contacting me demanding I finish a project I had "committed to", unpaid. It was something my replacement couldn't handle.

I ignored the messages, blocked his number, and moved on.

perpetualrebootinsanity.bat lives on in legend now.

A few years ago I was working remotely as a fancy IT guy and developer at a tech company. Within the first couple of months I'd automated so much of my workload that I legit had almost nothing left to do most days. Everything that could be scripted, monitored, or scheduled... was.

One morning my manager messaged me:

>"We've noticed your Microsoft Teams keeps going to Away every 20 minutes. This shouldn't be happening if you are at your desk working."

Fair enough.

I replied:

>"Understood. My Teams will never go Away again."

...and I meant it.

Instead of arguing, I spent about 40 minutes writing a PowerShell script that launched a harmless train of processes every few minutes, like mouse clicking, alt+tabbing, and it simulated just enough activity to keep my status green. I set this to repeat every 10 minutes.

I tested it.

Available.

Five minutes later...

Still Available.

An hour later...

Still Available.

I grabbed my backpack, walked out of Starbucks, and spent the rest of the afternoon, and every afternoon thereafter hiking.

My Teams status never went Away again.

The next time I heard from my boss he was once again reviewing status times and thanked me for my dedication.

Edit: People keep asking for a copy of the script. It's on one of my githubs, the link is in the comments.

Quick background, I've been an application developer for 20 years. I have over a 1000 followers on LinkedIn and a good handful of those are former colleagues. I've had a profile on the platform since it was about a year old. It used to be a very valuable resource to network, and the job boards were actually the best in the before-times. This doesn't seem to be the case anymore..

Now a days, I think our profiles are actually counter productive, and might be hurting some of us. You can't tailor your LinkedIn profile every time you apply for a new job like you can a resume directing it towards a specific position. Especially not when you are sending out 200 resumes every couple weeks.

The job boards are now garbage. The feed is just full of career 'influencers' that add no real value or information to a job hunt. There are even unemployed 'influencers' somehow now that even though they don't have a job, they're still trying to tell you what to do to get a job.. That last one has been my wtf is happening moment..

So what do you think? I don't bother with the jobs boards anymore. I can find open positions with AI web scraping and apply directly on company websites more efficiently than sorting through LinkedIn garbage. The only thing that is stopping me right now from doing this, is that on about half the applications I fill out on company websites, they ask what your LinkedIn URL is.. On the last few applications I put my github address in that field. Probably won't hear back from those companies.

I wanted to share my AVN story because reading other people's experiences helps me make sense of my own.

I'm 39 years old and two years ago I was bitten by a spider which led to a massive soft tissue infection. I spent over a month in the hospital on IV steroids, followed by an entire summer on oral steroids.

About seven months after the steroids, I started developing hip pain. It was initially blamed on my back (my spine is heavily damaged), and I didn't learn I had avascular necrosis until my left hip had already partially collapsed. Thankfully a curious doctor finally ordered X-rays of my hips and pelvis which is how things were initially revealed. By that point, the AVN was also affecting my other hip and both knees.

I was put in a wheelchair until orthopedic could come up with a plan to get everything replaced, but first they had to make sure I wasn't dying of cancer or a rare blood disease ensuring the steroids really were the cause.

Over the last eight months I've had four major surgeries, including both hips being replaced. In total, I've spent 126 days in the hospital over the past two years. It's been a life-changing experience, but thankfully the surgeries were successful and I'm starting to walk again.

I'm curious if anyone else here developed AVN after prolonged high-dose steroids following a severe infection or another medical emergency. How long was it between the steroids and your first symptoms, and has anyone else had it spread beyond their hips and knees?