But, there's this one story that I think is kinda funny, and I want it written down somewhere where I can share it. And I think now is the right time to share it. I've had a shift in my career track (more like a serpentine), and a renewed friendship with a fellow IT professional has kind of re-ignited my passion for IT.
Background
I used to work for a managed service provider with customers from different industries and of all different sizes and with different service agreements. I quickly rose through the ranks to being in charge of the tech support staff.
One of our larger sized clients was a vocational high school. And every summer, they had a two week "summer camp" where parents would spend big bucks to have their elementary school or middle school aged students take some classes on animation or engineering or whatever. And evidently some people at that client were not happy about how things went down as far as my company was concerned. So I got involved with helping the person running that account figure out what to do differently the next time around.
A few months later, due to staffing issues, I end up taking over that account in addition to everything else that I was doing, and it became evident that there really wasn't anything that we had done wrong - there were some personal vendettas against my company. Okay. Whatever. I'll do the best job that I can, and at the same time, try and make the experience as enjoyable as possible. And because we were all aware that this was happening, we made sure that we had extra people on hand to put out any fires, or alleged fires, that might come up.
One such sore topic was bandwidth. We had a 100mbps upload and download speed, and some how, with a fraction of the building in use, this was allegedly entirely used up at one point, making all of the computers "useless". Yeah sure, that's totally believable.
Act One
Never the less, we were pretty sensitive to bandwidth issues. So, when we started getting a bandwidth alert, and looked at the giant line graph on the big screen on the wall, and saw it creeping up towards 100%, we let out a collective "Oh shit!"
I tracked it down to a specific IP address, which correlated to a specific VLAN, which correlated to a specific classroom. I also looked up the reverse DNS to get the hostname, which not only indicated the classroom, but the specific computer. I used PSEXEC and NirCmd to print a screenshot of the screen to show that it was not school related stuff on the screen.
Now, you might be asking yourself "What are you gonna do with that information, Tony? Are you gonna bust in there all 'New sheriff In Town' style and kick that kid out of summer camp?" No! Of course not! The year prior, it was made clear, in no uncertain terms, that the last thing that we could have happen was parents asking for refunds. My plan was to go in there, quietly get the teacher's attention, explain that a particular student was doing something that wasn't part of the lesson plan, and that this was making it difficult for other classes and the front office to get any work done. I was going to politely ask her to ask him to stay on task.
I had previously worked in some quasi-rent-a-cop-armed-guard capacities in the past, and I kinda feel like that helped me to really hone my ability to know when you want to handle things with subtlety instead of force.
And that's what I did. Except....
The problem was that I didn't realize that two of my co-workers were following me because they were pissed! So, if you don't know, then, like now, I am a six foot tall 300 pound gorilla looking guy, and one of the two co-workers that was following me makes me look small. So when the three of us busted in there, the student in question turned around with a look on his face like "OH SHIT! I'M BUSTED!" He was in pure panic. I felt bad. But it was kinda funny too.
Still, I didn't want this to be a big deal, so I politely interrupted the instructor, and just kindly asked her to ask him to stay on task so that it doesn't interfere with literally everyone else in the building.
Now, as soon as I walked in the room, without even having to confirm "yep, this says workstation number six, and that's the first computer in the sixth row", I knew that was the student, because no one else turned around with a case of the oh-shits. But the two guys behind me started counting. Pointing, and counting. This really threw that kid into a tizzy. He looked at the screen of the student next to him, and decided "Well, I had better just copy whatever he's doing", so he opens up Microsoft Paint and starts drawing what the kid next to him had drawn.
Microsoft Paint wasn't a part of the lesson plan. Kid just copied off of the one person in the class that he didn't want to copy off of.
That was pretty much the end of it that summer. After the camps ended, there was the standard "de-briefing", where some things were blamed on us that had nothing to do with IT and then let go, and some things that were IT related were blamed on us, but once the powers that be realized that those things weren't our fault, and we actually fixed those things, making everything better, that was let go too. And finally, one teacher had complained that three of us had burst into her classroom and alleged that one student was wrecking the entire internet connection for the school.
"Is that true, Tony?" asked the
"Yes." I replied flatly. "Although I wouldn't say that I had 'burst' into the classroom. That would be rude."
Act Two
A year goes by. I'm a little older. A little wiser. A little fatter. A whole lot cockier.
Summer camps... bandwidth issue. Son of a gun.
I'm working with extra manpower again, but it's a different group of guys. Actually, it was two of our top guys that we had at the time backing me up, because summer camps are really important to that customer.
Same thing happens. Once computer is sucking up all (or at least a lot of) the bandwidth. Some little smarty pants got around the filtering (it wasn't Area 51 style web security - the customer didn't allow us to be really strict), and was playing a bandwidth intensive game.
"Should we go tell the teacher? Get the kid kicked out?" "Should we disable his Internet access?" "Should we lock his workstation?"
All good ideas, but I had something better in mind. Those solutions were all fighting the enemy head on. I didn't like that. I had just finished reading Sun Tzu's The Art of War for like the third time, and I wanted to re-direct my enemy's momentum into a direction that would be beneficial to me. And thanks to Intro to Human Psychology like a decade ago, I knew that all I had to do was disincentivise playing that game.
This classroom happened to be one that had security cameras installed (there were some areas with, and some without. They weren't hidden or anything like that. They were mostly used for when kids got into fights and stuff like that). So, I told my cohorts to gather 'round my desk. I pulled up the security camera, which was to this students back, to see what was on the screen. It was a little blurry, and I wanted a better view, but if I used the remote-support app we had in the district, it would pop-up all kinds of windows. This would alert the student to our watching, and perhaps lead into a cat-and-mouse conflict. I didn't want conflict, though, remember? Instead of stopping the student from goofing off, I wanted to convince the student to not want to goof off.
So, naturally, I opened up PDQ-Deploy, and sent a pre-packaged silent self-installer to install a VNC server (PLEASE NOTE: VNC BAD! I rarely use VNC, and when I do, the service only exists on a machine for as long as I'm using it, and the connection is restricted by password, and to only specified IP addresses - not full proof, but probably in some ways safer than that fancy remote-support app you shelled out big bucks for).
Now I could see everything on this student's screen, as well as the classroom itself. The bandwidth intensive game was being run in Microsoft Edge. Okay, now we are getting somewhere!
I open up command prompt and here's was I typed:
psexec \\computername12345 taskkill /f /im edge.exe
And then I hit enter. A moment later, the student's screen no longer had a game on it, but the coursework. And, lo and behold, bandwidth returned to normal. All was right with the world. Except, now, the student opened up Edge again. He went to the website. He signed in. He selected the game. He hit start. Some graphics loaded. He skipped a cut-scene, and as he and some other students leaned in closer, a progress bar appeared, numbers in blood red below it growing from 0% upwards. The air in that section of classroom was vibrating with excitement. It's almost ready! Here we go!...
As soon as it reached 100%, I pressed the up arrow on my keyboard, and then the enter key. Three students flopped back in their chairs as Microsoft Edge crashed. Again.
This happened at least two more times.
So, student wants to play bandwidth intensive game. This game is fun. That makes the student feel good. The student wants to show off his skills in front of the other students. That makes the student feel good as well. Now, using classical conditioning, I've modified that person's behavior. Student loads game. Game Fails. Other students doubt whether the first student was able to get it to run in the first-place, and therefor question the first student's claims at being good at the game. This makes that student feel bad. Loading Microsoft Edge to play that game makes the student feel bad. Student no longer wants to play the game.
It took me all of five or ten minutes, I didn't have to get out of my seat, no teacher can complain about the class being disrupted, and what's the student gonna do? File a complaint because the computer wouldn't let him goof off? The computer wouldn't let him waste his parent's money?
I got some high fives that day. And when you're a nerd like me, high fives are fucking awesome.
