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Long lurker, first real post - and in accordance with how long I've lurked, my first is a looooong one.
Long ago I worked on a university campus with ten on-campus computer labs. Since it was a liberal-arts state-run university, a lot of our neighboring state's undergrads came up for their four-year tour of what could charitably be called "the pot central university". Ironically enough a great many of these jackasses would be rolling down the road, smoking long spliffs of local green and talking about how simple living and ecological returns to the earth were good things - in fucking Range Rovers. There is nothing that to this day inspires more rage in me than seeing a "Save the Planet" sticker on a British SUV with a whiteboy dreadlock monkey piloting it singing out of key Bob Marley songs. It's more common than you'd think.
But I digress slightly in my background. I was the on-duty tech at the computer lab because I could slap the PCs and Macs around enough to make them hobble along a bit more before I had to hurl them to the refuse heap of computer recycling. Stripping Macs to their casing and putting PC guts in them was also kind of fun - of course, this being before the idea of cross-platform development came about.
We also fooled around with the Unix servers - the print queues ran on Unix, and I cobbled some expediter software together out of other chunks lying around. And since the Intarwebs had JUST crossed into the realm where you could have a cable modem running 24/7, the university also had an Information Science degree.
They also had a Master's Program in Information Science, but to the best of my knowledge, nobody knew of more than one guy who was actually a grad student in Information Science, primarily because the guys who actually understood the discipline were coming to the degree after a career that needed them to do things with long lines of code.
Except Wally.
Wally was a perpetual grad student whose wardrobe consisted, primarily, of a long black trenchcoat, light blue sweatpants with holes in the crotch, old Nikes, mismatched socks, and a sweatshirt with the logo of the university on it. Long, stringy, greasy unwashed hair, thick glasses, and a wafting smell of uncooked bacon. Wally was nigh-on legend in the services department. It was not uncommon for Wally to fall asleep in the library, then submit a three hundred book reserve list at exactly 10:45 PM before the library closed - which he would stand in front of the librarian until every single book on his list was entered. He carried a duffel bag everywhere and while the clothes he wore were rotated, the style was never the same. Wally had been attending grad school for six years and switched departments every other term.
Wally was also the son of an extraordinarily wealthy man who paid for a house and food and rent and general expenditures as long as Wally was attending school. Most everyone knew this because when Wally didn't get his way from the staff or student services group, he would remind them of how much his father made and donated to the school. He'd also threaten to sue.
So Wally added IS to his block of grad school, but refused to own a computer, insisting on learning only the theory, which would have served him immensely well had he not possessed the average learning ability of a cantalope. Instead, Wally camped out in the middle of my computer lab night after night, playing video games and surfing porn
Which is what we did, but we got paid for it, and we actually usually did our homework behind the desk as well.
I should mention another incident in the Wally pantheon - Wally loved to hire people to do his work for him. No contracts. He would hire "tutors" who eventually gave up and just did the damn work for him through undergrad or quit when they realized Wally used it as an excuse to cop feels (female), or just quit, period. Wally had money and entitlement issues to burn, which led him to asking me to do his latest IS 504 homework one night.
"Sorry, that's against school policy."
"It's your job," Wally kept saying, with his glasses shoved up on his face. "You're supposed to help me."
"I'm not paid to do your homework for you. I can help with technical issues."
"This is technical."
"I'm not doing your homework for you."
"I want to talk to your boss."
"Sure. You want to talk to my boss? She's on family leave right now. Which means I'm my boss right now."
"Give me her number."
"Wally, I'm not giving you the number of a female staff member who's on family leave."
"What could be more important than taking care of your graduate students?"
"Giving birth."
"Hundreds of years ago women gave birth in the fields and worked alongside their men. What's the big fucking problem?*"
and so on and so forth. He eventually got the hint and sat down at his favorite station in the corner to watch esoteric Japanese porn - the one he turned the monitor at a 45 degree angle to watch so the person next to him couldn't see it without remembering that the windows behind him that opened onto a courtyard were wide open.
Which brings us to another incident...
Wally developed a crush on "Mary", one of my student employees - and one day refused to get any computer that hadn't been first blessed by her - IE, she handed him the card that said he sat at that computer. It got steadily creepier and creepier until finally one day she saw him coming in and hid in my office behind the door. He stood at the desk for fifteen minutes until he finally grabbed a computer and stormed off. A quick perusal of the usage logs revealed a prediliction for animal porn and very young girls - both illegal but also useful ammunition for Mary to remind him, loudly, that it's not okay for people to look at porn when other people are waiting for computers to do their research papers. Wally screamed that it was an invasion of privacy; four women screamed right back that he was an oppressor pig (it was that kind of university). Calloo, callay, etc.
After that, Wally got stupid. I'd say he got mean, but he wasn't smart enough for that, and it became a cat and mouse game between him and my crew - I more or less looked the other way because the guy was a sleaze, and they attacked because he kept getting away everywhere else with his complete abuse of the staff.
One day, after the "I can't do your homework for you" incident, Wally grabbed a card and sat down at a computer, ignoring five people in line. At this point we learned to ignore him, but we'd also just happened to finish the new Cat-5 closet for the entire building.
So we waited. Apparently Wally was on a very, very big project. His tongue stuck out and he went through bag after bag of Funyuns and bottle after bottle of YooHoo. Meandering by his desk, a miracle had occurred - Wally had written actual CODE. And a lot of it. And a LOT of documentation on it.
And then the power went out. And we learned another thing about Wally - he didn't use disks or backups or saves or FTP backups. This was in the age of actual 3.5 floppies and Wally had just written out his entire thesis for a project - all twenty pages of it.
Sure enough, here comes Wally, bounding up to the front of the desk, frothing that his computer wasn't working - the other two people in the lab he was in meandering off, having saved every five minutes and heading home.
"MY COMPUTER ISN'T WORKING!"
"Well, no shit, Wally, the power's out."
"My project is due TOMORROW!"
"Yeah, we know. Did you save?"
"What the fuck are you talking about? Just get the computers back up!"
And just like that, the power restores. Wally goes back to his computer and shrieks.
"All my work is gone!"
"Did you save it?"
"Yes I fucking saved it!"
"What did you save it to?"
"I saved it on the drive! Where the fuck would I have saved it, fuckhead?"
And so we peered at the place where Wally was doing his coding and his documentation - no document, no code. The code was in an xterminal, and the documentation was in unsaved Microsoft Word.
Froth, scream, threaten, anger.
I did the explaining that the reason we put signs all around that said things like "Save early, save often" and "Floppies for free at desk, please ask" and "Remember to back up your work" and "Frequent power outages have been occurring this week due to renovation, please be forewarned" was that all of these things were indeed true.
So Wally, after a threat of graduate student power over staff, lawsuits, dad's donation cessation, etc, heads back to snarly work. Only this time, he's got a disk.
I can't help myself sometimes, though. I carefully slid the plastic square that locked the disk from being written to "open" when I handed him the disk from our spares pile. Wally triumphantly hit "Control-S" on his machine every twenty seconds. Sure enough, he's looking relaxed when all goes dark and all the computers crap themselves, simultaneously.
This time, Wally is all prepped and saved, though. And he stands up and says, "I believe I will go to a lab which is less dangerous. Some of us have papers to write, you know." Gathers his stuff, and walks out.
Wally is actually smirking at me with the "Oh you thought you were so damn clever" look on his face as he walks out. I look back into my office to the circuit breaker to see Mary giggling and turning red-faced while trying to breathe, her hand still on the switch.
I waited until Wally had left, then closed that door to talk to Mary about her attitude. In a way, Wally had made sure there was an ample supply of condoms in my desk drawer for the next six months. You just can't not think that kind of girl is hot.
Fortunately for us, Wally was a slow learner. The disconnecting of his machines via Cat-5 right at the crucial moment of code compiling, the reversal of all the scripts on his machines, the popup banner ads that overwhelmed him on single clicks - Wally took this all in due course, not realizing that the lab staff were happily tormenting him to incentivise him to get. the. fuck. out.
But the saga of Wally was not quite over.
One day Wally reduced my newest kid to tears - a newly out boy with a very sensitive side but brilliant and talented and sweet. Nick, my gay boy, was still terrified of Wally - but absolutely a brilliant computer science nerd who built gay porn sites for a local hub in his spare time. And this should be noted now about Wally.
Wally was homophobic to the extreme. He'd write letters to the editor of the student paper condemning gays and lesbians. And if he was actually intelligent about his discourse, it'd have been okay. But he used language more ineptly than a ketamined rugby player. His papers, printed multiple times on our printers, ran into the five-page run-on-sentence category, eschewing such modern contrivances as dictionaries, actual research, or the F7 key. His Biblical quotations often exhorted people to shear sheep in the winter rather than to condemn homosexuals.
But hey, three hundred pictures of chicks getting shagged by a mule from alt.pictures.beastiality was a-okay. We knew this because Wally had left a zip drive chock full of his favorite fap material in a machine, then returned for it, redfaced and screaming that it was his PERSONAL research. Mary, ever the comedienne, made a donkey noise from the other side of the room. Wally left, I got Mary in the office to talk about her attitude. Calloo, callay, etc.
My boss was visiting the lab when Wally came in, stormed up to Nick, and demanded his help with his homework. Nick tried the line I had, but Wally, seeing his chance to play the bully card, brow-beat Nick into coming with him to work on his homework.
I told my boss about the trevails of Wally, and she happily divulged four of her own regarding him. Four minutes later, Nick carefully, timidly knocked on my door and said, "He told me it's my job to build him a website. He has a project due tomorrow with requirements. I told him we can't do it, it's against educational policies, but he won't listen and now he thinks I'm going to stay late to help him."
My boss and I exchanged a look. "What's the project?" I asked.
"He has to build a website." Nick said.
I smiled. "Tell him you can't take his money, but that you will build a website. All he might have to do is upload all the code via FTP tomorrow on a disk that MIGHT be under the mat outside the lab."
"But..."
"Just do it."
The next day Nick was working in the back when Wally came screaming and threatening into the lab while my boss and the dean of the IS department were reviewing the lab acceptable use policies - followed by two campus security cops.
What Wally hadn't actually done was look at the code, the JPGs, the pages, or the text of the website. He had done exactly what Nick had told him to do - upload the content of a disk left outside under the mat, and uploaded an incredibly edge-out gay porn site, replete with animated gifs.
And the university's academic code not only frowns upon plagarism, but it most certainly frowns upon plagarism of web sites that are sexually graphic in nature and/or offensive in the extreme.
The fact that Wally had uploaded, lovingly, and carefully, a gay Nazi fetish porn site that advocated midget sex to his graduate school account was definitely not his instructor's idea of a funny joke.
Nor was it the dean's, who heard Wally's story firsthand ten feet behind Wally.
But my boss had a beatific smile, I could hear howls of laughter from Nick in my office, and Mary, in a summer dress on the other side of the lab, was giving me some serious come-hither-and-fix-this-computer-now looks.
After it was all over, Wally had been arrested for physically striking the dean (with his diskette, which was so bent from his sweaty wringing of his hands that no real information could be extracted by our systems techs), my boss had to take the rest of the day off, and I was called into my office by Mary to talk about my attitude.
We got our share of stressed-out assholes after that, but nobody could compare to Wally.
*actual quote. He was serious.
Long ago I worked on a university campus with ten on-campus computer labs. Since it was a liberal-arts state-run university, a lot of our neighboring state's undergrads came up for their four-year tour of what could charitably be called "the pot central university". Ironically enough a great many of these jackasses would be rolling down the road, smoking long spliffs of local green and talking about how simple living and ecological returns to the earth were good things - in fucking Range Rovers. There is nothing that to this day inspires more rage in me than seeing a "Save the Planet" sticker on a British SUV with a whiteboy dreadlock monkey piloting it singing out of key Bob Marley songs. It's more common than you'd think.
But I digress slightly in my background. I was the on-duty tech at the computer lab because I could slap the PCs and Macs around enough to make them hobble along a bit more before I had to hurl them to the refuse heap of computer recycling. Stripping Macs to their casing and putting PC guts in them was also kind of fun - of course, this being before the idea of cross-platform development came about.
We also fooled around with the Unix servers - the print queues ran on Unix, and I cobbled some expediter software together out of other chunks lying around. And since the Intarwebs had JUST crossed into the realm where you could have a cable modem running 24/7, the university also had an Information Science degree.
They also had a Master's Program in Information Science, but to the best of my knowledge, nobody knew of more than one guy who was actually a grad student in Information Science, primarily because the guys who actually understood the discipline were coming to the degree after a career that needed them to do things with long lines of code.
Except Wally.
Wally was a perpetual grad student whose wardrobe consisted, primarily, of a long black trenchcoat, light blue sweatpants with holes in the crotch, old Nikes, mismatched socks, and a sweatshirt with the logo of the university on it. Long, stringy, greasy unwashed hair, thick glasses, and a wafting smell of uncooked bacon. Wally was nigh-on legend in the services department. It was not uncommon for Wally to fall asleep in the library, then submit a three hundred book reserve list at exactly 10:45 PM before the library closed - which he would stand in front of the librarian until every single book on his list was entered. He carried a duffel bag everywhere and while the clothes he wore were rotated, the style was never the same. Wally had been attending grad school for six years and switched departments every other term.
Wally was also the son of an extraordinarily wealthy man who paid for a house and food and rent and general expenditures as long as Wally was attending school. Most everyone knew this because when Wally didn't get his way from the staff or student services group, he would remind them of how much his father made and donated to the school. He'd also threaten to sue.
So Wally added IS to his block of grad school, but refused to own a computer, insisting on learning only the theory, which would have served him immensely well had he not possessed the average learning ability of a cantalope. Instead, Wally camped out in the middle of my computer lab night after night, playing video games and surfing porn
Which is what we did, but we got paid for it, and we actually usually did our homework behind the desk as well.
I should mention another incident in the Wally pantheon - Wally loved to hire people to do his work for him. No contracts. He would hire "tutors" who eventually gave up and just did the damn work for him through undergrad or quit when they realized Wally used it as an excuse to cop feels (female), or just quit, period. Wally had money and entitlement issues to burn, which led him to asking me to do his latest IS 504 homework one night.
"Sorry, that's against school policy."
"It's your job," Wally kept saying, with his glasses shoved up on his face. "You're supposed to help me."
"I'm not paid to do your homework for you. I can help with technical issues."
"This is technical."
"I'm not doing your homework for you."
"I want to talk to your boss."
"Sure. You want to talk to my boss? She's on family leave right now. Which means I'm my boss right now."
"Give me her number."
"Wally, I'm not giving you the number of a female staff member who's on family leave."
"What could be more important than taking care of your graduate students?"
"Giving birth."
"Hundreds of years ago women gave birth in the fields and worked alongside their men. What's the big fucking problem?*"
and so on and so forth. He eventually got the hint and sat down at his favorite station in the corner to watch esoteric Japanese porn - the one he turned the monitor at a 45 degree angle to watch so the person next to him couldn't see it without remembering that the windows behind him that opened onto a courtyard were wide open.
Which brings us to another incident...
Wally developed a crush on "Mary", one of my student employees - and one day refused to get any computer that hadn't been first blessed by her - IE, she handed him the card that said he sat at that computer. It got steadily creepier and creepier until finally one day she saw him coming in and hid in my office behind the door. He stood at the desk for fifteen minutes until he finally grabbed a computer and stormed off. A quick perusal of the usage logs revealed a prediliction for animal porn and very young girls - both illegal but also useful ammunition for Mary to remind him, loudly, that it's not okay for people to look at porn when other people are waiting for computers to do their research papers. Wally screamed that it was an invasion of privacy; four women screamed right back that he was an oppressor pig (it was that kind of university). Calloo, callay, etc.
After that, Wally got stupid. I'd say he got mean, but he wasn't smart enough for that, and it became a cat and mouse game between him and my crew - I more or less looked the other way because the guy was a sleaze, and they attacked because he kept getting away everywhere else with his complete abuse of the staff.
One day, after the "I can't do your homework for you" incident, Wally grabbed a card and sat down at a computer, ignoring five people in line. At this point we learned to ignore him, but we'd also just happened to finish the new Cat-5 closet for the entire building.
So we waited. Apparently Wally was on a very, very big project. His tongue stuck out and he went through bag after bag of Funyuns and bottle after bottle of YooHoo. Meandering by his desk, a miracle had occurred - Wally had written actual CODE. And a lot of it. And a LOT of documentation on it.
And then the power went out. And we learned another thing about Wally - he didn't use disks or backups or saves or FTP backups. This was in the age of actual 3.5 floppies and Wally had just written out his entire thesis for a project - all twenty pages of it.
Sure enough, here comes Wally, bounding up to the front of the desk, frothing that his computer wasn't working - the other two people in the lab he was in meandering off, having saved every five minutes and heading home.
"MY COMPUTER ISN'T WORKING!"
"Well, no shit, Wally, the power's out."
"My project is due TOMORROW!"
"Yeah, we know. Did you save?"
"What the fuck are you talking about? Just get the computers back up!"
And just like that, the power restores. Wally goes back to his computer and shrieks.
"All my work is gone!"
"Did you save it?"
"Yes I fucking saved it!"
"What did you save it to?"
"I saved it on the drive! Where the fuck would I have saved it, fuckhead?"
And so we peered at the place where Wally was doing his coding and his documentation - no document, no code. The code was in an xterminal, and the documentation was in unsaved Microsoft Word.
Froth, scream, threaten, anger.
I did the explaining that the reason we put signs all around that said things like "Save early, save often" and "Floppies for free at desk, please ask" and "Remember to back up your work" and "Frequent power outages have been occurring this week due to renovation, please be forewarned" was that all of these things were indeed true.
So Wally, after a threat of graduate student power over staff, lawsuits, dad's donation cessation, etc, heads back to snarly work. Only this time, he's got a disk.
I can't help myself sometimes, though. I carefully slid the plastic square that locked the disk from being written to "open" when I handed him the disk from our spares pile. Wally triumphantly hit "Control-S" on his machine every twenty seconds. Sure enough, he's looking relaxed when all goes dark and all the computers crap themselves, simultaneously.
This time, Wally is all prepped and saved, though. And he stands up and says, "I believe I will go to a lab which is less dangerous. Some of us have papers to write, you know." Gathers his stuff, and walks out.
Wally is actually smirking at me with the "Oh you thought you were so damn clever" look on his face as he walks out. I look back into my office to the circuit breaker to see Mary giggling and turning red-faced while trying to breathe, her hand still on the switch.
I waited until Wally had left, then closed that door to talk to Mary about her attitude. In a way, Wally had made sure there was an ample supply of condoms in my desk drawer for the next six months. You just can't not think that kind of girl is hot.
Fortunately for us, Wally was a slow learner. The disconnecting of his machines via Cat-5 right at the crucial moment of code compiling, the reversal of all the scripts on his machines, the popup banner ads that overwhelmed him on single clicks - Wally took this all in due course, not realizing that the lab staff were happily tormenting him to incentivise him to get. the. fuck. out.
But the saga of Wally was not quite over.
One day Wally reduced my newest kid to tears - a newly out boy with a very sensitive side but brilliant and talented and sweet. Nick, my gay boy, was still terrified of Wally - but absolutely a brilliant computer science nerd who built gay porn sites for a local hub in his spare time. And this should be noted now about Wally.
Wally was homophobic to the extreme. He'd write letters to the editor of the student paper condemning gays and lesbians. And if he was actually intelligent about his discourse, it'd have been okay. But he used language more ineptly than a ketamined rugby player. His papers, printed multiple times on our printers, ran into the five-page run-on-sentence category, eschewing such modern contrivances as dictionaries, actual research, or the F7 key. His Biblical quotations often exhorted people to shear sheep in the winter rather than to condemn homosexuals.
But hey, three hundred pictures of chicks getting shagged by a mule from alt.pictures.beastiality was a-okay. We knew this because Wally had left a zip drive chock full of his favorite fap material in a machine, then returned for it, redfaced and screaming that it was his PERSONAL research. Mary, ever the comedienne, made a donkey noise from the other side of the room. Wally left, I got Mary in the office to talk about her attitude. Calloo, callay, etc.
My boss was visiting the lab when Wally came in, stormed up to Nick, and demanded his help with his homework. Nick tried the line I had, but Wally, seeing his chance to play the bully card, brow-beat Nick into coming with him to work on his homework.
I told my boss about the trevails of Wally, and she happily divulged four of her own regarding him. Four minutes later, Nick carefully, timidly knocked on my door and said, "He told me it's my job to build him a website. He has a project due tomorrow with requirements. I told him we can't do it, it's against educational policies, but he won't listen and now he thinks I'm going to stay late to help him."
My boss and I exchanged a look. "What's the project?" I asked.
"He has to build a website." Nick said.
I smiled. "Tell him you can't take his money, but that you will build a website. All he might have to do is upload all the code via FTP tomorrow on a disk that MIGHT be under the mat outside the lab."
"But..."
"Just do it."
The next day Nick was working in the back when Wally came screaming and threatening into the lab while my boss and the dean of the IS department were reviewing the lab acceptable use policies - followed by two campus security cops.
What Wally hadn't actually done was look at the code, the JPGs, the pages, or the text of the website. He had done exactly what Nick had told him to do - upload the content of a disk left outside under the mat, and uploaded an incredibly edge-out gay porn site, replete with animated gifs.
And the university's academic code not only frowns upon plagarism, but it most certainly frowns upon plagarism of web sites that are sexually graphic in nature and/or offensive in the extreme.
The fact that Wally had uploaded, lovingly, and carefully, a gay Nazi fetish porn site that advocated midget sex to his graduate school account was definitely not his instructor's idea of a funny joke.
Nor was it the dean's, who heard Wally's story firsthand ten feet behind Wally.
But my boss had a beatific smile, I could hear howls of laughter from Nick in my office, and Mary, in a summer dress on the other side of the lab, was giving me some serious come-hither-and-fix-this-computer-now looks.
After it was all over, Wally had been arrested for physically striking the dean (with his diskette, which was so bent from his sweaty wringing of his hands that no real information could be extracted by our systems techs), my boss had to take the rest of the day off, and I was called into my office by Mary to talk about my attitude.
We got our share of stressed-out assholes after that, but nobody could compare to Wally.
*actual quote. He was serious.
your story was awesome.
Must have been nice to have (if any) a bunch of blow off classes that allowed time for that nonsense.
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