Ok. Here is one anecdote which we tried. This was on my first job - fresh kid from college.
6 of us were there like that. And 4 seniors. Of them we started respecting 2 immediately
and naturally other two became target for our pranks...er...a differently respcted I
might say
It was a group designing
mix of analog/digital comm products. We did a bit of everything - including writing
C codes for networking - Novel networks!! This was pure DOS days. No Windows. Yeah and
Unix, of course - no Linux.
Well, these two differently respected seniors considered
themselves experts in software, reason enough for us to respect them differently! There
was a PC add-on card for which they wrote drivers. Hard part is for every bug, we had
to go around proving that there was nothing wrong with hardware and only then they will
start debugging the s/w. It got on our nerves as we kids considered our part finished
and wanted to move on to next project. It was not to be. Those 2 were a good pair- Laurel &
Hardy type! Add to that they eat like think alike walk alike and 'bug' alike!
One day before lunch there was a problem and they asked us to CHECK the card and
walked off. We were 200% sure it was a software bug. FLASH. I quitely swapped the keyboard
connections on their PCs which are next to each other. 286 days - they will dutifully
shutdown and go. When they came back and rebooted the machine, funny things started
happening.
My friend quickly claimed that it was a network error and the problem
was their NOVELL network cards and drivers. They got furious and started reading manuals
to see if keyboard connections can be ruted through network. It was a long lunch for
us as we could not face them and not laugh. After more than two hours, the PC was shut
down and they sincerely believed that keyboard commands are mistakenly routed through
network.
We let them use one of our machines to 'run' through their code to
see if there could be any problem. End of the day.
My friend had a better idea.
Next morning, he came early and swapped the monitor cables too. In effect each moron,
ooops, each-differently-respected-senior was sitting in front of his PC but operating
other's machine. They really panicked. We offered to check the code line by line. Till
that time, any suggestion would bring torrents of abuse. In their panic situation they
let 3 of us walk through the code. Chance for us to raise lots of questions and made
them think. They quitely took help of another senior and closed the whole project within
3 weeks. We moved on to next projects....that is when we let one of 'our' seniors about
what happened. He figured out we played a trick but was not sure how. He did not get
himself convinced that keyboard commands can be routed out through serial port of LAN
card!
