Office upgrade

In the late 1980s I worked for a company that sold overstocked LPs, cassettes, CDs, video games and Atari 2600 cartridges.

The sales office was open plan.

One Monday morning I came in to find that a small partitioned office had been built inside it, complete with a window. Geoff, the boss, was sitting inside.

I waved at him through the glass. No reaction.

A bit later I went in to say hello and realised what had happened.

He’d had two-way glass installed.

It was fitted the wrong way round.

We could see in. Geoff couldn’t see out.

Tech support: Webcam security

A client once forwarded me one of those emails claiming they’d hacked his webcam and had footage of him “enjoying some downtime”.

I asked, “Would there be anything… compromising on the footage?”

He coughed. A lot.

“What should I do about it?”
“Put a sock over your webcam.”

Tech support: The invisible printer

Back in the early noughties I had a client - let’s call him Nigel - who supplied computers to estate agents across the UK.

One day a call came in:
“This printer you’ve sent us is printing invisible.”

The client wasn’t far from Nigel’s office, so he went over to take a look.

After a very quick inspection, Nigel said:
“Oh, this is embarrassing. We also supply MI5 - we’ve accidentally sent you one of their printers that uses invisible ink.”

He took the printer out to his car, removed the tape from the print cartridge, then brought it back in as a “replacement”.

Problem solved.