If you work in Information Technology, you’re under-appreciated and overworked. And I’m sure you’ve had the occasional glimmer of mischievous glee thinking about the ways you could mess with your business users à la Jim and Dwight from The Office. Here are 19 ways you could make business users’ lives miserable if you were feeling particularly vengeful:
- Force users to reset passwords with high-security requirements…daily.
- Tell line of business people that the integration work will take 3 months every time they want to onboard a new customer.
- When they push back, tell them it’s because you can’t write a single new line of code for them until the Cubs win the World Series (sorry to put my finger in an open wound, fellow Chicagoans).
- Make the CEO’s printer default for all office computers.
- Add offensive words to users’ Microsoft Word auto-complete.
- Post everyone’s Instant Messaging conversations to a live feed under the guise of “promoting transparency.”
- Kick off the weekend early with an IT “review” of inappropriate websites visited by employees during the week….and publish the list in the company cafeteria.
- Compile a list of the Top 10 dumbest IT requests of the week — along with their requestors — and post the “winners” to the internal community.
- Schedule an ERP maintenance for the middle of the workday in the middle of the workweek — 11 a.m. on Wednesday sounds about right.
- Play World of Warcraft every day during the 3 p.m. hour to slow network traffic down to a crawl.
- During this time, answer the helpdesk phone with, “Leeerooooy Jenkins!”
- Disallow e-mail attachments, disable flash drives, and block access to Dropbox & Google Drive… for “security purposes.”
- Move user’s desktop icons, take a screenshot, and set it as their wallpaper.
- Block the NCAA IP address during March Madness.
- Refuse to answer an easy IT question because “it’s time for one of your State-allocated breaks.”
- Put all vendors through 6-month corporate security reviews (even the ones who don’t come on-site, access applications, or need email addresses.)
- Only offer support to users in a certain geographical region based on YOUR local time zone.
- Change all computer sound effects to fart noises throughout the office.
- Change all internet homepages to an unclosable RickRoll.
Next time you feel like your business users are not showing you enough appreciation, inject a little anarchy into their day with one of these shenanigans. Just don’t tell anyone who gave you the idea…