Ah, “net send”. I remember it fondly. For a brief period almost 20 years ago I worked for a medium sized desktop software company. They had draconian restrictio

Ah, “net send”. I remember it fondly. For a brief period almost 20 years ago I worked for a medium sized desktop software company. They had draconian restrictions on what we could do on the work computers. The only approved form of electronic communication was email, nothing instant. Many folks hated email, so the only real way to get an answer from a colleague was to get up and walk over. Being that I hated being interrupted by others walking up, I tried to be responsive to emails, but folks in the org were so used to others not looking, they just always defaulted to walking up. I then realized that while everything was very locked down, for some reason net send wasn’t. First in a small group of folks I told, but soon most of the office knew and was using it, tech folks and otherwise. Then someone had to go and see what else the net command could do. Said malicious person started rebooting other people’s machines. Needless to say, this got IT security involved (IT was in the Corp office, so hadn’t learned about our usage till then somehow). This lead to an investigation and ultimately it came to be known I started the usage. IT tried to blame the malicious loss of work due to the reboots on me, but thankfully my boss argued correctly I had nothing to do with that, they needed to find the real perp. IT’s solution was to put in a very crappy IM system (can’t remember what it was), lock down net command, and not bother finding the malicious person. Their “ultimate spite” though was to block me from using the new IM system (actually it sucked so bad it wasn’t really a loss) as “I was shown to misuse resources”. Needless to say, I didn’t stay much longer and jumped ship for a better job.