4 ms·
On reddit: Someone in IT trolled me for over a decade
- exabrial 3y agoI don’t believe any of these far fetched stories on reddit. Good entertainment though.
- bicijay 3y agoIt's one of those reddit stories that i just refuse to believe. No way a human being can be petty to this level
- shusaku 3y agoI don’t understand how there would be sufficient evidence of this.
- drewcoo 3y agoNot just petty. It sounds like an awful lot of work for very little result. An actual vengeful person with that level of access could certainly do better.
- stuff4ben 3y agoYeah, I've gotten sucked into those stories before too and some are just too fanciful to believe. The AI being trained on Reddit data is going to do more than hallucinate...
- SketchySeaBeast 3y agoI'm wondering if we'll be able to figure out which LLMs are Reddit-trained by asking them for advice around specific memes.
- chedabob 3y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36242914 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36242914 The counting subreddit has already had a bit of influence on the tokens.
- sonicanatidae 3y agoTrust me. This is amateur hour when it comes to how petty humans can be.
- toxik 3y agoAnd the victim just silently accepts their ditziness is local to only the office? Sorry but this is almost surely a creative writing exercise. I normally don't comment on these things but they also normally don't show up on HN.
- Handprint4469 3y agoOf course it's a fake story. It's a tried and true method of farming karma: write the most rage-inducing (read: engaging) story you can possible come up with, post it on r/AMITheAsshole (or similar ragebait subreddit), and just watch the upvotes come. It's called bait for a reason, and it's why most popular subreddits are not good places to hang out anymore.
- evandena 3y agoTo what end? Fake internet points just for the high score? Or are these future scammer accounts building credibility? I just don't understand ragebait, seems like a waste of everyone (including OPs) time, with no tangible reward.
- Unfrozen0688 3y agoYou can sell Reddit accounts. Also points go up feels good.
- Handprint4469 3y ago> You can sell Reddit accounts. This. There's a whole market for high-karma old Reddit accounts. If it has a comment history that makes it look like a real person is behind it, even better. Buyers are usually companies looking to astroturf their product/service, or scammers. Google "buy reddit account" and see how many results there are.
- freitzkriesler2 3y agoSame reason you post feel good group think here: the sweet sweet internet points. You can sell your reddit account too for good money.
- evandena 3y agoIt's nice to have my opinion, suggestions, thoughts, etc validated with upvotes. I'm not sure I'd get the same effect from a totally fabricated story. But that's just me...
- willsmith72 3y agoIt's unbelievable, but unbelievable things happen all the time. This would be far from the craziest thing I'd ever heard as a news story.
- kcplate 3y agoIt’s probably fake, but it’s not unbelievable to me that a spurned tech savvy incel type could be this petty. I have seen rejection hate flow for years.
- H8crilA 3y agoWhat a psychopath. Also, why isn't anyone suggesting suing the employer? Your contract is with the employer, not the mentally ill IT guy. And obviously anyone who works for the employer shouldn't be trusted here (luckily the new IT guy spilled the beans).
- raxxorraxor 3y agoThis isn't trolling, this is highly targeted harassment. If you want to do others a favor, make sure to hire a lawyer and go after him. This is nobody that should ever work with IT systems because that requires a high amount of integrity. Usually it isn't trivial to log and audit such access to work resources. But if there is any evidence, it might help.
- hoseja 3y ago>Sorry, I thought trolling was the technical term for abusing people over a computer network. I choose to believe, for my own sanity, that this itself is a masterful troll.
- tedajax 3y agoThese stories are always outrageous and catharsis seems designed to be out of reach to encourage engagement with the problem.
- rybosworld 3y agoReddit has a fake story problem unlike anywhere else on the internet. It's one of the reasons I stopped using the site. Please don't bring these to hackernews.
- derelicta 3y agoHow can you tell it's fake?
- pknopf 3y agoIt's as real as any other fake story. If a story is bombastic, it's safer to assume it's fake. Reddit incentivizes OPs to get engagement.
- squigz 3y agoAs opposed to HN, of course.
- jihadjihad 3y agoif [[ "$URL" == *"reddit.com"* ]];
- rybosworld 3y agoI don't feel like picking it apart to be honest. There's an assembly line of stories just like this coming out of reddit, and it's not worth engaging beyond "that's obviously fake". They all have peculiarities that point to creative writing exercises. The fact that so many people in this thread immediately suspected this to be fake is pretty telling.
- sevenf0ur 3y agoNew account. Rage inducing story. Aggressor left the country which leaves no solution. Another motive for these posts is to solicit sympathy donations over DMs.
- namaria 3y ago
- acdha 3y agoTrolling is not the right word for this – based on the follow-up comment about it starting after rejecting advances, this is straight up sexual harassment. I share the general sense of disbelief but it’s certainly not without precedent – a lot of small and medium businesses place a huge amount of trust on individual people without much oversight, and some fraction of those people will misuse their authority.
- rockbruno 3y agoIf this is not fake, this guy is an absolute idiot. 10 years of stuff going wrong and he never once bothered checking the edit history on his spreadsheets? The thing about taking screenshots and then not remembering if they were ever taken also doesn't make any sense; perfectly plausible if it happened once, but 10 years??? This is clearly fake.
- derelicta 3y agoIf those files are shared on a shared drive/folder, then I don't think there is an edit history, right?
- planetpluta 3y agoMaybe their work has a policy against it, but surprising they never used their phone to take a photo either!
- zero-sharp 3y agoIf I was expecting a file to be a certain way and it mysteriously changed repeatedly, I would switch on detective mode and start taking pictures with my phone, carefully observing edit times, and so on. I don't think native app spreadsheets have an edit history. But yea, this is silly.
- xyzelement 3y agoThis is obviously bullshit. What kind of records would “Bob” have left behind that the new IT dude would conveniently find - or even bother to look for? It’s also unlikely that after 10 years of this, the person was put on a PIP with the perfect timing to be removed from it once bob left. And really the job made the employee test for ADHD and Alzheimer’s rather than just letting her go.
- SkyPuncher 3y ago> What kind of records would “Bob” have left behind that the new IT dude would conveniently find - or even bother to look for? Most business storage solutions have record keeping functionality, or at least the capability to turn it on. Audit logs, versioning, backups, etc. Back when I worked IT, I had to pull old versions and access logs on a few occasions.
- xyzelement 3y agoYes sure but did you on a whim use these logs to check if your predecessor replaced “count” with “cunt” in someone’s email?
- squigz 3y ago> the person was put on a PIP with the perfect timing to be removed from it once bob left Pretty sure the PIP was removed because OP raised their concerns to HR.
- xyzelement 3y agoOut of the 10 years how long was she on the pip? A pip is usually 6 months max. So she was only put on it in year 9, conveniently so she can be taken off of it coinciding with bobs departure?
- red-iron-pine 3y agoyeah PIPs don't run for years. most of the time it's a very slow termination.
- Unfrozen0688 3y agoHow was he "accessing the system"?
- Unfrozen0688 3y agoThis is a fake story. Yes you can access computers through an RMM unnoticed. But you would not be able to change Excel and Outlook without the user noticing. If he had RMM access, the IT guy could do other fun things.
- SkyPuncher 3y agoIt could also be these are stored on a network drive and the IT guy is simply opening them up
- Unfrozen0688 3y agoThis story is particularly awful as it perpetuates the stereotype of the "IT guy" being a weird ass nerdy spiteful nerd.
- dicknuckle 3y agoI find it hard to believe the story, mostly based on the description of the new IT guy finding all of that within a week. Not to demean IT folks, as many of us have worn that hat at some point in our lives) but in the first week, a new IT worker is finding obvious things like "why do we only have 30% of our network gear in the monitoring system" or "shouldn't we change the hard drive with a blinking error light on the server?"
- djaouen 3y agoNot sure if this is real, but if it is, he should sue his employer and force them to take responsibility for employing someone like that. The only way justice will be served is if you force it to be, so I wouldn’t hesitate to make them eat their indifference to your suffering. :)
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]