Somewhere in the depths of London a mobile phone is playing its ‘you’ve got a message’ ring tone at the top of it’s little electronic lungs. There are two things wrong with this. 1) It appears to be my phone and 2) judging by the unfeasibly small numbers on my digital clock it appears to be somewhere around three in the morning. With considerable reluctance I crawl from under the duvet and scramble amongst the debris of everyday living to find the thing making all the noise. A fumbling of buttons shuts it up, and then I read the message and am suddenly horribly awake.
“FileServ1, crash of indescribable doom, raid fail.” So reads the message that permanently ruins my day, or would do if the well-greased wheels of overtime pay hadn’t just kicked in. Roughly translated our main file and database server has just decided to go into a sulk of epic proportions until someone (i.e. me) gets their arse in and fixes it’s hard disk, or to be accurate, hard disks. The machine’s built with several hard disks working as one, so it would need two disks to fail for the machine to shut down.
This little mystery keeps me entertained on the twenty-minute bike ride in to work through the dark and deserted streets. Slinging the bike into the generator room (to which only I have a key, therefore hiding the evidence of my mode of travel and lending credibility to my petty cash claim for a taxi fare at ‘emergency call out rate’ that will be coming later in the day) I wander upstairs, flicking the security systems off with a well practiced motion until I reach the server room. And stop dead as I see the hole in the front of the server where a hard disk should be.
Hmmm, something is amiss at the Circle-BOFH, not the missing kit of course, more the fact that anyone in the building would be stupid enough to try something this blatant. I thought I had them better trained than that. I go through the scene in my mind, and am left in no doubt it’s an inside job. No sign of forced entry, which means someone knows the door code. No tripping of security systems, so whoever grabbed it didn’t have to worry about them because they were turned off. And the security camera that watches our server racks has been tilted away. Now you can do that from the doorway, but only if you know beforehand it’s there. Otherwise it’s game over.
A quick check of the camera’s video feed from the last few hours shows nothing more than a long stick clacking against the lens as someone missed the camera body the first time while shoving it back to the wall. Under normal circumstances, this would be a problem, but our light-fingered interloper should have known better than to wander into a server room run by a fully paid up Bastard Operator From Hell. After all, its not every machine room that has a web cam hidden in the cooling vents of the phone system cabinet mounted just to the right of the server farm now is it?
Ah, I recognise the face (and a very attractive one it is too) but can’t place the name, which means whoever this soon-to-be-extremely-sorry woman is, she’s new here. A quick clicking of fingers on keyboard attach a name, Kate, to my criminal and I sit back to think. Yes, I could just report her to the bosses, get her fired and probably prosecuted, but there’s something morally reprehensible about not getting a cut of whatever she got for the drive. So, a plan b is needed. Seeking inspiration, and being a subscriber to the policy of know thy enemy, I fire up the security camera footage of the order processing department and run random one-minute snapshots while doing a quick search for anything incriminating in her e-mail and phone logs. To my surprise, there’s nothing there, which tends to suggest that she’s not entirely stupid. As I ponder the problem something on the video catches my eye and I do a quick check through a few other files to confirm it. Seems my new best friend has a thing for those big, chunky metal bracelets, the sort that look like they’d withstand a direct hit from a nuke. How interesting….
Grabbing an ‘emergency response kit’ from the shelf I head down to her desk and spend a productive five minutes working on her machine. A spare network card goes inside the box, and a length of network cable goes into the card. The other end of the cable goes, not into a network socket, but onto a plug which gets shoved into a cheap electric timer and hence into a wall socket. Come ten o’clock plan b should swing nicely into action.
Returning to the sanctuary of the IT department I slap a spare disk in the server and rebuild the missing data, then throw out a couple of ‘service interrupted, investigating failure, now leave us alone’ e-mails to the great unwashed. Job done I finish the paperwork to claim enough out-of-hours overtime to bankrupt a third world country and drop the finished timesheet on the boss’s desk, where, if I’m any judge of character, it will be signed off without hesitation. At least, it will considering what happened the last time he complained.
Not wanting to go home again for the extra half hour of sleep, I hit Ms Kate’s web logs. Nothing too strange, the normal breaches of company policy but nothing on the serious list. I’m about to switch off when a thought occurs and I start to check the phone logs, the image of a black shape about the right size for a laptop popping into my mind from the security videos. Sure enough, there’s a rogue machine connecting on the spare network port next to her desk from time to time, and it’s even logging in with one of our beancounter’s usernames. The girl just went up a notch or two in my opinion, not that it’ll save her of course. Ah, now this is much better, a few fetish sites, a load of dodgy software searches and, what the heck is the tickling media forum?
An hour or so of research later and I’m wiser in the ways of the world, have a much better plan b than I had before and am seriously lusting after more than one author. I kill the time till ten with a little light coding, modifying our print spooler to randomly insert a distinctly non-work-friendly image into print jobs of a hundred pages or more. Finally the clock ticks over to ten in the am, there’s a momentary blip from my voltage monitor as the timer three floors below clicks on and, rather than supplying nice safe data packets starts delivering rich chunky volts to the network card instead. Unsurprisingly this doesn’t last long as, even through three stories of concrete I hear the *bang* that filters up from down below as most of the internals of the machine revert to their liquid state, well, with a little help anyway.
A few minutes later, most likely after her heart’s stopped beating the Macarena, I get a visit from the undeniably attractive young woman asking if I could provide a temporary replacement machine. Doing my best to impersonate a helpful support tech I grab an old machine from the shelf, peel off the luggage labels from the Ark, and carry it downstairs for her. There are disbelieving glances from the masses as they see me actually helping someone, but that’s easily dealt with by a couple of stares that would have done a shark proud. I retrieve the ‘broken’ machine and replace it with the ‘new’ one, pocketing what’s left of my toy at the same time. I also yank the slightly charred remains of the network and power cables from their sockets and, expressing shock that anything could have done this in our professionally wired building, ask her to come back to the IT department to grab spare cables.
On the way up the stairs I ask her if she’d mind installing the cables herself to save me a trip, and am gratified to find my initial guess was right as she quickly agrees. Yep, a definite case of a wannabe techie, well have I got a newsflash for you….
Following me into the server room she wanders down between the racks as I head for the equipment store at the far end of the room. Digging through a box of network cable I wouldn’t use to run Christmas tree lights, let alone carry data traffic, I grab a spare power cable from a neatly stacked box with my other hand and turn to face her, finding her standing exactly where I wanted her, between the last two cabinets, their metal shelves empty as we wait for the last of our servers to arrive from the manufacturer.
I toss both cables to her at the same time, and ‘accidentally’ throw them too high. Reacting instinctively she raises her hands to try and catch them, and suddenly finds her bracelets caught on the edges of the cabinets. Making reassuring, but meaningless, noises, I move forwards to ‘help’, grabbing a roll of duct tape from the top shelf of one of the cabinets as I reach up. A quick hand movement or two later and her hands are taped firmly to the bracelets, which are in turn taped to the cabinets.
“Now” I say, stepping back as she realises she’s well and truly trapped. “I’d like to have a word with you about where exactly one of my hard drives went walking off to last night.”
“What the fuck are you talking about, let me go right fucking now!” Oh dear, and I’d so hoped this was going to be reasonable. Too bad, for her anyway. I move forward and slap another piece of tape over her mouth, cutting off her protestations of innocence. That’s one thing I’m not interested in, I’ve got the video proof of her guilt, what I want now is something I rather suspect she’s going to be unwilling to give me. Grabbing the room’s only chair I slide it into place behind her, reach down and pick her legs up, folding her at the knees until I can slip the seat of the chair into place so her feet stick out through the metal slats and her weight is supported on her shins and knees. Quickly I pull her shoes and socks from her feet and apply a layer of tape to hold her in place.
Reaching up to the same shelf that held the duct tape, I pull a wooden box down and carefully remove a set of smaller boxes. One at a time I open these boxes, removing a small circular magnet from each one that I slip under the chair, one per leg. They instantly bond to the floor, and Kate seems shocked to discover she can’t lift the chair off the ground. Before I put the fourth magnet in place I straighten and speak to her.
“Now, let me explain what’s going to happen. This is my game, my rules, and there is nothing you can do or say to change them. First, and understand this because it’s very important, I have video footage of you taking a hard disk from that server behind you last night at about eight thirty. The only reason I haven’t handed it and you to the cops is I don’t feel like it. I’ll let it go, but I want a piece of the action, in this case, 60% of whatever you’re getting for it, and a 50/50 partnership in any future transactions.”
“The way this works is simple. I am going to give you a chance, and only one chance to tell me what I want to hear. If you do not tell me immediately I will gag you again and torture you for five minutes. You will then get another chance to talk. Fail to co-operate and you’ll be tortured for ten minutes. Then twenty, forty and so on until you give in. Rest assured, I will get what I want, so you might as well talk.” With that I pulled the tape from her lips and waited.
“Fuck you! This is insa-mmpphhhhh” That was all she got out as I placed the tape back over her mouth and knelt behind her. I ran my fingertips ever so gently over her soles, travelling down, or rather up, from a point just above her toes to the very edge of her heel and was rewarded with a giggle and jerk from my captive. I paused for a moment letting the importance of what had just happened sink in. It didn’t take long, her eyes went wide and she started to pull at her bonds with desperate strength. Not that it mattered, I’d hung servers like this before and there was no way she was getting loose on her own.
I repeated the motion, harder this time and much slower, dragging my fingers over her feet slowly enough to trace every single curve and wrinkle as she gurgled and turned beetroot red from suppressing her laughter, both feet flexing away from me. I had an eye on the clock, wanting to give her only a taste of what was in store for her if she didn’t co-operate this time round as I repeated the harder touch. Now her eyes were shut tight, almost comically so, as she shock her head, dark brown hair whipping around above me. I started to gently tap her soles, running my fingers over her like a light drizzle on those admittedly very cute feet and her breathing turned to a series of rapid gasps, her self-control hanging by a thread.
As the clock hit the minute mark I turned the drizzle into a full on thunderstorm and sent my fingers racing over her feet, avoiding her toes completely as I scrapped my nails over her soles, constantly varying speed and direction, never giving her a chance to adapt. It was too much for her and Kate burst into muffled laughter above me, body shaking as she tried desperately to jerk away, every attempt thwarted by her bondage. Her toes flexed and wriggled as her feet writhed, but it didn’t even begin to throw my aim off. Mercilessly I dove in to the attack time and again, forcing that wonderful laughter from her and, to my surprise, enjoying it immensely.
Finally the first five minutes was up and I moved away from her tormented feet, moving round and standing in front of her, knees bent slightly to bring me down to eye level. Without saying a word I reached out and eased the tape away from her mouth. She panted for air for a moment, and then looked at me with such anger I almost laughed out loud. “What the fummm!” was all I needed to hear as I slid the tape back across her mouth and set the clock for ten minutes. It was one of those big countdown kitchen timers, one of the bits of kit that always seemed to come in so useful in this job, and on a whim I put it on a shelf to the left of her head so that she could twist around and see it if she wanted.
Reaching out I triggered the countdown and dived into the attack. This time there was no build up, no warning. She’d had her one, and only, chance to make this easy on herself and now I wanted results. Standing in front of her nicely stretched body I thrust my hands into her armpits, the white silk blouse seeming to welcome my questing fingers as I scratched and scrabbled away with reckless abandon. She screamed, or tried to through the tape, and tried to snap at my arms and hands with her teeth. I just laughed, there was no way, if I was careful at least and a true BOFH is always careful, for her to get at me, and her desperation to try such a move so early was a good sign.
“FileServ1, crash of indescribable doom, raid fail.” So reads the message that permanently ruins my day, or would do if the well-greased wheels of overtime pay hadn’t just kicked in. Roughly translated our main file and database server has just decided to go into a sulk of epic proportions until someone (i.e. me) gets their arse in and fixes it’s hard disk, or to be accurate, hard disks. The machine’s built with several hard disks working as one, so it would need two disks to fail for the machine to shut down.
This little mystery keeps me entertained on the twenty-minute bike ride in to work through the dark and deserted streets. Slinging the bike into the generator room (to which only I have a key, therefore hiding the evidence of my mode of travel and lending credibility to my petty cash claim for a taxi fare at ‘emergency call out rate’ that will be coming later in the day) I wander upstairs, flicking the security systems off with a well practiced motion until I reach the server room. And stop dead as I see the hole in the front of the server where a hard disk should be.
Hmmm, something is amiss at the Circle-BOFH, not the missing kit of course, more the fact that anyone in the building would be stupid enough to try something this blatant. I thought I had them better trained than that. I go through the scene in my mind, and am left in no doubt it’s an inside job. No sign of forced entry, which means someone knows the door code. No tripping of security systems, so whoever grabbed it didn’t have to worry about them because they were turned off. And the security camera that watches our server racks has been tilted away. Now you can do that from the doorway, but only if you know beforehand it’s there. Otherwise it’s game over.
A quick check of the camera’s video feed from the last few hours shows nothing more than a long stick clacking against the lens as someone missed the camera body the first time while shoving it back to the wall. Under normal circumstances, this would be a problem, but our light-fingered interloper should have known better than to wander into a server room run by a fully paid up Bastard Operator From Hell. After all, its not every machine room that has a web cam hidden in the cooling vents of the phone system cabinet mounted just to the right of the server farm now is it?
Ah, I recognise the face (and a very attractive one it is too) but can’t place the name, which means whoever this soon-to-be-extremely-sorry woman is, she’s new here. A quick clicking of fingers on keyboard attach a name, Kate, to my criminal and I sit back to think. Yes, I could just report her to the bosses, get her fired and probably prosecuted, but there’s something morally reprehensible about not getting a cut of whatever she got for the drive. So, a plan b is needed. Seeking inspiration, and being a subscriber to the policy of know thy enemy, I fire up the security camera footage of the order processing department and run random one-minute snapshots while doing a quick search for anything incriminating in her e-mail and phone logs. To my surprise, there’s nothing there, which tends to suggest that she’s not entirely stupid. As I ponder the problem something on the video catches my eye and I do a quick check through a few other files to confirm it. Seems my new best friend has a thing for those big, chunky metal bracelets, the sort that look like they’d withstand a direct hit from a nuke. How interesting….
Grabbing an ‘emergency response kit’ from the shelf I head down to her desk and spend a productive five minutes working on her machine. A spare network card goes inside the box, and a length of network cable goes into the card. The other end of the cable goes, not into a network socket, but onto a plug which gets shoved into a cheap electric timer and hence into a wall socket. Come ten o’clock plan b should swing nicely into action.
Returning to the sanctuary of the IT department I slap a spare disk in the server and rebuild the missing data, then throw out a couple of ‘service interrupted, investigating failure, now leave us alone’ e-mails to the great unwashed. Job done I finish the paperwork to claim enough out-of-hours overtime to bankrupt a third world country and drop the finished timesheet on the boss’s desk, where, if I’m any judge of character, it will be signed off without hesitation. At least, it will considering what happened the last time he complained.
Not wanting to go home again for the extra half hour of sleep, I hit Ms Kate’s web logs. Nothing too strange, the normal breaches of company policy but nothing on the serious list. I’m about to switch off when a thought occurs and I start to check the phone logs, the image of a black shape about the right size for a laptop popping into my mind from the security videos. Sure enough, there’s a rogue machine connecting on the spare network port next to her desk from time to time, and it’s even logging in with one of our beancounter’s usernames. The girl just went up a notch or two in my opinion, not that it’ll save her of course. Ah, now this is much better, a few fetish sites, a load of dodgy software searches and, what the heck is the tickling media forum?
An hour or so of research later and I’m wiser in the ways of the world, have a much better plan b than I had before and am seriously lusting after more than one author. I kill the time till ten with a little light coding, modifying our print spooler to randomly insert a distinctly non-work-friendly image into print jobs of a hundred pages or more. Finally the clock ticks over to ten in the am, there’s a momentary blip from my voltage monitor as the timer three floors below clicks on and, rather than supplying nice safe data packets starts delivering rich chunky volts to the network card instead. Unsurprisingly this doesn’t last long as, even through three stories of concrete I hear the *bang* that filters up from down below as most of the internals of the machine revert to their liquid state, well, with a little help anyway.
A few minutes later, most likely after her heart’s stopped beating the Macarena, I get a visit from the undeniably attractive young woman asking if I could provide a temporary replacement machine. Doing my best to impersonate a helpful support tech I grab an old machine from the shelf, peel off the luggage labels from the Ark, and carry it downstairs for her. There are disbelieving glances from the masses as they see me actually helping someone, but that’s easily dealt with by a couple of stares that would have done a shark proud. I retrieve the ‘broken’ machine and replace it with the ‘new’ one, pocketing what’s left of my toy at the same time. I also yank the slightly charred remains of the network and power cables from their sockets and, expressing shock that anything could have done this in our professionally wired building, ask her to come back to the IT department to grab spare cables.
On the way up the stairs I ask her if she’d mind installing the cables herself to save me a trip, and am gratified to find my initial guess was right as she quickly agrees. Yep, a definite case of a wannabe techie, well have I got a newsflash for you….
Following me into the server room she wanders down between the racks as I head for the equipment store at the far end of the room. Digging through a box of network cable I wouldn’t use to run Christmas tree lights, let alone carry data traffic, I grab a spare power cable from a neatly stacked box with my other hand and turn to face her, finding her standing exactly where I wanted her, between the last two cabinets, their metal shelves empty as we wait for the last of our servers to arrive from the manufacturer.
I toss both cables to her at the same time, and ‘accidentally’ throw them too high. Reacting instinctively she raises her hands to try and catch them, and suddenly finds her bracelets caught on the edges of the cabinets. Making reassuring, but meaningless, noises, I move forwards to ‘help’, grabbing a roll of duct tape from the top shelf of one of the cabinets as I reach up. A quick hand movement or two later and her hands are taped firmly to the bracelets, which are in turn taped to the cabinets.
“Now” I say, stepping back as she realises she’s well and truly trapped. “I’d like to have a word with you about where exactly one of my hard drives went walking off to last night.”
“What the fuck are you talking about, let me go right fucking now!” Oh dear, and I’d so hoped this was going to be reasonable. Too bad, for her anyway. I move forward and slap another piece of tape over her mouth, cutting off her protestations of innocence. That’s one thing I’m not interested in, I’ve got the video proof of her guilt, what I want now is something I rather suspect she’s going to be unwilling to give me. Grabbing the room’s only chair I slide it into place behind her, reach down and pick her legs up, folding her at the knees until I can slip the seat of the chair into place so her feet stick out through the metal slats and her weight is supported on her shins and knees. Quickly I pull her shoes and socks from her feet and apply a layer of tape to hold her in place.
Reaching up to the same shelf that held the duct tape, I pull a wooden box down and carefully remove a set of smaller boxes. One at a time I open these boxes, removing a small circular magnet from each one that I slip under the chair, one per leg. They instantly bond to the floor, and Kate seems shocked to discover she can’t lift the chair off the ground. Before I put the fourth magnet in place I straighten and speak to her.
“Now, let me explain what’s going to happen. This is my game, my rules, and there is nothing you can do or say to change them. First, and understand this because it’s very important, I have video footage of you taking a hard disk from that server behind you last night at about eight thirty. The only reason I haven’t handed it and you to the cops is I don’t feel like it. I’ll let it go, but I want a piece of the action, in this case, 60% of whatever you’re getting for it, and a 50/50 partnership in any future transactions.”
“The way this works is simple. I am going to give you a chance, and only one chance to tell me what I want to hear. If you do not tell me immediately I will gag you again and torture you for five minutes. You will then get another chance to talk. Fail to co-operate and you’ll be tortured for ten minutes. Then twenty, forty and so on until you give in. Rest assured, I will get what I want, so you might as well talk.” With that I pulled the tape from her lips and waited.
“Fuck you! This is insa-mmpphhhhh” That was all she got out as I placed the tape back over her mouth and knelt behind her. I ran my fingertips ever so gently over her soles, travelling down, or rather up, from a point just above her toes to the very edge of her heel and was rewarded with a giggle and jerk from my captive. I paused for a moment letting the importance of what had just happened sink in. It didn’t take long, her eyes went wide and she started to pull at her bonds with desperate strength. Not that it mattered, I’d hung servers like this before and there was no way she was getting loose on her own.
I repeated the motion, harder this time and much slower, dragging my fingers over her feet slowly enough to trace every single curve and wrinkle as she gurgled and turned beetroot red from suppressing her laughter, both feet flexing away from me. I had an eye on the clock, wanting to give her only a taste of what was in store for her if she didn’t co-operate this time round as I repeated the harder touch. Now her eyes were shut tight, almost comically so, as she shock her head, dark brown hair whipping around above me. I started to gently tap her soles, running my fingers over her like a light drizzle on those admittedly very cute feet and her breathing turned to a series of rapid gasps, her self-control hanging by a thread.
As the clock hit the minute mark I turned the drizzle into a full on thunderstorm and sent my fingers racing over her feet, avoiding her toes completely as I scrapped my nails over her soles, constantly varying speed and direction, never giving her a chance to adapt. It was too much for her and Kate burst into muffled laughter above me, body shaking as she tried desperately to jerk away, every attempt thwarted by her bondage. Her toes flexed and wriggled as her feet writhed, but it didn’t even begin to throw my aim off. Mercilessly I dove in to the attack time and again, forcing that wonderful laughter from her and, to my surprise, enjoying it immensely.
Finally the first five minutes was up and I moved away from her tormented feet, moving round and standing in front of her, knees bent slightly to bring me down to eye level. Without saying a word I reached out and eased the tape away from her mouth. She panted for air for a moment, and then looked at me with such anger I almost laughed out loud. “What the fummm!” was all I needed to hear as I slid the tape back across her mouth and set the clock for ten minutes. It was one of those big countdown kitchen timers, one of the bits of kit that always seemed to come in so useful in this job, and on a whim I put it on a shelf to the left of her head so that she could twist around and see it if she wanted.
Reaching out I triggered the countdown and dived into the attack. This time there was no build up, no warning. She’d had her one, and only, chance to make this easy on herself and now I wanted results. Standing in front of her nicely stretched body I thrust my hands into her armpits, the white silk blouse seeming to welcome my questing fingers as I scratched and scrabbled away with reckless abandon. She screamed, or tried to through the tape, and tried to snap at my arms and hands with her teeth. I just laughed, there was no way, if I was careful at least and a true BOFH is always careful, for her to get at me, and her desperation to try such a move so early was a good sign.