I'm pretty sure she made me touch her butt.

I never really socialized much at work. I didn't really even leave my desk except when I had to, and when I did, I would do what I needed to do as quickly and efficiently as possible so I could get back to monitoring the tubes, reading science fiction magazines, and playing with my Nintendo DS. Sometimes I would wear headphones when I left my desk so I could pretend I didn't hear anybody and avoid talking to them. When I was forced to talk to people, I didn't say much, and would immediately go back to my desk when I was done doing what I was supposed to do, regardless of whether or not it seemed like somebody was done talking to me. I just didn't see any need to make friends with the people I worked with, and I didn't want to waste my time talking about the weather, sports, Jesus, TV shows, or any other inane bullshit people seemed interested in. My disinterest in talking to people stemmed less from a specific dislike for the people I worked with than from a general distaste for people.

There were, however, exceptions to this rule.

Some of the people I worked with I found truly disagreeable. Among them was a morbidly obese black woman who dressed very loudly and caked her face with many layers of clown/whore makeup every day. Her appearance was not the only loud thing about her, and I would often be forced to listen to her having long conversations with her friends in their normal indoor voices, which were the screams, yells, and cackles you would expect from people at a loud concert rather than a quiet office building. At least once, I turned my headphones up painfully loud, but was still unable to drown out the sound of her and another woman practicing their gospel singing at full volume.

The woman was somewhat crazy, and I had once heard from a girl my age about an altercation she had had with the woman. The girl was swearing, talking to her friend, when the woman put her face inches from the girl's face and engaged her in a yelling argument over her apparent lack of respect for herself. The girl asserted that she was "a grown-ass woman" who could talk however the hell she wanted to, which only served to make the woman louder and angrier.

I was, unfortunately, too friendly to be actively disliked. Despite my unwillingness to socialize with my coworkers, I would always help people with their retarded-person computer problems if they asked for my help. I would have preferred it if people thought I was an asshole and never tried to talk to me, but I gained a reputation as a quiet but friendly guy who was willing to help people when they were too goddamn inept to do incredibly basic tasks by themselves.

On several occasions, the loud woman came to my desk asking for computer help. Each time, she wanted me to go back down to her desk to help her. She was very slow-moving because of her girth, so I would be forced to endure extra moments of her talking to me. She would tell me about her teenage son's incredible musical skill, and how he played for a large number of incredibly famous acts, and how all kinds of guys really want her because she's so sexy. I never believed her. When we got to her desk, her problem would invariably be something so fucking stupid that it would shock me that somebody would give her a job sitting at a computer much of the day. I would save her file, or maximize her window, or whatever other stupid shit she needed, and then immediately go back to my desk.

I tried to avoid interacting with her more than I tried to avoid interaction with anybody else. When she did say something to me, it was often uncomfortable shit like, "You get more and more handsome every day", or trying to get me to come to her birthday party. I tried to be polite, but I was always very short and in a hurry to get back to my desk.

One day, I went downstairs to pick up my batch of work that should have been printing out at that moment, as it did every evening. The morbidly obese lady was standing near the printer with two other coworkers.

"They're not coming yet," she said.

"Oh," I replied, ready to go back upstairs.

She grabbed my hand. "Here," she said in her deep, manly voice, "let me show you."

I didn't need to be shown, and I sure as hell didn't need to have my hand held to walk 3 feet to the printer. My hand was limp as she clasped it and began waddling towards the printer.

And then my hand touched her butt.

"See?" she asked, gesturing at the empty printer with her free hand.

"Uh, yeah," I said, pulling my hand free. "I guess I'll check later," I said, and went back to my desk, wondering what the fuck just happened. Did she just pull my fucking hand into her butt? I asked myself.

It has been hypothesized that perhaps pulling my hand into her butt was just an unfortunate consequence of her being so fat that her butt took up so much space. That makes me wonder, how often do morbidly obese people "accidentally" touch their own butts? I will never know whether or not she intentionally made me touch her butt, but either way, she had no goddamn business grabbing my hand in the first place.

On my last day of working at that place, she stopped me as I was walking to my boss's desk, trying to bitch at me about doing too much work and raising the ludicrously low standards, which meant she actually had to do some work.

"You do all them boxes, and now Chris thinks we can all do that much. I can't. You need to..."

"This is my letter of resignation," I said, cutting her off and showing her the paper in my hand. "I don't have to take any shit at all from anybody here ever again."

She was clearly taken aback. "Oh," she said, "well, I was thinking I might have to do the same thing if things don't change around here."

"Yeah," I said, not trying to hide the contempt in my voice, "You do that." I walked away.

I'm so happy that I'll never have to see her again.

I was a teenage hax0r d00dz!!!!11

My family gained internet access via AOL in 1994, when I was in 8th grade. At first, my internet usage was monitored pretty strictly, and I got to fart around only occasionally and only for brief periods. Having seen a story on the news about the evils of the internet, I knew that there were instructions for various nefarious deeds readily available online, and when my parents weren't home, I would print out instructions on how to blow things up. My classmates and I found these tutorials endlessly fascinating, though we never actually made the effort or took the risk of blowing off our fingers. At some point, some careless student got a stack of printouts confiscated, my parents were contacted, and my internet access was cut off. My parents canceled AOL.

In 9th grade, I regained internet access, this time through a local phone company. The same company ran a dialup BBS that several of my friends had been accessing for some time, but I had never been able to enjoy due to it being outside of my local calling area. Now, I was able to connect to the BBS via telnet. I created a free account and began using it to email my friends, chat with locals (mostly making fun of them anonymously), and hack monsters to bits on the MUD (multi-user dungeon) they had.

I read an article in a book about how to send email from a fake address. It was a simple matter of connecting to a certain port of basically any server and then manually typing in the commands that an email program would normally do for you. You told the computer you were somebody else, and then you got to send an email as whoever you wanted to be. I sent my friends a bunch of emails from people I wasn't, and I was thrilled by the power it gave me. I wanted more internet power.

I started poking my nose in places it didn't belong. I'd use FTP to connect to anything I could and just look around at what files were there. I connected to my internet service provider's domain and was able to download their password file. I didn't know exactly what to do with it, but a simple internet search taught me that I could run it through some software to pick out passwords. I did, and though it was slow going and I didn't let the program run all the way through, I still found a handful of passwords. A group of people had chosen 12345 for their password, and another had chosen 54321. Clever. I compiled my own word list file to check against the password file, using only words relevant to our area, like school mascots. The program ran through much more quickly this time, and brought me more passwords.

I didn't do anything with the passwords I found, but I wanted more, anyway. I decided to give brute force attacks a shot. In other words, I was going to try guessing passwords. I logged in to the BBS and started looking through people's public profiles. One kid was a Mortal Kombat fanatic, so I correctly guessed that his password was mk. I logged in, changed his password, and started playing around. He had paid for his account, so he had more access to things on the BBS than I did. I ended up reverting his password when his brother logged in and started talking to me. They actually weren't mad about it, and the kid whose password I stole told me he'd be smarter about making up passwords in the future.

Still unsatisfied, I decided to get sneakier. I made another free account on the BBS and named it PW-DATA. Then, I picked random people on the BBS and sent them an email that purported to be from the sysop (the "system operator" of the BBS).

Dear BBS user,

We've been experiencing some problems with our password database, and because of this, your account may be in danger of becoming inaccessible. Please send a message to PW-DATA containing only your password.

We apologize for the inconvenience.

Dwayne, the sysop

Within hours of beginning this, I had more passwords. I was surprised that less than half of the people who I sent messages to actually sent their passwords. Still, I was proud of myself.

One of people who sent me their password was a guy who I hated anyway, due to his being an obnoxious internet douche bag. When I got his password, I went through all of his emails. He had a lot of messages talking about the drugs he had and the drugs he was going to get. I also found a receipt from when he paid for his account. I took down his credit card information and used it to buy my own account. I sent him an email saying, "Don't fuck with me, I know things about you."

The account activation wasn't automated, and when I paid using his credit card, I didn't gain access to all of the things I was supposed to. I emailed the sysop, who activated my ill-gotten account. I finally had a paid account of my own.

A couple days later, I found that the account had been canceled, and the password for the guy's other paid account had been changed.

My password phishing account was still active, so I continued sending people email from the sysop asking for their passwords, and I continued getting passwords. For the most part, I didn't even log in to anybody's account, but I liked knowing that I could.

I sent my fake message to the kids from my school who used the BBS. They were, for some reason or another, all dirty, unpopular, and poor kids rumored to be inbred. I've never been able to understand why this was so. They came from different families, so it wasn't because they shared a computer. I knew very few people who were online at this point, but the poorest kids were among them. They were all too clever to fall for my ruse, though.

One of the kids, Aaron Smith, overheard me talking with a friend in gym class about my phishing endeavors. He told me that he was friends with the sysop, and that he knew it was me.

"It's fraud," he told me, "and it's a felony!"

I stopped phishing for passwords when Aaron told me the sysop was on to me. I never knew if the sysop actually knew, or if he only knew because Aaron overheard me and then told him it was me. I came home a few days after Aaron told me it was a felony, and my dad told me I wasn't allowed on the internet anymore. I guess Dwayne, the sysop, had called him. I was disappointed to have my internet access taken away, but relieved that I wasn't having charges pressed against me.

For the most part, I lost interest in such things after that. In 10th grade, I fooled around on MUSHes (sort of like MUDs without fighting), and figured out how to give myself complete God power over everything through a combination of social engineering and code manipulation. Other than that, the draw of secret knowledge and forbidden power was never strong enough to combat the fear of losing my internet access again.

Password reminder.

My job requires me to access various database systems via the computer on my desk. One of these systems I had to access once a week for a few months, and then not at all for a few months. When I needed to use it again, I found I had forgotten my password. I tried a few different things I thought might be my password, but after a few tries my account was locked, and I was given a message with an 800 number to call to regain my access. Unfortunately, the phone on my desk can't call outside lines. It was no big deal, since I only needed access for one small thing, and I was able to pass it on to somebody who remembered their password.

It's been months since I've needed to use that system for anything, but today we had a meeting about a new task we were going to be doing, and it required access to the system in question. I told my boss what had happened with my password, and he had me reset it from his computer. When I went back to my computer, though, I was still locked out. He said he'd look into it, and hopefully have my password ready by next week.

A few minutes later, my boss came to my desk with my username and a temporary password written on a piece of paper, and said he thought he figured it out. I was able to log in this time, and was greeted with a message saying that I had to change my password. On the screen was all the user information I had entered previously, including my name, department, and my forgotten password reminder. When I had entered my password reminder, I must have been wrongly certain that I would never forget my password, because it wasn't really much of a reminder. I scrolled the screen, pretending I was looking for the box to enter my new password, but actually just trying to prevent my boss from seeing my password reminder.

In the middle of the screen was a box that read "PASSWORD REMINDER".

And underneath that, right where I had left it so long ago, it said "FUCK YOU".

"That's a nice shirt!"

I sometimes wear my internet nerdism on my chest in the form of a shirt with the word GOATSE printed on it, with little hands on each side of the word stretching it across the shirt. For any readers fortunate enough to be unfamiliar with the term, goatse was one of the original internet shock sites. I first experienced goatse in high school, when one of my friends sent me a link and told me it was completely awesome. Unaware of what I was in for, I clicked the link and was confronted with an image of a man bending over and stretching his anus to legendary proportions. Shocking, indeed.

I was visiting my mom and brother not too long ago, and I was wearing the shirt.

"Ooh, that's a nice shirt!" my mom said when I came downstairs after taking a shower in the morning. My brother looked at the shirt and shook his head, and I just started laughing.

"That's gross," my brother said.

"What? What is it?" my mom asked.

I kept laughing as my brother explained to her what goatse was.

"That is gross!" she said.

I'm not really a computer guy, but you really are an idiot.

"Let me see the bottom of your mouse," she said, picking up the mouse on my desk and flipping it over.

"Uh, OK."

"No, that's not it," she said, putting it back down. "Somebody keeps stealing mine and replacing it with a broken one. I'm so pissed off about it."

"What's wrong with it?" I asked, sympathetic because people were always stealing shit from my desk, too.

"I move it around, and it doesn't go where I want it to. Like, it sticks."

"Oh, that's easy to fix," I said, flipping the mouse over and popping out the ball inside. "You see these strips of gunk built up on these bars?"

"Yeah."

"Well, you just scrape that crap off with a paperclip or your fingernail," I told her, and scraped the crap off with my fingernail. I put the ball back in and moved the arrow around my screen.

"Oh," she said. She paused for a second, and then said, "Well, I'm just gonna call the tech help desk to see if they'll give me a new one."