Who, Me? Welcome to the working week, dear readers, and good luck navigating whatever it brings - a task we hope to illuminate with a fresh instalment of Who, Me?, the reader-contributed column in which you share tales of the times you weren't at your best but managed to get away with it.

This week, meet a reader we'll Regomize as "Bryce" who told us about the time he supported the email system for over 100,000 users at a large government organization.

"Most of the staff had a Dell PC running Windows XP and fitted with 2GB of RAM," Bryce told us.

When staff left, their PC would go into storage. But an informal practice developed that often saw their RAM removed and placed in an actual worker's machine - to give it a performance boost.

Bryce was the beneficiary of that policy and gloried for a time in his 4GB machine. But after returning to work after one Christmas period, he found his PC sitting in its usual space with its fans spinning furiously, XP unable to boot, and just 2GB of RAM in residence.

A RAM raid had clearly taken place, leading Bryce to conclude that the memory bandits might not have replaced his RAM appropriately - poorly seated DIMMs are a known cause of PCs not behaving.

That fine theory was wrong. A further test that involved swapping memory between machines brought news that the RAM in Bryce's box worked - but no amount of working memory would make his PC function properly.

As Bryce tried to figure this out, he learned that over Christmas a manager had ordered the inspection of all PCs, to enable retrieval of re-purposed RAM.

That process had somehow broken Bryce's machine - so he figured the manager owed him a new one.

That manager was by then on holiday, and it would be some time before Bryce could get a replacement PC.

So he looked around the office, satisfied himself that nobody was in, and stole the manager's PC out from under his desk.

"I quickly yanked out the power cable, swapped the two machines over, swapped the hard drives and RAM, and hit the power button."

The manager's (formerly Bryce's) PC duly started spinning its fans furiously, with no sign of Windows coming to life.

Bryce plugged in his purloined PC, which booted beautifully and then served as his everyday workhorse for months without incident.

"A few months later when a member of our team left we kept hold of their PC 'for spares' and I ended up with 4Gb RAM again," Bryce confided to Who, Me?

He also told us he wasn't the only team member whose PC was worse the wear after this manager's ministrations.

Speaking of that manager, Bryce learned that he was forced to dip into the pool of spare machines.

"No-one ever mentioned it or paid me a visit about it," Bryce recounted, "so I reckon I pretty much got away with it."

Have you "liberated" tech meant for a colleague without incident? Don't imprison your story: click here to share your story with Who, Me? so we can share your exploits on some future Monday. ®

https://www.theregister.com//2024/07/15/who_me/