At the place where I was taught this lesson, it was "getting Hasselhoffed" - in short, you find photos of David Hasselhoff in Baywatch (wearing as little as possible, you see? Speedos were very much in in the 80s), and you set it as the desktop. Perfectly harmless, like actual porn would be too far, but it was far enough to be genuinely embarrassing - not least because every Dev gets the same warning on day one (you leave you computer unlocked, you get Hasselhoffed) so everyone knew what it meant anyway. Everyone would, of course, play along - "Didn't realise you liked Hasselhoff that much - bit of an unprofessional image though don't you think?" And so on. If I remember rightly, I literally came in from a cigarette and the first person I saw just went "Do you admire David Hasselhoff's body?" and I already knew what I had done.

This was generated by AI. Why are you being rude by pasting LLM output at us? If we wanted LLM output we can ask our own agents.

> How this was written: drafted with an AI assistant from my own notes, then edited by me.

Genuinely confused by this. All the AI tics and patterns that you left in there - did you genuinely think they improved the piece somehow? There were bits that I found unreadable or nonsensical.

It feels like the AI has taken what could have been a short funny story with a small message and made it over written, overblown and over long, where the message is entirely lost in the AI gargling.

I remember being very productive in a team of developers and locking the screen wasn't necessary because everyone had full trust in each other and we shared a common goal. No time for nonsense. Obviously this changed when the corporate developers arrived, teaching the ways of the professional. We also learned to save hours of programming with weeks-long projects.

I remember doing the desktop screenshot trick in my high school's computer lab. Alas I wasn't around to see how many people got suckered and who eventually figured it out (very likely the IT teacher), but it was fixed the next time I visited and not a word was said anywhere I could hear :D.

I the companies I've worked, it was ice cream. Someone would post an ice-cream emoji on the general_random slack channel under the name of the person that left the computer unlocked and that person then have to bring ice-cream for his team. We used to say that guy got ice-creamed.

Hey we did that at engineering school in the early 90s. Pranks were a little less ... subtle shall we say.

Still, to this day I still can't walk off my desk with locking my screen. So the lesson was well taught, and I'm happy about that (and have find memories of the various pranks).

Locking is not enough today. I take laptop, phone and all personal stuff for lunch and meetings. Over years I had too much stuff broken, stolen, chowed... Once someone spilled coffee over my laptop! Another time coworker peed on my laptop bag!

I learnt this lesson already during the university, worse you could even lock your screen, but there were xhost and VT access that could also be used for some fun, if the default security settings were left on their original state.

had this in the 00 at a company i worked at, happended to me one time, pizza for the all dev teams. i took the lesson (never happend again), but refused to buy the pizza. i am there for earning money, not to spend it.

You should at least reread your text. I found the story interesting, but it's practically unreadable. The text is completely AI-generated, and poorly generated.

Hard read as the AI tells are everywhere. Too bad; as a tale of a different time it could be interesting.

left alt + left shift + print screen toggles high contrast mode in Window 9x. That was always fun to do on an unlocked screen.

I like the story, I really can’t stand the way you used AI to write this. The story is great! But I genuinely cannot tell what you actually think. Too much over-wording and cheesy phrasing.

So so many emdashes and LLM phrasing....

TL;DR (or Too Slop; Didn't Read), if you left your computer unlocked at PayPal other employees would send emails from you to the whole company, like offering to buy everyone donuts.