Once Is All It Takes…

This happened about five years ago when I worked as an IT technician in a factory. I was an infrastructure technician and I had a colleague — we’ll call him J — who, like me, had a weird sense of humour. J told me that the following happened to him one day. 

At the time, we had two wireless networks; one was our corporate network, and only for laptops, barcode scanners, and company mobile phones. The other was technically only for visitors, but employees tended to connect their personal mobile phones to it. 

Our visitor network was only available in certain parts of our two factories. However, someone had managed to find the Wi-Fi code for the corporate network, so quite a few people connected their personal mobile phones to it. Our SysAdmin had to block these devices because they took up valuable IP addresses that were needed for devices like handheld barcode scanners.

One day, J went round to the stores to look at a printer that wasn’t working. He fixed it and got chatting with the stores guys. One of the younger guys asked J why he had suddenly lost connection to the corporate Wi-Fi. J, completely deadpan said, “Yeah, we had to block personal devices because we discovered that some people were using the corporate network to look at p*rnography on their mobile phones.” Defensively, the storeman replied, “I only did that once!”

J went very quiet, looked the storeman in the eye, and said, “I was only joking!” The storeman blushed bright red, and said, “Oh, so was I!”