CONTENT WARNING: Drugging, Sexual Assault

A few years ago, I was working in a hotel as the front desk manager, covering the audit (overnight) shift due to a callout. A young lady who was wearing a very short skirt and a low-cut top and looked worse for wear came into the front lobby shortly after midnight. She walked to the center of the carpeted room and proceeded to squat down and pull her panties aside to relieve herself.

Me: “Hi, how’s it going?”

Lady: *Continuing to urinate* “Fine. How’s your night going?”

Me: “Well, it just got really interesting. Um… do you need a restroom?”

Lady: “No, I’ll be all right where I am.”

Unfortunately, I had to contact the police, and they arrived pretty quickly. The lady was extremely intoxicated, and my only option apparently was to have her arrested for indecent exposure and disorderly conduct. I work in Maryland, and that arrest would mean that she would be placed on the Sex Offender Registry in our state because that’s how the law works.

Me: *To the officer* “Could I decline to press charges now, get her identification, and have her return in a day or two to pay for the carpet cleaning?

She didn’t have money at the moment. He said I could do that because none of us wanted to destroy this woman’s life because she peed on the carpet while clearly not realizing what she was doing.

So, that’s the route we took. I photocopied her ID and gave her a note to hang on to remind her what she had done and that she needed to bring money to the hotel by a certain date or, unfortunately, the charges would get filed.

A few days later, I was on my normal shift when an extremely beautiful woman walked in inquiring about how to handle the incident that occurred the other night.

Me: “The young lady needs to come back and handle it as agreed upon.”

Lady: *Very embarrassed* “I am the young lady.”

I was blown away. What a difference a shower and makeup that wasn’t running everywhere made for her! She was very embarrassed as I recounted the story for her, and she actually started to tear up as she got money from her purse. She gave me $100 for the carpet cleaning.

Lady: “Not that it matters, I know, but I brought this to prove to you that I am not that kind of person, and I am really sorry.”

She proceeded to hand me a note from the local hospital with attached lab work that showed she had tested positive for Rohypnol (roofies). Apparently, she and two of her friends were dosed at a bar in town. One friend was sexually assaulted, while the other friend wound up in the drunk tank, and we all know where this young lady ended up.

I immediately apologized for having had her come back with money and explained that I wouldn’t be taking any money from her at all. I was so upset to find out that these three young women came to our town to have a good time and it turned out so awful. I ended up giving her and her friends a discounted rate for a few days since they had to stay for the investigation into the assault. I did my best to redeem our town by giving them anything they needed going forward.

Long story short, what I thought were just drunken shenanigans turned out to be someone’s worst night. Calling the police was a godsend because they were able to identify that she had also been dosed.

She and I still communicate to this day, and I see her when she comes into town. (She has ever since and still does use the regular restroom when she visits!)

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I’m working in fraud protection for a department store’s credit card while saving money for college. One day, I have a call from the store. A woman was putting in a request for a card at the store and was told she had to talk to my department before the card could be used.

Caller: “Why do I have to answer all these questions?”

Me: “Your credit bureau report has a note saying you’ve been the victim of identity theft in the past and that you would like extra verification to prevent anyone from fraudulently opening a card in your name.”

Caller: “Yeah, but that was years ago. I haven’t had trouble with that for a while.”

Me: “I understand, but since the credit report says you’ve had someone steal your identity, we need to do a few extra verification steps to ensure that no one else is capable of opening accounts in your name.”

Caller: “But I’m the real person! I don’t need anyone checking things now. Whoever was doing all that stopped years ago.”

Me: “Well, ma’am, you can always contact the credit bureau and ask them to remove the warning if you feel it’s no longer required. But I’m afraid since the warning is currently on the report, my system won’t let me move forward until I’ve done some extra verification.”

This is a lie; while our customer service team has very automated systems that control what they can do given the widely different types of fraud and how they should be handled, it generally requires a human who can use their discretion to handle these accounts, and as such, we don’t have automated systems restricting our actions.

However, I’ve found that blaming my computer for why I’m doing something tends to appease customers more than trying to tell them I’m not stupid enough to ignore a giant warning that someone may try opening fake accounts just because she asked me to.

Caller: “They didn’t tell me I’d have to do all this when I put that on the report!”

This begs the question of what she thought we would do to stop someone from opening accounts in her name if not verifying things like this.

She continues to grumble but does begrudgingly allow me to verify everything we need. I’m pretty confident that she is the real person, even assuming the thief knew enough to pass our extra verification, they wouldn’t have wasted time fighting me about it first. The fraudulent folks treat this like a job and ironically tend to be more professional — when not actively trying to upset us to distract us — than our regular customers.

Caller: “Finally! I hope you all at least put that guy that stole my social through this much trouble, also.”

Me: “That is the point of this, ma’am.”

When I was a little kid, my parents took me to a restaurant well known for making breakfast around lunchtime. My father decided on a steak while I stuck to breakfast stuff and got eggs.

Waitress: “And how do you want your steak cooked?”

Dad: “Well done.”

Waitress: *To me* “And what would you like, little man?”

Dad: “He wanted [meal choice].”

Waitress: “And how do you want your eggs done?”

Me: “Um… well done?”

All the adults laughed at me, which I felt quite indignant about.

Waitress: “Sorry, hun, but I’m not sure our chef knows how to do that.”

Me: “But Dad’s is well done. I want it as good as Dad’s!”

This got me another round of amused laughs before my mother came to my rescue and told the waitress how I liked my eggs and my father explained to me what a “well done” steak really meant.

This answered a question that had pestered me for a while whenever we went out to eat: who would want a poorly done steak?

A while back, I was approached by a coworker, and sort of friend, who wanted to know if my being a programmer meant I could break into a password-protected laptop. Apparently, she noticed that someone accidentally left his laptop behind when leaving a train, and it was a little too late to catch him before the train doors closed. She tried asking at the train station how to return it, but they were no help, so now she had a locked laptop in her possession and no clue what to do with it. She figured she might as well make use of it if she couldn’t return it.

I believed her story. She was a very kind and well-meaning person, and I had every confidence that she had made a sincere effort to return the laptop before coming to me. Still, I wasn’t all that comfortable with the idea of breaking into someone else’s laptop, and I originally argued that I didn’t know how to unlock it anyway.

But even as I was trying to point out that being a programmer didn’t make me a master hacker, the geek part of my brain couldn’t help but tackle the problem, and I quickly realized that not only could I probably unlock it, but I didn’t expect it to be all that difficult to do. Now I found myself tempted to help just so I could later joke that I broke into a computer with my 1337 H4x0r skills.

In the end, I agreed to try to do what my coworker wanted, but only on the condition that the first priority would be to return the laptop to the rightful owner and she would only get the laptop back if I couldn’t do so. My original plan for unlocking the machine involved a Linux boot disk, but I was saved from having to burn one by the fact that a quick Google search returned a straightforward step-by-step guide for how to get past Windows passwords.

It involved intentionally shutting the machine down wrong so it would offer to do a full scan of the hard drive when rebooted. When that scan was completed, it would give a message in Notepad about the results of the scan. If I then chose to save that message, the screen that would pop up to pick where I wanted to save the file also allowed me to do some other things, like renaming existing files, and because it opened in admin mode, I could even change files that were usually protected.

So, I replaced the “sticky keys” file that runs when you hit Tab five times in rapid succession with the program that would open a command line prompt. After another reboot, when I was prompted to enter a password I instead hit Tab until the computer tried to run “sticky keys”, and instead, it opened up a command line running in admin mode, at which point I effectively could do anything I wanted on the machine by typing the appropriate commands.

For those who are screaming, “How could Microsoft be so sloppy that you could just Google how to unlock their machines?!” I should first mention that this was a much older version of Windows, nothing you are likely to be running on your computer at home.  

More importantly, the truth is that no matter what operating system you are using, your data really isn’t secure; if this exploit hadn’t existed, I could have fallen back to my original plan to use a boot disk, after all.

I’m sure the folks at Microsoft looked at their password protection as a way to keep non-computer-savvy people away and to slow down savvy folks enough that they couldn’t break in while you were away at the bathroom. Since the exploit I used required waiting for a long hard disk scan first, the password protection still did its job of slowing hackers down, and that’s all they really could hope for.

Anyway, now that I had full access to the laptop, my goal was to try to figure out how to contact its owner with minimal invasion of privacy. I got lucky there when I almost immediately found a resume saved in his documents with a phone number and email address at the top.

Now I had a new problem: the minor detail that I’d just broken the law. At the time, the “anti-hacking” laws we had were excessively open-ended. There was no doubt that my intentional breaking into a laptop qualified, even if I had the best of intentions when doing it. So, I had to figure out how to return the thing without confessing to my evil criminal ways.

In the end, I created a dummy email account to message the person who owned the laptop about returning it. He was quite thankful. Apparently, he hadn’t backed up his computer and thought he had lost some valuable files. He asked me how I managed to contact him, but in my reply, I explained only how I had come by the laptop and glossed over how I’d figured out his email address, and he thankfully didn’t ask about the omission.

I politely declined to have him come pick up the laptop at my house — we master criminals have to hide our addresses, after all — so we settled on my dropping it off at the nearby rental office for the complex he lived in so he could pick it up there later.

My friend was a bit disappointed to discover she wasn’t getting a new laptop any time soon but admitted she couldn’t be too angry at me for managing to return it to its rightful owner.

I am extremely afraid of spiders and bugs. I am dealing with a very large cricket — easily as big as my palm — jumping around close to my feet.

All of a sudden, I get a scam call and answer.

Me: “Hello?”

Scammer: “Hi, I’m [Scammer] from [Company]. How are you?” 

Me: *Scared* “Not good. I’m being stalked by a cricket!”

Scammer: “Oh… I’m sorry to hear that… Nbye…”

And she hung up. I guess I’ve figured out how to stop these calls?