Those Boring Meetings Are Getting SPICY

I used to work at a large bank in the UK as a junior support analyst. In the early days, I surprised my colleagues by picking up shell and SQL scripting really quickly, and I became the go-to for creating bespoke reporting for issues that needed monitoring — usually PDFs with a list of discrepancies — that would go to executives to take into meetings.

I handed in my notice for a better role elsewhere, so I needed to hand over this work to someone in my team — my manager. (We were a small team.)

The handover went well, and the first thing my manager did was to make the report look nicer, with better fonts and company logos, as the report was being distributed to a wider audience in the company.

At the same time, an adjacent team — the one that looked after all the expensive printers — was getting looked into by the IT security team for distributing adult material at work, something my manager and I laughed about.

It turns out, my manager, being lazy, just used the URL of the company logo instead of adding it into the script.

The image was hosted by a conspiracy website in Berlin. I can only imagine that this site was seeing a ping/image download every morning at 8:35, and an admin there did a reverse IP trace, only to discover it was owned by the bank that the logo was from.

This German genius replaced the image with — to keep it SFW — a picture of a very beautiful woman with her legs spread while balancing on something large. It had been at the bottom of every report for approximately five weeks — thousands of emails.

It was discovered by an executive while he was holding his freshly printed report. The image was on the back page facing everyone else in the meeting, full of other executives.

I’m pretty sure nothing came of it, and everyone involved thought it was hilarious, but my manager got very lucky!