All your trivia belongs to us

At the college computer lab where this pilot fish works, one employee has taken to playing with the network monitoring software -- much to the dismay of the students trying to use the computers.

"Several attempts to discourage this were ignored," fish says, "so I set out to find a method of stopping this mistreatment of our students. I set all of the hosts to refer to 127.0.0.1."

Next day, the problem employee is at it again. But when he sends a "Reboot: No Warning" command to one of the lab PCs, his own computer reboots on the spot.

Fish is watching out of the corner of his eye as his puzzled co-worker waits for his machine to finish booting. Then the co-worker queues up the same command for the same user -- and once again, his own system reboots.

Now he's worried. "I think that student is up to something," he tells fish. "Every time I try to reboot his system, it rebounds to me!"

Fish is desperately trying to keep from laughing, but he's saved when a network-savvy associate steps in. The network guy rattles off a litany of technical-sounding terms related to firewalls and hacking, then concludes with a completely straight face:

"They're haxoring our Gibson."

That's a dead giveaway, fish figures. How could anyone working here not recognize that line from the movie Hackers?

But the problem employee doesn't. And when the deadpan network guy tells him to contact the help desk immediately to report the successful hack, he doesn't hesitate.

Says fish, "I wish I could say that the look on his face when the term 'haxoring the Gibson' was explained to him by a frustrated system administrator is imprinted indelibly upon my mind.

"But I simply couldn't see his face anymore through the tears of laughter when he started shouting at the phone, 'Haxoring our Gibson! Haxoring our Gibson! Why don't you put someone on the phone that knows what they're doing?!?'"

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