The Register, Monday, February 23rd, 2026
Work Experience Kids Messed With Manager's PC To Send Him To Ctrl-Alt-Del Hell
Rogue user showed them an excellent prank, which they put into production
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The Register, Friday, February 20th, 2026
Desktop Tech Sent To Prison For An Education On Strange Places To Put Tattoos
And a very awkward introduction to workplace culture
more → The Register, Friday, February 13th, 2026
Enforcing Piracy Policy Earned Helpdesk Worker Death Threats
This week, meet a reader we'll Regomize as "Henry" who shared a chilling story from his time delivering internal desktop support for a major internet service provider.
more → The Register, Monday, February 9th, 2026
Tech Support Chap Invented Fake Fix For Non-Problem And Watched It Spread Across The Office
You can fool some of the people some of the time, but The Register tries to entertain all of its readers most of the time and especially early on Monday mornings, when we present a new installment of "Who, Me?" - the reader-contributed column that shares your stories of workplace mayhem and mischief.
more → The Register, Friday, February 6th, 2026
New Hire Fixed A Problem So Fast, Their Boss Left To Become A Yoga Instructor
Poking around in deep menus found a fault that flummoxed old hands
more → The Register, Monday, February 16th, 2026
Final step to put new website into production deleted it instead
The Register hopes you arrive at your desk well-rested after a pleasant weekend, and not stressed out by working late as is the case in this week's instalment of "Who, Me?" - the reader contributed column that chronicles your mistakes and escapes.
more → The Register, Monday, February 2nd, 2026
Techie's One Ring Brought Darkness By Shorting A Server
Monday brings the shock of a return to work, a transition The Register always tries to ease by bringing you a new instalment of Who, Me?, the reader-contributed column in which your fellow readers admit to errors and disclose how they dodged the consequences.
more → The Register, Friday, January 30th, 2026
In-House Techies Fixed Faults Before Outsourced Help Even Noticed They'd Happened
60-minute SLA was effectively useless and the contractor admitted it
more → The Register, Monday, January 26th, 2026
Marketing 'Genius' Destroyed A Printer By Trying To Fix A Paper Jam
This week, meet a reader we'll Regomize as "Louis" who told us he once managed the IT operations at a leasing company.
more → The Register, Friday, January 23rd, 2026
Tech Support Detective Solved PC Crime By Looking In The Carpark
Some tech support jobs are sweet, and others go sour. Whatever taste they leave in your mouth, The Register celebrates them all each week in On Call - the reader-contributed column that shares your support experiences.
more → The Register, Monday, January 19th, 2026
ATM Maintenance Tech Broke The Bank By Forgetting To Return A Key
This week, meet a reader we'll Regomize as 'Phil' who once had a job maintaining automatic teller machines (ATMs).
more → The Register, Friday, January 16th, 2026
Engineer Used Welding Shop Air Hose To 'Clean' PCs - Hilarity Did Not Ensue
This week, meet a reader we'll Regomize as "Wilson" who once worked as the boss of a welding shop attached to an engineering consultancy. Wilson set the scene by telling us this story came from the early 1980s, when AutoCAD was replacing drawing boards.
more → The Register, Monday, January 12th, 2026
Techie Banned From Client Site For Outage He Didn't Cause
This week, meet a reader we'll Regomize as 'Patrick' who told us he once installed an extra shelf of storage for a NAS at a local council office in Australia. The job initially went well. 'The staff left me alone in the computer room while I was tidying up the paperwork,' Patrick wrote. While he handled that administrivia, something caught Patrick's eye.
more → The Register, Friday, January 9th, 2026
Help Desk Read Irrelevant Script, So Techies Found And Fixed Their Own Problem
As you should, when being told the only remedy is deleting everything and starting again
more → The Register, Monday, January 5th, 2026
Techie Turned The Tables On Office Bullies With Remote Access Rumble
Meet the 'Mean Avenger', the office anti-hero who steps in when managers don't defend their team
more → The Register, Friday, January 2nd, 2026
The Y2K Bug Delayed My Honeymoon ... By 17 Years!
More tales of apocalypse avoided - including in an animal testing lab - and the hard work that made that possible
more → The Register, Thursday, January 1st, 2026
Welcome To Wendy's! Before Your Order Can Be Taken, You Must First Reset This Kiosk
Today's example of bork-in-the-wild shows that Microsoft is not the only game in town when it comes to screens having an IT moment in public. No, there will be no orders on this Firefox-based drive-thru kiosk at Wendy's.
more → The Register, Monday, December 29th, 2025
When The Lights Went Out, And The Shooting Started, Y2K Started To Feel All Too Real
Welcome to a special festive season edition of On Call, in which we share readers' stories of working on the 31st of December 1999 - the moment the tech world held its breath and hoped years of Year 2000 bug remediation efforts would work.
more → The Register, December 11,2025
IT Team Forced To Camp In The Office For Days After Y2K Bug Found In Boss's Side Project
The lack of trust that leads to outsourcing can be expensive
more → The Register, December 11,2025
New Boss Was Bad, His Attitude Was Ugly, So The Tech Team Pranked Him Good
This week, meet a reader we'll Regomize as "Clint" who told us he once worked as a consultant for a major Italian entertainment company.
more → The Register, Friday, December 19th, 2025
User Found Two Reasons - Both Of Them Wrong - To Dispute Tech Support's Diagnosis
Hey, teacher, leave that cabling alone
more → The Register, Monday, December 15th, 2025
Techie 'Forgot' To Tell Boss Their Cost-Saving Idea Meant A Day Of Gaming
One keypress turned a tricky Windows NT balancing act into a life of leisure
more → The Register, December 12,2025
User Insisted Their Screen Was Blank, Until Admitting It Wasn't
Getting that confession took hours, during which L1 and L2 support gave up
more → The Register, December 8,2025
Untrained Techie Broke The Rules, Made A Mistake, And Found A Better Way To Work
Opinion varies about the most efficient way to commence a working week. The Register's contribution to that conversation is Who, Me? It's the reader-contributed column in which you share stories of your mistakes, and subsequent escapes.
more → The Register, Friday, December 5th, 2025
Vendor's Secret 'Fix' Made Critical App Unusable During Business Hours
Medical software maker also had a vastly unhealthy approach to security
more → The Register, Friday, December 5th, 2025
Web Dev's Crawler Took Down Major Online Bookstore By Buying Too Many Books
Forgot one setting, for one subdomain, and caused an hour of severe errors
more → The Register, Friday, November 28th, 2025
Cabling Survived Dungeons And Fish Factories, Until A Lazy User Took The Network Down
A quick squeeze of the crimper saved the day ... and a career
more → The Register, Monday, November 24th, 2025
Dev's Last-Day-Of-Contract Code Helped To Crash App Used By 350,000 People
Customer signed off and a remaining staffer triggered the mess
more → The Register, Friday, November 21st, 2025
Linux Admin Hated Downtime So Much He Schlepped A Live Ups During Office Move
The working week can be burdensome, so each Friday morning The Register tries to lighten the load by bringing you a new instalment of On Call, the reader-contributed column in which you let go of tech support stories that weigh on your memory.
more → The Register, Monday, November 17th, 2025
Developer Made One Wrong Click And Sent His AWS Bill Into The Stratosphere
Yes, he knows the 40x increase could have been avoided with some pretty simple automation
more → The Register, Friday, November 14th, 2025
Developer Battled To Write His Own Documentation, But Lost The Boss Fight
This week, meet a reader we'll Regomize as "Gordon" who told us about his time working for a storage vendor as the sole developer and maintainer of an application used by around 50 other employees.
more → The Register, Monday, November 10th, 2025
Techie Ran Up $40,000 Bill Trying To Download A Driver
This week, meet a reader we'll Regomize as 'William,' who like many of you got his first taste of computers from behind the keyboard of a Commodore Amiga.
more → The Register, Friday, November 7th, 2025
Help Desk Boss Fell For 'Internet Cleaning Day' Prank - Then Swore He Got The Joke
Lost packets would be cleaned out of routers, dead gopher servers would be pulled out of holes
more → The Register, Monday, November 3rd, 2025
'ERP Down For Emergency Maintenance' Was Code For 'You Deleted What?'
One SQL slip-up is survivable. Not learning from the first mess meant change
more → The Register, Friday, October 31st, 2025
Actor Couldn't Understand Why Computer Didn't Work When The Curtain Came Down
When tech support collides with Halloween, the results are scary
more → The Register, Monday, October 27th, 2025
Frustrated Consultant 'Went Full Hulk' And Started Smashing Hardware
Welcome to Monday morning and another installment of Who, Me? For the uninitiated, it's The Register's weekly reader-contributed column that tells tales of your greatest misses, and how you rebuilt a career afterward.
more → The Register, Friday, October 24th, 2025
New Boss Took Charge Of Project Code And Sent Two Billion Unwanted Emails
Techie summoned at 02:00 AM to sort things out sent another 2 billion trying to fix it
more → The Register, Monday, October 20th, 2025
Company That Made Power Systems For Servers Didn't Know Why Its Own Machines Ran Out Of Juice
Oh . you mean we shouldn't press that button?
more → The Register, Friday, October 17th, 2025
Fax Virus' Panicked A Manager And Sparked Job-Killing Reply-All Incident
The 1990s called with a reminder that in the time before ransomware, infosec panics could be quite quaint
more → The Register, Monday, October 13th, 2025
Techies Tossed Appliance That Had No Power Cord, But Turned Out To Power Their Company
Illicit colo cleanup seemed like a good way to get out of the house during Covid
more → The Register, Friday, October 10th, 2025
Client Defended Engineer After Oil Baron-Turned Tech Support Entrepreneur Lied About Dodgy Dealings
Reputations earned over years of service can work wonders
more → The Register, Monday, October 6th, 2025
Techie Found An Error Message So Rude The CEO Of IBM Apologized For It
This week, meet a reader we'll Regomize as "Saul" who shared a story from his time working for an IBM dealer in the late 1980s. "I'd taught myself how to use a PC/DOS and got the job because I knew more about PCs than the hiring manager or the team lead," Saul told Who, Me? On his first day at the coal face, his boss asked him to learn something new: UNIX.
more → The Register, Friday, October 3rd, 2025
Energy Drink Company Punished ERP Graybeard For Going Too Fast
Cool kids drank the aggressive micro-management Kool-Aid
more → The Register, Monday, September 29th, 2025
Intern Had No Idea What Not To Do, So Nearly Mangled A Mainframe
An early career lesson in the power of documentation, and the importance of exploration
more → The Register, Friday, September 26th, 2025
Hardware Inspector Fired For Spotting An Error He Wasn't Trained To Find
Manager's quality control priorities were upside down
more → The Register, Monday, September 22nd, 2025
Bored Developers Accidentally Turned Their Watercooler Into A Bootleg Brewery
Revenge on managers who slow things down is a drink best served with floating fungus
more → The Rgeister, September 19,2025
Word To The Wise: Don't Tell Your IT Manager They're Not In Excel
Contractor sneakily fired after pointing out odious ignorance
more → The Rgeister, September 15,2025
After Deleting A Web Server, I Started Checking What I Typed Before Hitting 'Enter'
Student thought she had the hang of this 'Linux' thing and its kooky CLI
more → The Register, Friday, September 12th, 2025
'IT Manager' Needed Tech Support Because They Had Never Heard Of A Command Line
The very premise on which The Register is built is that our readers know quite a lot about information technology, and that stories featured each Friday in On Call - our weekly tales of your support experiences - therefore reflect your working lives.
more → The Register, Tuesday, September 9th, 2025
AI Darwin Awards Launch To Celebrate Spectacularly Bad Deployments
From fast food fiascos to botched databases, there are fresh honors for machine learning misadventures
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