It’s the late 90s and I was working in IT for a small (200 employees) company.
One of my tasks was performing daily data backups, which ran for about four hours and started after everyone else had left for the day.
We had an intercom system in the building, where if you picked up your phone and dialed a specific extension, you could page someone, or make announcements so everyone could hear.
One night I was in the process of running Ethernet cable from switches on the second floor down to individual terminals on the first floor, so there was a lot walking around the building.
I like to have music when I’m working, but I didn’t have an MP3 player at the time, so I thought… “I have music on my PC and no one is around. Why don’t I just…”, and I went around and cranked the volume knob on every ceiling intercom speaker in the whole building. Then I dialed into the intercom from the phone in my office, put the handset up as close as I could to my PC speakers, and boom, music throughout the building.
Cut to a few hours later, it’s late, I’m tired, the backup is finished, so I close down the system, hit the lights, lock the doors, and go home.
The next day, I come in, not thinking about anything from the night before, and get to work. About 11:00am, the owner’s secretary got on the intercom to page someone… and blew everyone out of their seats. There was an almost collective, “What the fuck!!!” from everyone, and an “Ohhh, shiiit” from me, because of course I immediately knew what happened.
I ran around like a madman, turning the volume down on all of the speakers that I had forgotten the night before, while saying, “No idea… Yeah it’s crazy… No no, it’s fixed now…”
No one ever found out exactly why the volume was so loud that morning.
Not at work but in High School.
It was the 90s and computers at school had just become a thing. Our school offered a typing class which seemed pretty chill so I signed up for that. I think I was the only guy in the class.
Anyway, I started talking to this girl who sat across from me and we ended up just sending emails back and forth to each other all through class, using our school emails. This went on for weeks. The messages started to get kinda flirty and then eventually they got more than flirty.
So I’m sitting in another class one day, maths or something, and a teacher comes in and asks if I can go with her. She takes me to the principle’s office and sits me down. In walks the principle with typing girl and she sits her down next to me. The principle then dumps a massive pile of paper on the desk and asks us to explain… we of course have no idea what she’s talking about. I pick up a sheet and start reading and my heart drops. It’s our entire email chain, weeks of cringe and filth. They must have been monitoring our emails, right? Wrong.
So we get a bollocking, threatened with suspension, the whole deal, but it wasn’t until we were sent on our way that we started to realise what had actually happened and the gravity of the situation. Over the next few hours some really weird shit started happening. I’d be walking through school and kids I didn’t even know would just start pointing at me, shouting out random things. Even my teachers were being super weird. Everything just felt really off and then my mate filled me in.
Now, to this day, I still don’t know how this happened. I genuinely think that our school email system was set up wrong but somehow, when replying to one of typing girl’s messages, I had forwarded our whole email chain to every person at our school. Every kid. Every teacher. Thousands of them.
It was humiliating.
I was forever known as that guy. Typing girl never talked to me again.
TLDR: I accidentally forwarded weeks worth of dirty emails to our entire school and held on to my virginity.
As a fellow pro in the keeping-virginity in high school dept, game recognizes game.
That sucks. I think the blame is on them for misconfiguration.