In most workplaces, the IT department is what keeps your entire workforce from crashing and burning on a daily basis.

They know how everything runs behind the scenes, and they also know exactly what little action to take that will bring productivity to a grinding halt!

So, when this IT employee had been called for the same printing issue one too many times, he sent a message from “God” to the employee that scared the daylights out of him!

Check it out!

Message from God

Was on call rotation. Beeper went off, so I went into work.

This was in the day when the beeper just went off. You had to know who to call. No LED screen with a number. Just audio.

But I digress. I was working at a hospital, and at least once or twice a week the beeper goes off.

Call, 3rd floor radiology. Already I know the issue.

The night-shift  X-Ray transcriptionist has removed the paper so he can work on his personal Japanese language class.

The problem was we could never prove it.

This was a dot matrix printer with normally triplicate forms (again, a long time ago).

He can’t get the forms back in? He calls the operator. Who calls the beeper.

But he saw the perfect opportunity to catch the transcriptionist one night when the beeper went off!

One night we’re working very late/early. Beeper goes off & I’m onsite with a coworker.

We’d just set up a God account for fun. We did a terminal to terminal message, “I know what you’re doing!”

What we didn’t know was you can’t use the maximum number for priority on a user account.

The result? The mainframe crashed!

And the message they sent was enough to make anyone have second thoughts about using the printer again!

For clarity message would read:

“MESSAGE FROM GOD: I KNOW WHAT YOU’RE DOING!”

We call the hospital (operator can’t see where from), “Be there in about 30.”

Normal response time. About 30 minutes later we head up to the 3rd floor.

Guy is white as a sheet. We change out the paper. No words are exchanged.

Just as he planned, he never had to deal with this guy’s printing problems again!

After that night? NEVER got a call from 3rd floor radiology.

That probably meant he saw the message on the screen right before everything went dark on the computer.

We also fixed the priority value so we didn’t crash the mainframe again. I laugh about it to this day, decades later!

Reddit loved OP’s tech savvy prank, with many reminded of their own interesting system glitches and tricks.

This user recalled a time he scared a poor secretary at his office with a message saying she had to pay to use the printer!

And this commenter completely pranked a coworker on April Fools, and she was in such disbelief that even after he explained it to her she still had no idea what happened!

Finally, this user theorized that it was actually the noise of the printer that was bothering the transcriptionist.

Freaky stuff… don’t mess with your IT department.

They’re always watching!

If you liked that post, check out this story about a customer who insists that their credit card works, and finds out that isn’t the case.