Living with other people can be aggravating, especially if you have a lazy roommate who refuses to help with chores.

What would you do if you were in charge of the Internet connection and one roommate only wanted to play online games? Would you let him be lazy? Or would you make his gaming life miserable?

In the following story, this exact scenario happened to a group of college housemates. Let’s see what they did.

Video games are more important than chores? That’s some nice internet you have, it would be a shame if something were to happen to it.

When I was in my 3rd year of university, I lived with a couple of housemates. One was super-awesome, and the other guy turned out to be completely useless.

He wouldn’t help out with the chores AT ALL… not even just turning on the dishwasher when it was full. He just wanted to play computer games all day.

I mean… I get it. Gaming is awesome; me and the awesome housemate were playing a lot of Lineage II at the time, but we still made time for real life stuff.

If you value the Internet and live with an IT person, you better do your part around the house … or else.

Eventually me and awesome housemate had enough of the other guy not pulling his weight. I was in control of our internet connection, including operating our router (a Linux box shoved under my desk).

So, we hatched a plan and I wrote a script.

Periodically, it would scan through the NAT state table on the router (a list of all connections the router was handling between the internal computers and the Internet), identify connections from lazy housemate’s PC, and then would randomly, in descending order of likelihood:

• Do nothing
• Forge a FIN packet that appeared to be from housemate’s PC and send it to the remote server
• Forge a FIN packet that appeared to be from the remote server and send it to housemate’s PC
• Forge a RST packet that appeared to be from housemate’s PC and send it to the remote server
• Forge a RST packet that appeared to be from the remote server and send it to housemate’s PC
• Drop the connection from the NAT state table

If you’re confused, this will help.

To explain this to the non-initiated:

A FIN packet is a notification to one side of the connection that the other side would like to terminate the connection; there is a negotiation that happens between both sides to tear down the connection, so both sides know about it. This is a “graceful” disconnect.

A RST packet is a “hard disconnect” — drop the connection immediately, don’t negotiate with the other side, don’t send any more packets — just stop.

Removing the connection from the state table effectively stops all traffic in either direction (because the router no longer knows about the connection) but neither side of the connection knows this has happend.

The last 3 options in the list are particularly nasty because it leaves one (or both) sides of the connection thinking that they are still connected.

Dedicated players will wait as long as it takes to join a World of Warcraft server.

Now, understand — this is wayyyy back when WoW first launched, and that is pretty much the only game lazy housemate was playing.

If you played WoW around that time, you’ll remember the LOOOOONNNNNNNGGGGGG queues to get onto a server — 20+ minutes at least.

Imagine, if you will, what would happen in an MMO if you tell the client to disconnect, but the server thinks the client is still connected.

He must’ve been very frustrated.

The client quits immediately with a “you have been disconnected” message, but the server won’t log the user out for a LONG time (at least several minutes), and in the worst case will continue doing the last-commanded action (like…. “walk forward”).

In the case of early WoW, you couldn’t even log in and wait in the queue again because… the server thought you were already logged in. You had to wait 5-10 minutes for it to kick you off, THEN join the queue for 20+ minutes.

As time went on, we pestered the bad roommate to help with the chores. Each time he refused, we would bump the likelihood that one of the non-“do nothing” options would happen.

And then it started to show.

Every time it killed one of his WoW connections, we would hear a loud “F***”.

Somewhat quietly at first, then louder and louder over time, then he started literally smashing his keyboard and/or mouse (and at least once, his monitor, which left some nice dead pixels in the shape of a fist).

When we moved out, he removed — I kid you not — a decent sized box FULL of smashed mice.

Feeling vindicated, the other roommates found it funny.

It got to the point where he would log in, wait in the queue, get into the game, start moving around, and within 5-10 minutes, it would kill his connection, and after he eventually got back in, he would often find his character dead from NPCs or at the bottom of a cliff because his character had continued to walk forward for 5 minutes.

Sometimes he wouldn’t even make it out of the queue before being disconnected. It was hilarious to us, but he was absolutely RAGING.

Even more hilariously, my script ONLY looked at connections to WoW; other connections to, for example, Ventrilo, were unaffected.

He finally got suspicious.

So the housemate would be on Vent with his clanmates, would drop out of the game, but his voice chat would be completely unaffected.

Eventually (at least 3-4 weeks later) he came and asked me if there was something wrong with the internet connection.

I said something to the effect of “Oh, yeah, I applied an update to the router to make the internet connection as reliable as the person using it.”

Some people never learn.

He got the hint… but still didn’t help with housework. He put up with a practically-unusable internet connection until we moved out (which wasn’t long after that).

Meddle not in the affairs of sysadmins, for your network connections are crunchy and are tasty with ketchup.

Wow! This must have been hilarious to watch!

Let’s see what the folks over at Reddit had to say about it.

Here’s another example of how dedicated WoW players are.

This person had a similar situation but handled it differently.

Yet another person very dedicated to WoW!

Here’s an example of a gamer who will go to any length to keep their connection.

His life would’ve been easier if he just helped around the house.

Hopefully, he learned a lesson.

If you liked this post, check out this story about an employee who got revenge on a co-worker who kept grading their work suspiciously low.