Kids can surprise you in the most spectacular ways.

So, what would you do if parents hired you to stop their eleven-year-old from bypassing parental controls, and what you discovered was that she had secretly installed a second hard drive with Linux? Would you expose her to her parents? Or would you close the loophole and let her keep the secret?

In the following story, one PC tech finds himself in this situation and can’t bring himself to tell on her. Here’s the story.

The time I was called in to stop an 11 year old genius.

In 2007, when I was still working for myself as a pc technician, a couple saw the flyers I had posted. They called me and told me their daughter (11) kept bypassing their parental software and going online. They asked me to take a look and see what I could do.

So I go in, look at their XP setup, and of course, the software is garbage. I test it out, and am able to get around it via the device manager.

So I go online, look for a better one, and install it.

I see the kid peeking from around a corner just… smirking. I know she’s done something. I open the new software, and everything seems fine.

After a little digging, he saw something weird.

It was something like NetWare Nanny or something, I can’t remember the name. Basically, it blocked any attempt to open non-whitelisted websites.

Still, that smug look made me more curious. I looked around the programs folder, but nothing stood out. Checked running processes, everything is ok. Looked in the service list, fine. Ok, time for a reboot.

As the computer reboots, I notice something. For a brief second, it said the first boot device was disabled and loaded the secondary device. Since I had been hired to investigate, I did so.

I rebooted again and loaded the bios menu. A second hard drive was listed in the BIOS as the primary. I booted it up, and it took me to a very familiar Linux screen I had been using at home.

Then, he figured out what she did.

She had somehow managed to install a second hard drive, hide it in Windows, load it with Linux, and hide all of this from her parents.

I was incredibly impressed.

I wrote a short note to her because I knew she would eventually figure out a way past what I was about to do. I then went into the bios and locked it with the Linux boot device disabled. I thought about giving her up and handing her parents the hard drive. But I just couldn’t.

I wrote down the password to the BIOS, handed it to them, and told them I had locked the BIOS so it couldn’t be changed without the password. I still wonder how long it took her to find that slip of paper and get back online.

Wow! There’s no way you could’ve seen that coming.

Let’s check out what the people over at Reddit think about it.

According to this comment, kids these days don’t know much about computers.

This man helped an ex keep her son off the computer.

Here’s someone who was doing tech work in elementary school.

Let’s hope she didn’t figure it out.

What a smart kid!

If you liked that story, check out this post about a group of employees who got together and why working from home was a good financial decision.