People lying is something we’ve gotten used to but what happens when computers start lying?

This IT employee shares how he got fooled by his computer while he was trying to locate a file.

Check out the full story!

They lie to you

As someone employed as an IT technician in the educational sector, we see a lot of things. Today was a new one. Anyone in the educational sector knows that exams are a stressful time.

He explains how things are always tense…

Much can go wrong, and with the increased use of technology to support those that struggle academically, technology is playing a larger role in exam provision. The stress of exam sittings is always increased when you get lied to, and so begins our story…

It’s resit season.

Those that did poorly in their exams 6 months ago, get a second chance to improve their grade. This of course means, that those with access needs (word processor rather than writing the exam, or a text-to-speech audio reader for those struggling with reading) also need provisions.

Usually this means they are sat in a computer room with an exam invigilator and some well tested workstations. Not today…

This is where it gets tricky…

Today, we had the requirements for a student to be in their own room. This meant we had to provide a laptop. Easy enough, the same software is loaded on the laptops, and as such, exams can be held pretty much wherever.

As long as the file can be saved to our network shares, everything is good.

Of course, being exam accounts, there’s a lot of restrictions on what can be accessed (no internet access for example), as well as no access to certain programs, no access to anything other than the the exam account’s user area etc… This is great, it prevents a lot of cheating and exam conditions breaches.

When it comes to printing the exams, the usual process is to print to the local room’s printer. Every computer room has it’s own laser printer, and so that is where exams are printed to usually.

He knows things would get weird…

When using laptops, the process is quite different. We usually look in the exam account’s user area on the server, open it, and print it from there… We don’t map printers to laptops, the expectation is printing happens from hard wired systems.

Except today, it wasn’t there. We looked on the laptop, it’s saved to their user area. it’s saved to “\\myorg.network\users$\exams\examacc” That’s where the user area drive maps to, that’s where explorer says it’s saved.

Looking at the server, nothing. It’s connected to the network, everything looks fine, but this file won’t save to the server.

Yikes.

I try saving it to basically anywhere on the laptop locally, no luck. We’re too good for ourselves, these accounts are locked down like Alcatraz.

I’ve checked the share permissions. They look perfectly fine. The account has access to the share, similarly configured accounts have worked correctly nigh on 18 hours before…

He was shocked!

WHAT??

Except, there’s a way out… The laptop I’ve used was my own office laptop, as the request for the laptop for the exam was made incredibly late. Therefore there’s printers mapped that wouldn’t normally be. Namely the photo printer in the art office.

PRINTPRINTPRINTPRINT!!! And a sprint to art office! Aaaaaand it’s on card. Well at least it’s on something. We’re saved!

Cool, now lets see if we can get the digital copy. Let’s “switch users” and log in to an admin account. Explorer.exe clearly lied to us earlier by saying the file was saved to the server, surely it’s in “C:\users\examacc\Documents”. Right? Right?!?!

Dear readers…. No.

It’s nowhere. Whatever Explorer said, it was bullcrap. This file is nowhere on this drive. Searching the C: drive for the file pulls up nothing either.

He was so frustrated at this point…

So I decide to switch back to examacc, The files are still there clearly saved to the share, from the laptops point of view. The network share still shows nothing.

And then I think… Is it the network? Nahh, it’s connected, it shows it’s connected. No errors came up logging is as admin… I could access all the shares under that account. But leave it, let’s try it anyway.

I plug in the network cable. I save the file…

It appears on the network share.

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WHAT????

So there was no permission issues. It was a network issue. Explorer lied to me.

The file is printer, handed to the exam officer, and I’m left to the conclusion that computers don’t need AI to lie to you….

YIKES! That sounds super weird!

Who would have thought computers would learn to lie?!

Let’s find out what folks on Reddit think about this one.

This user knows the argument with computers is a long one.

This user knows how windows has always been weird…

If you enjoyed this story, check out this post about a helicopter inspector who grounds a flight after the pilot is rude to him.

This user knows there’s something up here.

This user hopes the kids didn’t mess up their exam entries!

This system sounds like a failure!