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When you work in IT, you need to keep track of all the hardware at the company to ensure it doesn’t go missing, especially if it could contain sensitive information.

When a new PC disappeared in this story, the IT team and security quickly tracked it down to the desk of an eccentric employee who worked on the trading floor and made the bank a lot of money.

They confronted the guy, and he was not apologetic or worried because he knew he wouldn’t get in trouble. He did, however, have to give the computer back.

Read through the full story to see exactly what happened.

Nice hustle, but please steal for the bank, not from the bank

Used to be a hardware support technician in an international investment bank.

Ok, he has to have everything ready for Monday.

I spent one Thursday evening after business hours setting up eight new workstations in a new “bubble” – an enclosure constructed by carpenters in the middle of an open office format.

The bubble was on a former trading floor that is now used as corporate purgatory for wayward departments during large-scale rearrangements, so a team of auditors can get to work the following Monday.

Where is the 8th computer?

Friday morning, we get a notification from a business manager on the floor: There are only seven workstations. They said eight. Seven is not eight.

After convincing said BM that technicians can indeed count up to eight as long as neither hand is covered, we take a look at the area and, indeed, there are only seven workstations.

A missing computer is a major problem.

No evidence at all that there was an eighth one – the desk it was supposed to be on was bare: No peripherals, power supplies, anything. Almost like we never installed it.

But we did, and we’re not gonna get paid once to do a job twice. Plus, there’s more important considerations working as IT in an investment bank: Missing PC means missing hard drive, and missing hard drive – even if it was freshly imaged – is enough to get a technician frog-marched out the building that same day.

This needs to be figured out fast.

You can assault an end user and they’d still give you at least a week’s investigation, but this was serious: This is the kind of place where hard drives from PC swaps are regularly put in sealed evidence bags and put in cold storage for years on the chance that regulators might want to take a peek at them.

And the auditors these PCs were destined for are important enough to get their own private area.

So, the computer is around here somewhere.

So, before panic set in, we decide to try and see if it’s at least still in the building, and the quickest (though not the most comprehensive) way to check that is to see if it’s still online.

Ping the hostname, huh, the PC is online. We hand Network Operations its IP address and they give us a switch and port – but the switch is on a different floor.

A trading floor. Curious. Tracing the line in the IDF gives us a desk location. Wait. I know that desk location.

Now things are getting interesting.

Emergency Trousers.

Emergency Trousers is a known entity to IT Hardware. We gave him that nickname after finding a spare pair of trousers nestled with his two trading PCs.

Most end users will have a blazer or dress shoes at their desk for the occasional formality, but extra pants is something we presume you’d keep around if you were concerned about your reaction to particularly bad market conditions.

This desk must have been crazy.

And it appears leg coverings weren’t the only things he was hoarding.

Indeed, we – and it is “we,” for at this point the IT posse has grown to a line manager, two techs, and a security guard – go to Emergency Trousers’ desk to find a suspiciously large number of monitors.

And for a trading floor, you have to have a lot of monitors to become suspicious . An average setup for this firm is six or seven, split among two or three high end full towers, connected through one of three types of KVM switches of varying capability.

The case of the missing PC is solved.

Emergency Trousers has nine, which is more than his allocated two PCs are meant to handle. A quick peek under his desk and, indeed, his two PCs are proud parents of a third PC! Funny, that. Care to explain how that got there?

“I found it.”

“You found it? Why did you take it?”

He isn’t even sorry that he took it.

“Nobody was using it.”

“It’s not yours. It belongs where it was.”

“Okay, but can you wait until the end of next week?”

The nerve of this guy.

Now that is the cheek of an end user who knows full well he’s on the right side of the ledger and we’re not. But we’re also not taking the fall for this.

Security is embarrassed because they didn’t notice an unauthorized individual skulking about after hours, IT is looking to make sure we have the same number of employees at the end of the day as at the start, and nobody is in the mood to let this slide.

Did they even consider letting him keep the computer?

A quick huddle and back to the end user.

“It’s going back now.”

“Okay, fine, you take take it.”

Honestly, I’m surprised they don’t want to move it themselves.

“No, we’re not touching it. If we touch it now, we’re culpable. You put it back, since you were clearly competent enough to move it and set it up here.”

A further conversation with his line manager and Emergency Trousers is pulled from his desk to return and hook up an auditor’s PC on a different floor.

These types of new rules never last.

Security is lined up and given a collective slap in the face, access rules tighten for exactly thirty days – long enough to show force, short enough that it ends right as people are getting annoyed at the new measures.

IT gets to live another day, and according to his team members, Emergency Trousers was pulled aside by his manager and given an admonishment and a slap on the wrist: “We like your drive and hustle, but please steal for the bank, not from the bank.”

Emergency Trousers must make a lot of money for the bank, so he can get away with basically whatever he wants.

Read on to see what the people in the comments have to say about this story.

This commenter has a great suggestion.

You never want end users doing their own IT work.

Any advantage you can get can make a lot of money for brokers.

Some people are weird.

If you enjoyed this story, check out this post about a woman who finds herself in a tough spot when a coworker reports her for the “policy violation” of having her personal water bottle at the register.

Don’t mess with the auditors.

When you make a company enough money, you never really have to worry about your job. I’m honestly surprised that this guy had to give the PC back.

If I had to guess, after he got slapped on the wrist, his boss acquired him another PC through the proper channels.