We had an older Hospital where, over time, we’d been upgrading their CCTV, security, door access, and nurse call/paging systems. I’d been at this company for a few years, but they’d been doing all the sparky work here for over a decade, so we knew the whole place really well. The buildings, the people, the staffs positions and job roles.. everything. I worked there a lot, so I got to know the drama, politics and secret affairs too. (Also, voices carry into ceiling spaces. This has been a Public Service Announcement.)

I got to lead a team in building and maintaining each of the new systems. These systems had been chosen because they could all work together to achieve the clients needs, and were networked. They were also standalone, because Gov’t IT didn’t want the 3rd party gear on their networks. We had to install all the infrastructure and equipment. I had network hubs all over the place where I could access all four of these systems.

Summary: I had admin/installer access to 170 cameras, over 520 doors/gates, the security system, and the Hospital-wide paging system.

(All names are changed.) (Technical details have been simplified.)

One Tuesday

I was sitting at one of my network hubs, doing regular testing/maintenance. I’d just been checking the CCTV, watching Janine do that lop-sided, stumbling walk she does in high heels. I believed I’d done enough continuous work at 10am to deserve a treat.

That morning, Nancy, a nurse in Pediatrics, had brought cupcakes in for the ward staff. Nancy had kept two individually packaged cupcakes aside for me, clearly labelled with my name, in the ward staffroom fridge. I walked the 5 minutes over to the ward, humming my ‘I’m about to have cupcakes’ song. (It’s based on a ‘Proclaimers’ track.)

Open the fridge.. no cupcakes. I mean, there were maybe 20 still there in a big clear Tupperware container, but mine weren’t. Not the ones Nancy set aside.
Before I just lose my shit altogether, and flip that fucking fridge over, I’d better go check to see if something dire has happened. Maybe one of the kids needed these particular cupcakes to stay alive. Maybe these two cupcakes saved the planet.
Work is forgotten, and the investigation begins..

I speak with Nancy. First, I ask if she saw that Janine was wearing heels again. We both have a chuckle. Then I bring up the cupcake situation. We go through the whole “they were they before”, and the ‘checking of the fridge so Nancy can confirm my story’. It’s like she doesn’t understand that I wouldn’t joke about this. We begin interviews. No-one on the ward is owning up. We believe them. Someone ‘not of this ward’ has taken my cupcakes. The Pediatrics nurses are livid. Myself, and my team, want answers.

(It’s a funny thing. Once cameras and swipe-card doors have been in a while, people forget all about them. Forget that they are always watched. Forget that doors have logs to see who went where, and when. Forget who put them all in.)

Back to the hub I go. A quick audit of door access reveals that Jerry went in the staffroom between the relevant times. (Not yet, don’t lose your ever loving shit just yet, do the due diligence.) Checking the CCTV, I see Jerry. Walking out of the staffroom carrying a bag, wiping his mouth. Rewind, pause, zoom in.. frosting. The hubs’ rack did nothing wrong, so I step back and stare at the wall. The first 8 thoughts get caught by the filter. I calm down a little and head back to my nurses.

They see me coming, and gather. Sick kids are an afterthought in this matter. I tell them I know who did it, don’t want to say who just yet, need some time to think, and ask if we can keep this all hush-hush for now. They say they understand, and immediately ask who it was. (They are after all, Gov’t staff.) I head back to the hub to continue work, not walking 500 miles to eat cupcakes anymore.

As I’m swiping my card across the reader, in that 1 second it takes the red light to turn green.. a plan starts to play like a cinematic in my head. It’s like my subconscious has known about this day for ages, and is now premiering it’s devious feature. It screens the permutations, possible flaws, ramifications.
I’m not sure how long I stared at the door.. rewinding, pausing, fast forwarding. The plan is beautiful, and I promise my brain a cupcake soon.

Jerry

Jerry was a General Orderly who was supposed to float around the whole Hospital, helping any ward, and pretty much anyone else when they paged him. He didn’t though, Jerry didn’t like walking around. Jerry was lazy. And did not like patients. He used to work in the wards, but couldn’t find one without close supervision, or patients, so he moved to day-shift general duties. Jerry hated to be made to walk from one end of the Hospital to the other. And..

Jerry, fucking, HATED the swipe cards and the electronic door locks. Some people just don’t get technology. Some people just hate change and love to complain about it, while not taking the effort to learn how to work it. While responding to maintenance tickets, I’d had to listen to Jerry whinge numerous times about doors. For this, and other reasons, I did not like Jerry.

Jerry knew my distinctive name, knew what I did here, saw the other 20 cupcakes, and ate mine anyway

Yeah. Time to fuck with Jerry.

At the hub, I make the necessary improvements to my systems. Select a variety of well chosen doors. Set auto-paging for different events. Create different calendars. Set some automated conditions so everything swapped and changed around.

Once I’m set-up, with the program on hold, I go see Nancy. I need to give Jerry a chance to own up, even though I’m pretty sure he won’t. I ask Nancy to page Jerry, so she can ask him about the cupcakes. Nancy isn’t surprised it’s Jerry, and is on board. The other nurses gather and ask what’s happening. I tell them that Jerry is about to work off some of the belly. They aren’t surprised it’s Jerry either, and swear secrecy. I walk to the Maintenance Managers (Maint Mgr) office while Nancy summons Jerry.

I go into Maint Mgrs office grinning. All he says is, “What?”, with a smile. He knows me, we’ve worked closely together here for a while. We’re Mates, and he’s seen that look on my face before. I ask him to just print any maintenance tickets, generated by Jerry, for card/door/gate/pager issues, but not to action them. I’ll pick them up while I’m here doing other work, and deal with them personally. When I tell him about the cupcakes and my plan, he’s not only on board, he laughs so hard he has a coughing fit for about 25 seconds.
I head back to check-in with Nancy and find that Jerry has, ever so accommodatingly, denied all knowledge.

What I’d created in my systems was a randomised, intermittent program, all focussed on Jerry’s card. A program that would send Jerry’s pager a message to go somewhere on the other side of the complex, seemingly at random, based on Jerry swiping his card at particular doors. Or the gate to the staff carpark wouldn’t work. Or his card would stop working, making him go to get it revalidated. Or a siren would sound for a few seconds when he entered certain rooms.
I already knew all the staff routines and areas of responsibility. The patients wouldn’t be adversely impacted. And Jerry did fuck-all anyway.

Back at the hub, I clicked the go buttons..

Week 1

By Friday afternoon, in 4 days, Jerry had raised 18 tickets. I grabbed the stack of paper from Maint Mgr and went to the orderlies office to find Jerry. While I gently fanned the tickets, he listed all the weird things he’d been experiencing. He was explaining how the Duty Nurses were getting annoyed at his unexpected arrivals when I interrupted him. To ask if he’d seen anyone take my cupcakes from the Pediatrics fridge on Tuesday.
The puzzled face he put on was a head shorter than mine, and about 1m/3’ away from the embroidered name on my shirt. No confession.

I’d only had 50 specially selected doors active in the program these past 4 days.
That Friday afternoon, at the end of Week One, I clicked the ‘All’ button.. and added the other 470 doors.

Week 2

By midday Wednesday there were only 6 tickets raised. I checked the systems logs and found out why. In just under 3 days, there’d been a mixture of over 85 events. Jerry didn’t have time to lodge tickets.

When I spoke to Jerry that Wednesday, he demanded that I do my damned job and fix this stuff, and why hadn’t I done it yet. No confession, no apology. Time for some head games.
I told him I’d sort it out. When I went to ‘check the systems’ that Wednesday midday, I stopped the program.
On Friday morning, I turned it back on again.

Week 3

I let it run Monday, Wednesday and Thursday. I almost felt sorry for him this week when I was talking to him, and considered stopping the plan. Then I remembered why I didn’t like him so much.

The one thing I haven’t mentioned yet, is that standing staring at that door, I already knew Jerry was in the final stages of ‘Disciplinary Management.’ This was the lynchpin to the plot of the film that ran through my head.

Remember before when I said:
(I got to know the drama, politics and secret affairs too.)

I knew that one of those Disciplinary Warnings (among other things) was for taking people’s lunches, on four occasions. And not because he needed to either. That’s the reason the nurses and Maint Mgr weren’t surprised it was Jerry, and were on board. They knew too. Everyone did. That was the reason why he didn’t kick up a stink to his manager, or confess. I didn’t want to get him fired, just make him apologise. Cupcakes are serious business.

The Final Week

Week 4 the program ran Monday and Tuesday. The plan was only ever going to be for a month, or until Jerry confessed and apologised.

Before this Tuesday, I’d had a chat to Nancy. I’d asked her if she wouldn’t mind a cameo in a little vignette. She understood, and agreed.

When I was talking with Jerry in the orderlies office, Nancy arrived and handed me a personalised pair of cupcakes. That looked, and were packaged, the exact same as the missing ones a few weeks earlier.

As Nancy was walking away, now-silent Jerry looked from the package, to my shirt, then to me. I held up the tickets, mustered my best Adam Hills, and said, “Don’t be a dick mate.”

He was silent and very angry. I could see he’d realised that I’d been doing this on purpose. If he made an official complaint, the missing cupcakes would come up, and he’d lose his job. Also, during our chats, he’d heard me say ‘intermittent issues’ many, many times. Jerry was angry because he knew he couldn’t do a fucking thing about it.

I walked off to the Pediatrics Ward, where Nancy and I were going to eat these treats. I hummed my tune the whole way.

Loose Ends

• Unfortunately, Jerry was a dick one more time. He got sacked 2 months later for taking more stuff out of a fridge. I felt bad for him as I helped Security save the footage to a drive.

• As I was walking up to Pediatrics on that last Tuesday of the plan, I stopped the program and took Jerrys’ pager number out of it. I had to scrap the program altogether a while later. Some bright Hospital spark finally convinced Gov’t IT to add the systems to the Hospitals intranet. (Sysadmins are killjoys. Maybe rightfully so. Maybe.)

• Janine continued to wear the 4” heels, on and off, until she sprained her ankle. There is no showreel.

• Maint Mgr tried bribing me with Jack Daniels after this episode, to add certain pager numbers to the program. There’s no way I could’ve done that. He’s an evil, evil bastard. We drank the Jacks as we didn’t watch a non-existent showreel.

• Nancy totally fancied me. I mean, after all, she’s only human.
  (Nancy didn’t fancy me. I just wished she did.)

Thank you for reading.

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GLOSSARY

Tupperware - is a sealable, plastic, food storage system. If you want to royally piss your wife off, use one of the big containers to drain your engine oil.

Pagers - featured in Season 1 of ‘The Wire’ (2002). My favourite line of the show to quote is from Omar Little, “A man gotta have a code.” Great show.

Voices and Ceilings - work both ways. Once, I was in an office building ceiling fitting some supporting steelwork for a thing. I cut my hand on some aircon duct strapping, and too loudly said, “OWWW, FUCK IT.” From below someone asked, “Are you OK?”

The Program - in the time it ran Jerry, generated 277 mixed events. I don’t know how many extra kilometres he walked.