Help Desk Boss Fell For 'Internet Cleaning Day' Prank - Then Swore He Got The Joke
The Register, Friday, November 7th, 2025
Lost packets would be cleaned out of routers, dead gopher servers would be pulled out of holes
Welcome to another instalment of On Call, The Register's Friday reader-contributed column that celebrates the fine art of tech support.
This week, meet a reader we'll Regomize as 'Mason' who told us that in the mid-1990s he worked as a Unix administrator for a daily newspaper which decided to start a new business as a dialup internet service provider (ISP).
The ISP was set up as a separate department with its own help desk and server administrators, but Mason was sometimes called in to help because the Unix boxes he managed handled jobs like dialup authentication and DNS.