Moments of Inspiration

Every now and then, you experience an extraordinary moment of creativity. It happens in a flash, and you just have to take advantage of it when it happens. My first true moment of abstract, and somewhat malicious, creativity struck me years ago. I was working for a computer firm in Memphis, and the lady who ran the place pissed me off. I was working my ass off, maintaining all the internal computers, as well as her laptop, generating billable hours and she was screwing me out of my commissions. I wasn't really in a position to 'push back' so I just had to take it....for a while.

This was in the mid 80's, the days before multi-taking Windows was introduced. It was the days of MS-DOS - Microsoft Disk Operating System. There were some computer programs called 'TSR's...Terminate and Stay Resident. The first one was 'print'. I got a hold of a paper by some guys who had 'reverse engineered' 'print', and figured out how to make a program stay resident in the computer's memory. I used that paper to figure out how to write a program that would cause my computer to display a clock with the current time in the upper right hand portion of the screen at all times. It was pretty cool.

While stewing over my 'lost' commissions and having cocktails in a bar called The Bottom Line, I had an epiphany. It struck me out of no where. I couldn't make her pay me my commissions, but I could make her crazy. Just ask any of my X-wives. I can make women crazy.

If I used what I had learned about writing TSRs, and wrote one that used a random number generator to randomly trigger a video swap, I could have some fun. So, I wrote a program, driven by a random number generator, that would seize a block of memory identical in size to video memory, and in that space write in large block letters the work "BITCH". Next, the program would copy the contents of video memory to another location. Finally, it overwrote video memory with the contents of the first location (the word BITCH), and .25 seconds later, put the original contents back. The result was that the screen flashed "BITCH". Did I mention that I maintained her computer?

The nice thing about this, was that it did not happen often. She would just see it every couple of days,but when she did, she would scream, and everyone would go running into her office to see what had happened. She would tell us that her computer just called her a bitch. We'd hang around while she tried to recreate the 'flash', but of course, it wouldn't happen because it wasn't triggered by her. It was driven by my random number generator. Most of the office snickered some and thought she was nutts. I just kept my mouth shut.

After a couple of months of this, she bought a new laptop computer. It was a brand new Toshiba. She called me into her office and after going on and on about how the old laptop was calling her a bitch, she told me to install all the software from her old laptop onto her new laptop. When you are the low man on the totem pole, you have unique opportunities.

I installed the software....all of it.

A week later, a scream shattered the silence in the office again, and I smiled...Sweet Moments of Inspiration.

A word to the wise....Don't piss off your systems administrator.