Kids do dumb stuff when they’re bored. It’s usually not malicious. This kid had some time to kill during school hours and just started screwing around with a photo of a duck and some computer desktop folders. It nearly got him expelled.
Ten years ago I really ducked up. I was in 8th grade but taking a math glass at the high school because I was so ducking smart.
The high school’s schedule was slightly different from the middle school, leaving me with a free half hour every day, which my teachers decided I could spend in the computer lab.The school district gave every student a personal drive that could be accessed from any computer on the network – their H: drive. One day, I saved a photo of a duck from Wikipedia to my H: drive and titled it “Duck”. Then I copied it 10 times and put the copies into a folder titled “Ducks”. Then I copied that 10 times and put those folders in a bigger folder, also called “Ducks”. You get the idea. Exponential growth. My goal was to reach 1 million ducks. Why? Because I was 13 and I was randommmmmm. I think I reached about 600,000 and forgot about it.
The photo above is the actual duck photo he used. The entire thing seems pretty harmless. His biggest mistake though, besides not spending his free time in a better way, was never deleting all those folders.
Fast forward a year. I’m in high school and doing pretty well. One day I get summoned to the librarian’s office. She tells me that someone at the district office was wondering what was taking up so much space on the servers. She says he stumbled on a folder called “Ducks”. Does that sound familiar to me? My face gives me away. She tells me he was sure it was being used to hide something. So one by one, he went through Every. Single. Folder.
Ok…that’s funny.
There were 60,000 folders, each containing 10 identical photos of the same fucking duck. He had been going through them all night. And he was livid. He wanted to have me expelled, but the librarian had insisted that she knew me (she did), that I would never do something like this (I would), and that my H: drive must have been hacked. I got a lecture but not much more, so it wasn’t that bad a duck-up in the end, but I do feel bad for the poor motherducker who had to sift through 600,000 iterations of this duck.
A comment on the Reddit post is funnier than anything I could come up with.
“Somewhere in those 600,000 ducks, you should have put 1 goose.”
[via Reddit]
