Hacked - Hotline Hacked Vol. 5

Episode Date: September 25, 2024

It's a five-alarm fire in the fifth instalment of our call in show. We hear from a caller who accidentally won a naval war-game by unplugging a radio, a person whose company hired someone who clearly lied about their technical background, a very wholesome story about Counterstrike, and a person who decided to do a scavenger hunt by scavenging online instead of the real world. Hotline Hacked is brought to you by DeleteMe. Take control of your data and keep your private life private by signing up for DeleteMe. Now at a special discount for our listeners: Today get 20% off your DeleteMe plan when you go to joindeleteme.com/HACKED and use promo code HACKED at checkout. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thank you for calling Hotline Hacked. Share your strange tale of technology, true hack, or computer confession. After the B. Hey guys, big fan of the show. I really like the Hotline Hacked episodes you guys do. I'm glad to hear you guys will be making more of those. I was listening to the most recent episode, which was volume four, I believe. And it reminded me of this time about a year ago. I just graduated college. I was working as a web developer. And one of my favorite bands was promoting their new album. And the way they had decided to promote this album was they made a scavenger hunt. And they set up these codes all around venues in the U.S. that they liked to perform at. And if you were in the area, you could go to the venue and look for the codes that were hidden. And once you found a code, you could go to their website and input the code. And once all 20 codes were found, they were going to release some sort of.

surprise to the website. So it was a really cool way of promoting it. Me and my friends were all following it pretty closely. I was checking the website every day to see what codes were left, how many have been found. And there was one code in particular. Nobody could seemingly find. And it was the last one left. And it had been about a week. And I started to get impatient. And so looking at the website, it just looked, you know, just poorly made. And you get that itch of like, I bet if I start looking around here, I could probably find something I shouldn't find. So I got onto the website, pulled up the Chrome developer tools, started looking at the network responses, what would happen if I tried to input a fake code and submit it, what response would I get? I started looking at the source

code, seeing if there were any hidden pages anywhere. And at the bottom of the source code, I found these scripts and one of them had some JavaScript code that just had an if statement in it and it just said if number of codes equals 20 run this endpoint. So I grabbed that endpoint and I ran it in my console and it responded with a audio file and a random string of letters and numbers. So I downloaded the audio file and listened to it and it was actually a snippet of one of their new songs. So that was really cool and then I just saved the string of random numbers and letters because I figured it was important somehow. So I started looking around the website some more and I found that there was an image being hidden in the source code. So I removed the hidden attribute that was set and it popped up on the page

and it was this blurred image so you couldn't see it. So I started looking at the source of the image and I noticed that in the source there was a string of random numbers and letters that was exactly the same as the one I found with the endpoint that I ran. So I started looking some more at the source of the image, and I noticed there was a dash blurred at the end of the string. So I just removed the dash blurred and ran the page again, and it popped up the unblurred image, which was the album cover of their new album that was coming out. So those were the two surprises that were supposed to be released once all the codes were found was a snippet. And that was a snippet. And that was the album cover. their album cover. So of course I sent the audio file and the album cover to my friends and they all thought

I was some hacking genius because they don't really have technical background. So I got some nice street cred for that. I also tried to log back onto the website a few days later to see if that one code ever was found and my account had actually been banned from the website. I don't know if they were able to log that I ran that endpoint somehow or what had happened, but I got banned. from the website. Luckily, I have multiple emails. I was able just to make a new account and get back on there. But yes, that's the story of how I was able to look around and find some information about my favorite band that I was not supposed to find. Anyway, big fan of the show. You guys are awesome. Doing great. Love the new episodes coming out. And yeah, keep up the good work.

Man, I love a scavenger hunt. I love a scavenger hunt that can be hacked. I love that. I have a theory about this. I can do all this work or I could just go to the website, dig through the JavaScript, find the call back, make the call, you know, dig into some of the source code and solve it all for myself. Yeah, I think that every scavenger hunt that uses computers is secretly two scavenger hunts. There's the scavenger hunt and then there's the armchair scavenger hunt version of it that just involves hacking apart whatever web portal they use to try and make it.

Also, welcome to Hotline Hacked. It's a Colin show where you can share your strange tale of technology, true hack or computer confession. If you want to share a story, go to Hotline Hacked. And if you want to know who brings you this show, it's Delete Me. Yeah, check out DeleteMe. Join DeleteMe.com slash Hacked. They're the people that sponsor the Hotline Hacks series, and they're the reason why we're

making more of these. And we love this show concept, and we love that they came aboard to make sure that we made more of them. So if you've got time, check them out. Join DeleteMe.com slash Hacked. But more on that later. Yeah. Let's dive into this a bit.

I love the part of the story here that's the real twist for me is the fact that they banned his account. So they must have been looking for people that are reaching the end point without the end point being reached. He still got the payout, but they banned his account for it. And it surprises me that in a, you know, using his words as close as I can remember them, like a kind of a shoddy built website, that they had the ability to detect when somebody, you know, breached it. So that's surprising to me. That was the twist.

That was the big twist for me. Kudos to you for getting through it. I'm sure he broke some terms of service and stuff. But like had your own scavenger hunt, technical scavenger hunt. Always be breaking terms of service. I, uh, there was about a decade ago, there was this trend. in marketing, and it was the guerrilla marketing scavenger hunt. And just based on the timelines about this, I feel like this is when this would have happened.

I remember there was a Boards of Canada one. They did a scavenger hunt to promote their record. I'm now starting to wonder if one of these, I remember, is the band the caller was calling about. The famous one was nine inch nails. They did a big internet scavenger hunt that was a pretty big deal, like, I want to say like 2008, 2009 maybe. That alternate reality game era of guerrilla marketing,

I always thought it was going to go somewhere. I always thought maybe marketers were going to be the first through the breach and that over the years these things were going to slip more into the mainstream and we were just going to have a puzzle solving culture. And everyone was going to be like taking part in the puzzle, same way as we all sit down to watch the episode every week. And it didn't really shake out like that. And this just makes me,

yearn for what could have been, you know, because I don't know if I've said this. I love a scavenger hunt. Well, I know this was big in recruitment, too. Like, I remember Google got super popular and famous. Well, they were obviously already were super popular and famous, but their recruitment campaign. And they posted just a billboard on the road to Silicon Valley that was like a puzzle. And it was like some, I can't remember. It was like a mathematical equation.com. and you had to solve for this mathematical equation. So you had to write code and solve for it. And then you got to that website

and that website presented you with another puzzle. And then it was like once you got through all the puzzles, it was literally like a, hey, Google might want to hire you, click this link, fill this information out. And yeah, I remember this marketing trend. Do you remember, and this is a bit of a digression, not technical at all, but there was like a company that was doing like actual treasure hunts.

Like they would bury $50,000 in gold. in the city. And then you would pay, you know, a couple hundred bucks for the first clue. And their anticipation was like if we could get enough people to buy the first clue, it would cover the prize, the logistics headaches as well as a bunch of the other things. So there was like teams of people like running around cities trying to find this buried gold. That's a great idea. A treasure hunt. A lottery with like more steps.

And that sounds like I'm dunking on it, but I'm not. I think those steps are fun. I remember for a long time, Cicada 3301 was the go-to reference for weird internet puzzle mysteries, which is a thing because of this show. I spend a lot of time Googling. And it was online kind of in like the early 2010s into the mid-2010s. And it was this thing. I think it started on 4chan. It was a lot of these, for example, the callers involved going to a venue and looking for a code and maybe commuting.

communicating with other people online to try and share it. This one was like deep cryptography, steganography. Like you had to really be putting a lot of time and energy into it. And the speculation was, as you mentioned with Google, that this was for NSA, CIA. One of these big orgs must be putting this on because it is far too involved. The other alternative being that this was sort of just another evolution in an earlier trend of like cypherpunk. type internet culture. No one really, I think, ever totally cracked what it was.

And I wonder if it was just promoting an album from like a late 2000s indie rock band. Can you imagine? You imagine how mad you would be? You spend years of your life trying to solve the greatest internet mystery and it's just like, I don't know. The album art for a new album? Totally. I'd be furious. That's been out for like 15 years.

Totally. Edward Sharp or something. You're like, God, damn it. I do love this. This is like showcasing how far a fundamental set of technical skills can take you. Like this reminds me of last hotline hack, the person that figured out how to call the JavaScript endpoint to auto-complete their like training modules. Same thing.

Like a little bit of technical savvy in today's internet-based world goes so far. far. And it's that if statement. Totally. You can do a lot with an if statement. Yeah. If X equals 20 execute this. It's like,

well, what if I just executed it now? Here's the new Gorilla's album cover, whatever it was. Yeah. That's a great one. Thank you for calling in. We appreciate that one.

And remember, if you have your own tales, visit hotlinehacked.com. You can actually call a real phone number. We have an actual phone number that you can call and leave voicemails on. or you can send us an email with text and we can convert it to audio or you can record something and just email us the recording files like that caller did.

When this started, I thought it was going to be someone confessing to the July of this year ticket master hack. Like, I was trying to go to a concert. Anyway, 560 million ticket master customers data leaked later. I found the album art. I was like, for a brief moment, I thought it was going that way. I suspect at some point we're going to get one of those phone calls. We're going to have a big discussion about whether we can run it. Being like, yeah, so when I took down the Las Vegas casino networks and it's like,

hmm, this feels evidently. Yeah, the line between a call-in show about hacking and just an evidence portal is pretty blurry. Maybe never unbler it. And remember, if you'd like to disguise your voice, please do so prior to sending us the files. We do occasionally do. it on the tail end, but don't have that as an expectation. So please, if you're going to send in something incriminating, take steps to disguise it so that we don't get forced into some evidence loop. Thank you. But don't hesitate to send us something incriminating. Yeah.

For the stories. Like, we're here, we're in the story collecting and transmission business here. If you got a good one, I don't know, pitch shift your voice and send it in. We do want to hear it. Hey, love the show. I wanted to share a simple hack that's pretty basic, but something I'm still proud of. Back in 2002, I was in a computer systems networking program at a community college in southwestern Ontario. We spent most of our time playing CounterStrike day and night in the student center. The only problem, we couldn't access online servers, and the local servers kept going up and down, leaving the community fractured, plus whoever hosted had to sacrifice their laptops performance.

as you do in college you spend all the time using university resources and the high broadband internet connection that the university has to play competitive for search and shooters. I identify with this. And the terrible truth is that whatever this caller is about to do to circumvent that system

is probably going to prove to be almost as valuable as anything you learned in a class when it comes to the real world. Yeah, I feel like he should have got an A in his program given what he's probably about to tell us he did. We don't even know what he's done. This guy just said I liked Counterstrike. We're like, this motherfucker's up to no good.

Well, he's been firewalled in by the university, so I imagine he's about to go around said firewall, but let's hear it from him. I came up with a pretty simple solution. The campus had a lab full of Windows 2000 computers, and while IT had locked down the USB ports, they hadn't restricted the CD-ROM drives. I burned the necessary files to a CD, copying them over to a lab computer,

and set up a scheduled task to run the server on boot-up in the background, completely unnoticed. We called it Me Edgimication, and it gave us a stable, always-on, counter-strike server that brought the whole community together. It was a simple hack, but it unified us and made for some of my best memories from that time. Anyway, you guys do a fantastic job with this podcast. It makes my long commute fly by. Keep up the awesome work.

Well, I was wrong. I was wrong. Didn't circumvent the firewall. You know, use a proxy or something to bypass it or, you know, any of the other ways that you get around it. They just hacked one of the local massive computer towers and turned it into a dedicated counterstrike server. Another great solution. Another great solution. I just want to dwell on the name for a second.

edgimication. It's a perfectly cromulent word, which if you know, if you know, you know, I thought that was a Simpsons reference, and I'm Googling it apparently. There are instances of that being used in early Popeye cartoons. There's instances of that being used. Yeah, I thought that was purely a, I think it might have been in the Beverly Hillbillies. I thought that was a Simpsons goof. I think a lot of people probably thought that that's a Simpsons goof, and it's not.

So I learned something today. One of the parts that really stands out in this story for me is how much he talks about the betterment of the community. Oh, I love it. It's bringing them together. It's like he's hacking for good. He's made a bootable disk drive, our disk, and essentially rooted one of the servers. And he's done that to bring the people together. This is the Robin Hood story.

And I respect and appreciate it. Thanks for calling it. Yeah, I really like that. USB ports are locked. The CD-ROM is not. You just want to play some counterstrike with the boys. I think this is community building. Yeah.

I think that's what this is. Yeah, I think, and as a fellow Canadian, Southern Ontario University, you know, he's one of us. The Canadian edjimication system is truly world class. Found y'all today. Found out about this hotline hat thing. Welcome to the show. Yeah, we're happy to have you.

And I've got kind of a unique story. of something I did whenever I was in the Navy that I didn't really fully appreciate until I started telling some other nerdy friends about it. One especially is a guy that just absolutely loves limits and he really appreciated this. So I figured I'd let y'all know too.

So I was in Japan for four years. not going to say what bold I was on. It's not over there anymore. But, you know, just keeping it kind of anonymous. I just want to jump in because when I was living in Honolulu, and the first time I went to Asia, I flew from Honolulu to Japan, and I was seated next to two Navy electronic technicians,

and I'm wondering if this is not one of them. And they were an absolute blast. We had the best time on our flight. I've never seen the American respect for the military and how it gets you around certain rules. Oh, interesting. Oh, yeah. Like we sat down.

We made introductions. I found out they were nerds. We immediately hit it off. They bowled out a crib board and a bunch of cards. Then they reached up into the overhead and started taking out their duty-free booze and just ripped it out of the duty-free booze. duty-free bags. They buzzed the airline stewardess, and they were like,

bring us a six-pack of Coke and a bucket of ice and some glasses. And they were like, sure, sir. And they came back with a bucket of ice and a bunch of glasses. And they just literally started making cocktails. And we just sat and played crib and drank from Honolulu to Tokyo. And it was, they were awesome. It's like one of my, one of the best flight memories I've ever had was sitting with these two electronics technicians for the Navy.

flying from Honolulu to Tokyo. So the second he said he was stationed in Japan, I was like, could it be? Could it be? Did one of them have a really good southern kind of drawl? Yes, yes. Okay. It's all coming together.

So an electronic technician, one of the things that I was in charge of was a communications set of year that utilized the HF, VHF, UHF, UHF, SHF, and EHS bands for communications. We go out on a regular patrol, and during that patrol, we got hit up saying that Navy Red and Navy Blue wanted to use our ship for a training exercise. Well, we were about three hours in, and I'm hanging out.

out in the, for lack of a better term, command center of the ship while underway and the operator started mentioning how some random, I don't know how to say it was that tracks for the gear was just randomly popping up and disappearing and how the SHF and HF, actually it was just the SHF side of the house, was acting really weird. I kept having people come in and drop out of the net, and I didn't really think a whole lot on it. I knew that it was a network issue inside the gear itself, so I went down and just pulled the cat five table out of the gear, which we go down on SHS. and the H.HF. But at that point, they weren't the links that we needed to keep up.

So we're still up on HF and UHF and still doing everything we need to do. About, let's say, five to ten minutes after that, the Navy Blue commander came over to us and asked which one of us turned off the... SHF and EHF band for the gear and I told them that it was me. It's my gear. It was that just screwy, so I just disconnected it so that way we wouldn't have any issues and keep going with the exercise. What I didn't realize is I didn't even know it was possible, but Navy Red had gained access

to the IPs on the SHF side. and was getting access to actually mess with our radar pitch. I didn't really think too much about it. I mean, I knew I did a, I fixed the gear, but I didn't really appreciate it until I told my buddy that. And, you know, came up with the, our little thing that we say to each other that you can't have to network if there's no network anymore. I thought I would get a kick out of that.

I'm not in anymore, so I don't care to tell that story. It doesn't really compromise security-wise. It's like the oldest rule in cybersecurity. It's like if you want to stop a network attack, you just disconnect from the network. And it sounds like... Just unplug it. So I'm just going to kind of give a little summary to anybody that's been following as the best I can tell what's happening.

So he's in Japan. They're on a boat. Navy, red, navy blue, I assume are the red team and the blue team. And so they're attacking and defending the ship. And it sounds like the red team had hacked in through certain radio waveband systems into their network. And he just trying to fix and maintain the system that they were utilizing for the boat operations just disconnected that network, essentially disconnecting the red team's access. You can't hack a network if there's no network. So do we think that the band that was giving them the trouble?

Like they're on this boat and suddenly one of them, one of these bands is acting kind of screwy. I think you described as acting kind of weird. Figures there's a network issue. Do you think that's a symptom of the fact that they are being hacked at that moment? Like, do you think that it's behaving oddly because they're being hacked? And he goes, ah, well, we don't need it anyway. Unplug it inadvertently preventing the hack.

Yes. I think that's exactly what happened. Amazing. It sounds that. That's great. They were trying to use it to do to adjust the radar pitch. So they're trying to essentially disconnect the comms for the boat, I would have assumed. So they're probably adjusting the communications to the back to the satellites, maybe, radar pitch.

I don't know. I'm by no means a sophisticated Navy operator. But but, but and then they, they noticed that they were having comms issues. So he just disconnected the, the feed from those lines and, and essentially stopped the red team's hack in its tracks. essentially acting as the champion of the blue team by just disconnecting them. You know what kind of clever on your feet thinking that is? What? The same kind of clever on your feet thinking that would lead a person to skip ordering cocktails

and just ask for a six pack of Coke and a bucket of ice on the airplane. Yeah, like why get drinks? And here's the other funny thing is that the booze on the plane was free. Like it was a trans-Pacific flight. But it was like, nah. It's like I got my own Johnny Walker. They were good Southern boys. It was a good time.

Anyway, that's a long story. That's really, really good. The other thing I like about this is the insight into how naval games work. It was, we go out on regular patrol and Navy Red and Navy Blue, an ungoogulable term because of the color Navy Blue for context. Of course. Navy Red and Navy Blue wanted to use our ships for training exercise. Is that how this works?

Like, you're just out doing Navy. You're out doing Navy. and these like alternate reality game people show up and they're like we we want to do a thing for a minute, can we? Like is that? That seems like it's very loosey-goosey. I, you know what though? Like I would assume aside from the fact that they probably like in real wartime conditions, you would just expect that people would be trying to muck with you in today's world.

Right. So it's like, why wouldn't you be out doing my favorite verb, navying? And then. Navying. and then have, you know, hackers simulate a red team, blue team situation where, like, the, the defensive blue team has to, like, deal with these adverse attacks coming from this, like, hidden red team. Because that's probably very realistic to real world conditions.

Right. Like, now that we, like, I would say that, you know, regular warfare is now augmented by cyber warfare. Hmm. That's fascinating. Great call. I, like, love getting a little my optic views. into these different worlds that are generally quite mysterious. Yeah, all of that, please.

Call in Haughtenhack.com. I sometimes wish that there was a way in the real world that I could unplug the metaphorical radio connection that is my identity on the internet. But since you can't really do that, we should probably just kick it over and talk about the sponsor of Hotline Hacked. Our pals delete me.

You're getting great at these transitions. Thank you. I appreciate it. I should by now. That one took a minute. So you're being generous. Thank you. Yeah.

So again, just to repeat, you know, delete me, join delete me.com slash hack came forward and said, hey, we love the Hotline Hack Show concept. We'd love you guys to make more of them and we'd love to sponsor them. So we love to have them and we love to make these shows and we love the content. It's always a great time to listen to your guys stories. And if you have those stories, Hotlinehack.com, please send us more content. as we love it. Some of you might not know who Delete Me is, but Delete Me kind of scours internet databases

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and they will kind of scour these data broker sites and request removals of your information from these databases. A really bummer amount of all of our personal data is out there on the internet for everyone to see your name, your contact and fill, your social security number, home address, even information about people's family members. As Scott said, data brokers. They're compiling it and they're reselling it online.

and pretty much anyone with the wherewithal can go ahead and buy it. This can lead to identity theft. This can lead to fishing attempts. This can lead to harassment, unwanted spam calls. Now, thanks to our sponsor, you can protect your privacy with Delete Me. That's why I personally use it and recommend it. You know, they send regular personalized reports to you about what they found, where they found it, and what they removed, which is great,

because you get to actually see how much your stuff is out there. And the other thing is it's not just a one time you push the button. it does it once. It's a, it's a, it's a, it's a kind of a constant service that's running and it's constantly perusing these data brokerage sets and looking for your information. And it flags it, throws it to you, says, hey, we removed you out of this thing. So, so it's kind of like a, I don't know, kind of like your own blue team. Hmm. So, a little naval blue team. That'll, that'll unplug the radio that is your identity on the internet. You can take control of your dad and keep your private life private by signing up for Delete Me. Now to special

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Hey guys. This is just an all-around good story that comes full circle with a little bit of that justice you love to get from quitting a bad company. So about a decade ago, I was a junior DBA for an e-commerce company. Database administrator. I'll be the acronym translator means the world and it was just me and the senior DBA Mike will call him and Mike was paid very well I was just a junior with a baby salary you know Mike was making three three and a half times my salary and so as it goes a you know in the tech world a private equity company comes and takes over and they tell my they I tell Mike that he's going to be let go in six months and, you know, they're going to hire another senior DBA to replace him.

So they end up hiring somebody and we'll call him Ravi. And Mike or I never got to interview this guy. I don't even know what the criteria was, how many interviews he got. I don't know anything about it. But I can just tell you that this guy lied hard on whatever it. on whatever his resume said. I won't go into that stuff, but all I will say is he did not know how to connect to MySQL from a terminal.

He had never used the MySQL client on the terminal, and I have no idea how you can be a DBA without doing that one. That is shocking. But I just wanted to flag that we have not had a Hotline Hack call for somebody who faked a resume and got a job they shouldn't got. That's true. That would be a great story. So if you've got one of those, please call in.

I was just like, you know what? This is bullshit. I'm not going to train this guy. And when I know more than him and have him be the senior, that's going to be paid a lot more than me. So I asked my director. I tell him this guy lied on his resume. He doesn't care.

And so I'm like, well, I want $10,000 more dollars a month. And that was it. And they said no. So I said, okay. And I got hired at another company and quit, put in my two weeks. And so, you know, Mike is still training Ravi. And on the first day after I'm gone, I don't know what he's doing, Ravi drops a table in staging, not prod.

It was staging, but all of a sudden, Mike is just getting hit up from all the devs saying that, you know, tons of tests and things are broken. So I'll be the tech translator here. So databases are full of tables. Drop is a SQL command to essentially destroy it. So he destroyed a table in staging, not prod, so not the production environment, but the staged production environment where you're kind of evaluating new changes and stuff to the system before you promote it to production. I feel like I'm going to have to do a decent amount of translating in these last three

minutes, so please bear with us. And so Mike messages Ravi, and he's like, dude, stop whatever you're doing. And once he kind of figured out that this table is missing and what was going on, he was messaging Ravi and he was like, all right, well, you know, we need to meet up to fix this. And he didn't hear anything from Ravi. And it was just crickets. So he, you know, restored the table and, you know, carried on. So when you break the staging database, everybody that's developing the application would be using the staging database for final touches before it goes to production. And most of the dev team would probably not be able to work once that database is broken. Got it. Well, I don't know if it was days or weeks, but no one ever heard from Ravi after that. He just drove it.

dropped the table and was gone. And like HR was reaching out. And so it got to the point where they were actually concerned about his health and safety. So someone from the company lived close enough to him that they could drive over there to Ravi's house. And so they knock on the door and Ravi answers. So I don't know what was all said in that conversation. all we heard was that Ravi said, oh, I sent an email on that day to HR that said that I quit, but, you know, that wasn't true. No one ever heard from him.

So that's the end of Ravi. And, you know, so now the company says, all right, Mike, you can, you know, definitely interview and hire the next guy. So whatever recruiting company that they were using, you know, gave Mike a stack of red. resumes and one of them was Ravi. So I don't believe he got another interview. So it just, it was great. It ended up, you know, Mike was there for like another two years, getting paid his, you know, incredibly high salary.

And all I asked for was $10,000, you know, and they couldn't give me that. So I like to think that they were, you know, regretting it. So that's my story. All right. I swear he said $10,000 a month in the first pass, but maybe that was a mistake because it seemed like a hot raise request, like, come in and be like, I'd like an extra $10,000 a month. It's like, that's like, I know tech has high compensation, but to ask for a, ask for a 120k lift in your salary is a pretty substantial pay bump. But an extra $10,000 a year seems much more.

I thought it was honestly going to go full circle and the recruiter was going to reach back out to him and be like, Hey, do you want this job? Me too. That's exactly where I thought it was going. I was like that it was going to be. I thought we were closing the loop. Exactly, that he was going to get recruited for a new opportunity at the same company that he started out the story by quitting. But as he said in the beginning, justice you'll have to get from quitting a bad company.

Sounds like maybe not the place he wanted to be working after all. To your earlier comment about us getting more calls about people faking stuff on their resume, this seems, hmm, not the worst it could go. But to have your first day go so cataclysmically wrong that you just ghost the business, stop replying to emails and go back to your house and pretend none of it ever happened is like maybe that's why you don't lie about your resume on technical jobs. There's a lot of jobs you can lie about your resume for. But technical ones, they're going to figure it out really, really, really fast.

Yeah, like the like databases are complicated, but they're not like, you know, they're not like black magic. They are if you tried to build your own, like, from scratch. But just managing them and administrating them is like, it's technical. But even then, if you can't even connect to a database from a console line, you should be nowhere near a DBA job, let alone a senior DBA job taking over for, like, the leader of the DBA team from what it sounds like. Yeah. I can't believe, I just can't believe, like, could you imagine, like, you know,

there's a lot of talk about mental health and anxiety. days. And it's like, could you imagine the anxiety of being in a senior technical position and having none of the skills to do any of it? Even the junior role you couldn't even have probably done. You lied your way into a senior position. And like, you're just like, I don't know what I'm doing. And I hit this button. This says drop. And I don't understand what that means. And now it's gone. And I don't know how to get it back because it would be pretty easy to get it back potentially. But you just didn't know how to do that. So you just literally hit the log off button, got in your car, drove home, and we're never to be seen from again. It's that, it's that moment

when he drops the table in staging. And everyone, probably not knowing that that's what was happening, starts throwing up their hands saying like, oh my God, everything's broken. Nothing is working. People are running around on fire. Mike asked a message you saying, for the love of God, stop whatever it is you're doing. That's the moment, right? That's the moment you realize you, you did fuck up. You maybe were eligible for like a junior job, if that, and you managed to, if that, and you manage to kind of like claw your way into a management role. He probably told yourself a nice story about, hey, it's management. I'll just be overseeing people. I'll learn on the fly, right? I learned, I learned the language. I read, read the like database for dummies.

Exactly. Like, I can, I can talk about it. YouTube exists. I can stay one head, one step ahead. I can teach these piano lessons as long as I'm one piano lesson ahead of the student. It's not that kind of thing. It's not that kind of thing. And suddenly you're back at home just ignoring calls from HR and, you know, answering wellness checks because you didn't show up to your job. It's pretty great. Justice to borrow your term caller is a pretty good term for it.

They should have just promote from within guys, you know. It's a tale of oldest time. And, you know, speaking of promotion from within, we could talk about the new Nike CEO, who started as an intern and is now the CEO. I saw that. This entire career, promoted from within. There you go. Works for Nike.

It can work for you. Promote from within. The, yeah, amazing. And the fact that he's still out there looking like, he didn't learn his lesson, obviously, if the recruiter's still sending his resumes out as part of the hunt for another senior DBA. like is he just doing incremental training at the cost of companies? Right. Like that it just seems like such a like, okay, I'm going to go to this one.

Mike's going to teach me for a few weeks. I'm going to destroy something. I'm going to go like ghost out the back door. Then I'll get another job somewhere else. Sure, sure. I'll take the three weeks of knowledge that Mike gave me and it'll make me a little bit more productive until I destroy something. And then I'll ghost out the back door and just like doing this like passive, you know, technical diploma in database admin via like taking senior roles and working in them until he

destroys something. This is how he does professional development. It's like some people learn by doing. Some people learn by being taught. Some people learn by destroying from on high an organization from within. It's like, wow, that's a very intense way of learning, Ravi. How is it working out for you? He's like, I'm, I get two weeks severance every time I go into one of these places, it's going okay. Well, to the caller, like, congrats on getting a new job. Hopefully you got a nice promotion. It sounds like you deserved it over Ravi. And it sounds like Mike, I think it was Mike, was his name, his manager, the senior DBA that was making all the money. It sounds like he probably got a really sweet deal out of it because I'm sure after you get your termination

notice and then they're like, hey, actually, we need you to stay around for two more years. I'm sure you get to even negotiate at that point. now that they've put themselves in such a pickle. So you can take your extraneous salary and make it bigger. Nothing shows the value of a loyal mic than a drive by Ravi. And if you have a story, a strange tale of technology, a true hack, a computer confession, a naval war game gone amok. We would love if you'd share it with us at hotlinehack.com.

You'll find the actual phone number you can call. You'll find the email address where you can submit text or an audience. file. It's anonymous as you make it. But it would mean the world to us. We love hearing your stories. We love making these episodes. And as always, thank you to delete me for for helping us do it. I think that puts a pin in another one, doesn't it, Scott? Yeah, I think so. I think that's that's it. So yeah, thanks, delete me. Join delete me.com slash hacked, code word hack, check it out. And yeah, we'll catch you next time. Please, again, hotlinehack.com, send us some stories. We need these stories to make this show. We get a lot of great content. And if you've got a great one,

we'd love to hear it. Catch you in the next one.