Who, Me? How on earth is it 2026 already? The Register will ponder that existential matter after first presenting a new instalment of “Who, Me?” – the reader-contributed column in which we share your stories of things you shouldn’t do at work, and how you escape them unscathed.

This week, meet a reader we’ll Regomize as “Patrick” who told us about his time working on the tech support team at a UK government agency.

“One of my colleagues was an 18-year-old whose entire job was resetting passwords,” Patrick told The Register. “That's it, that is all he did. We had a large number of users and hence a large number of numpties who regularly screwed up their logins.”

Patrick described his young colleague as “remarkably patient” and “a good lad who we all got on well with.”

So when Patrick saw two other members of staff shouting at the youngster, he felt protective.

“I can't remember what the shouting was all about, but it quickly became evident that this had gone way beyond a telling off and turned into outright bullying,” he told The Register.

The young worker looked decidedly uncomfortable and, once the tirade ended, returned to his desk with his head down.

Patrick hoped a team leader would step in to offer comfort, but nobody intervened.

So he decided to do something about it.

“Step forward the ‘Mean Avenger’: me,” he told The Register.

The Mean Avenger’s revenge plot started with reconnaissance.

“I walked past the desk the bullies were working at, and in passing took note of the asset number printed on a label on the PC,” Patrick wrote. He also observed that the bullies were working on a large and complex spreadsheet.

He then returned to his desk, looked up the PC’s asset number and learned it was also the PC’s hostname. His next step was to fire up a command line and type a command to shut down the PC – silently, remotely, and instantly.

And then he waited until he heard the bullies speak words that suggested they had finished working on the spreadsheet and all that remained was to press Save to preserve their work.

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“I counted to five – which should have been enough time for the save to complete – and pressed Enter to remotely shut down the PC,” Patrick confessed to The Register.

And he got the timing just right, because when the PC shut down the bullies assumed the save had failed, their work was lost. The bullies then started to blame each other for the mess with the same horrible fervor they’d brought to their abuse of the young worker.

“Their argument was long enough, and loud enough, to finally get a response from management, who arrived at the scene to calm things down,” Patrick told Who, Me?

All that remained was for the Mean Avenger to make his escape, which Patrick feared would be hard because log files recorded his actions.

“If anyone went digging, they would find a big arrow pointing in my direction," he wrote. “But nobody looked and I got clean away with it.”

“I never told anyone what I did, until now.”

Have you stepped in to save the day when management turned a blind eye to rotten workplace behavior? If so, do the right thing and click here to send your story to Who, Me? We’d love to tell your tale as the year unfolds. ®