Who, Me? The world of work can sometimes drive IT pros to drink, leaving them more likely to make the sort of mistakes that The Register celebrates each week in Who, Me? It’s our reader-contributed column in which you share stories of making a mess at work, and cleaning up afterwards to the best of your ability.

This week, meet a reader we’ll Regomize as “Sherman” who once worked as a senior software engineer for a Dutch internet service provider.

The developers tried to debug the watercooler …

“Even though there was a never-ending backlog of new development initiatives, code deployment was the limiting factor in this company,” he told Who, Me?

Bureaucracy was to blame for the bottleneck: Company policy required the chief security officer and chief technology officer to approve every code change.

“This meant our department became gridlocked quite often, and we had lots of free time on our hands,” Sherman wrote. He and his fellow developers therefore tried to work on worthy side projects, but also sometimes found themselves unable to resist frivolity. Which was why one day some staff arrived at work to find a sprinkling of black keycaps on their beige keyboards, and vice versa.

All that fun took place in the basement of the 17th-century canal-side Amsterdam building the ISP called home, until it expanded into an adjacent office of 1970s vintage and the developers were sent into that new facility.

The new office lacked air conditioning, so as their first summer in the new digs heated up, Sherman and his team found themselves quaffing a lot of cold drinks.

Lemonade became a favorite, made by mixing syrup with cold water from team’s water cooler.

The devs drank so much lemonade that one of them came up with a bright idea: Pouring the syrup into the bottle that sat atop the water cooler, to remove the extra step of mixing the two liquids. “We would have premade, cold, lemonade whenever we wanted it,” Sherman enthused.

This was easier said than done, because the bottles that fit this watercooler had a protective cap that a little wedge inside the machine opened when someone dropped a bottle in place.

The lemonade scheme necessitated removal of the cap to add syrup and then turned predictably messy as Sherman and his fellow developers tried to fashion a replacement cap and insert a 20 liter bottle of lemonade in place with minimal spillage.

“We failed miserably doing this, and some of us got soaked in lemonade, but we succeeded in getting the bottle on top of the watercooler,” Sherman wrote. “Our plan worked: We now had a watercooler that would dispense ice-cold lemonade.”

The devs were so chuffed with their work that they invited colleagues from other departments to observe their handiwork.

The fun didn’t last because a few days later, the developers started to notice “weird floating things in the lemonade.”

Sherman said the lemonade still tasted fine on Friday, but on Monday he and his team arrived to find a watercooler full of floating mold and fungus.

One brave soul sipped the lemonade, which was foul to the taste.

The developers therefore tried to debug the watercooler and learned the machine only cooled liquid in a small chamber between the neck of the bottle and the taps.

“We had basically left the rest of the lemonade exposed to summer heat,” Sherman deduced. He and his crew also figured out that every time they poured a glass, the air that bubbled up into the bottle brought more bacteria and oxygen into an already sugar-rich environment in which fermentation was clearly taking place.

So they’d basically built a very crude brewery.

“We made sure to get rid of the lemonade before anyone noticed and cleaned the water cooler thoroughly,” Sherman wrote. But no amount of scrubbing could remove the horrible taste that now permeated the machine.

“So that evening we stayed after closing time and we swapped our watercooler with the one used by the chief technology officer and chief security officer,” he told Who, Me?

What technology have you abused when bored, and what was the result? Click here to confess to Who, Me? If we run your story, we promise to treat it carefully so we don’t brew trouble for your career. ®