Teacher starts WW III

It all happened some five or six years ago. I was studying in Albacete, a little city, but that has one of the most important fighter bases of the Spanish army.

Well, it happened that our University was located at about half a mile from the air base. Imagine the delight of having a squadron of Mirage-2000 super-sonic fighters zooming over your heads, or breaking the sound barrier not too far away from our place (after all, legally these were not “inhabited areas”).“En fin…”

Anyway, what happened was that a friend of mine (he was a sergeant of the air base) told me that, for the next two months or so, every Thursday, at noon, they were going to have “emergency drills”, with sirens, aircraft taking off, people running about, etc. I then decided that this was an opportunity too good to be wasted…

Our terminal room had some 30 terminals, neatly disposed in some six rows, with five terminals per row. You could send a message directly to other terminal (if you knew its code… of course, I worked hard to find out the codes of all the terminals in that room). And, some time before that, one of us had discovered the way of sending messages to other terminals hiding at the same time the little header “message from terminal XXXX” that appeared in the recipient's screen.

Well, I prepared some little programs, some text files, and next thursday, at 11:45 AM, I went to the terminal room, installed myself in the last row of terminals, and waited to see if a suitable victim entered the place. I needed someone who would use a terminal, but who didn't know a word about computers. At 11:55, my victim arrives: one teacher of English, who had never used a computer in his life (or almost). He sat a couple of rows in front of me, somewhat displaced to the right, so I could see what he was typing. It was obvious that it was the first time that he used a terminal (he was following some instructions scribbled in a little sheet of paper). Probably he was there changing his password or something. Anyway, he began having a look at his account, trying to create directories, moving around, etc. Typical new-comer stuff.

At 11:58, I decide that he is a perfect specimen to suffer the effects of my prank, and I send to his terminal a little text file. He was quite surprised when his screen was deleted, and the following message appeared: (translated from Spanish, of course)

WELCOME TO THE COMPUTER SYSTEM OF LOS LLANOS AIR BASE Please enter code (4 numbers):

He looked hesitantly around him (I pulled my best "working face", looking intently at my terminal). I was watching him, and I couldn't believe my good luck when I see him slowly typing four numbers. Then, I quickly sent him the following message:

YOU HAVE GAINED ACCESS TO THE SYSTEM. WELCOME, SIR: YOU
HAVE ENTERED THE DECISIONS AREA. PLEASE CHOOSE ONE OF THE FOLLOWING: 
0.-Red
Kangaroo. 
1.-Blue Bee. 
2.-Yellow Dolphin. (......) 
8.-Brown Dog. 
9.-Black Cat.

I didn't believe that he would fall for it. But there are people that will blindly believe anything that a computer tells them. So, I was thoroughly delighted when I saw him typing a number with a hesitant finger. Quickly, I sent him the last message:

RED ALERT - RED ALERT - RED ALERT 
VERY WELL, SIR.
OPTION ALREADY PROCESSED. 
RED ALERT WILL BE IMMEDIATLY GIVEN. ALL CRAFT READY
TO TAKE OFF. TARGETS PROCESSED AND DESIGNED. 
RED ALERT - RED ALERT - RED ALERT

The teacher didn't know what to say, and looked at the screen with dubious eyes. But I was lucky. Ten or fifteen seconds had passed after I sent the last message, when hell broke loose: Sirens blaring, Aircraft taking off, people running around in the base (you could see it from the University) …

It happens that, not too long before, the film “War Games” had been shown in Spain, and had been quite a success. Everybody knew about it or had seen it. So, the poor man literally jumped, and went running out of the terminal room screaming: “OPERATOOOOOOOOR!!!!”. I quickly deleted all proof of my activities, logged out from the terminal, changed to another place (everybody in the room was quite surprised) and waited to see what happened.

Shortly after, the teacher entered the room in almost a hysterical fit, trying to explain to the operator that he had triggered World War III!

The final outcome was that nothing happened, and they never knew who had been the culprit. After that, that teacher became famous in the University as “the WWIII freak”, or something like that (not to speak of the operator: for a long, long time, she couldn't help but have muffled laughs whenever she saw him).

Shortly after that, I finished my studies there. I went to see the teacher and explained everything to him. He took it quite well, and told me that he remembered that prank more as something funny and witty than something of bad taste. Three or four days later, he managed to have some 25 porn magazines sent to my home. I still remember my parents' face when they opened the mailbox and saw *that*. Oh, well… I guess we were even after that.