Back in the 90s, during the Dialup Era when dinosaurs (486s) still roamed the earth and line noise ate your downloads for dinner, I was working for a local ISP. I was recently promoted out of support into jr. sysadmin, but I was still the person they went to for "problem calls." And I actually enjoyed that. Some guy with a Commodore that was having trouble dialing in? Sure, I'll help. That OS/2 user? I used to use OS/2, I can help. Linux? I use that at home, I'll help. It was fun. [1]

But not this call.

One fine morning the sunlight was streaming in the window, I was sitting in my office[2], and a support person (SP) walked in my door, saying "I've got a problem call on hold. Can you help?"

That was typical. But what was odd was SP's demeanor: his tone of voice was pleading, he looked actually afraid that I might say no.

I asked, "What's going on?"

"She says all her pictures have been turned into horses."

Pause. My brain was having trouble with that sentence.

"Uhhh, what?"

"Yeah. She says all her pictures are now horses."

"What pictures?"

"I don't know. She's frantic, mad, and clueless. She can't even explain. Please help?"

"OK, sure."

SP departed at a much higher velocity than usual for a person that was about to return to his office and take more support calls.

I picked up the call. The customer, who I'll call HL for reasons that will become clear, was indeed frantic, mad, and not particularly computer-literate.

"Hi, this is Universal_Binary, how can I help?"

"I've been hacked! Your system is terrible! How could you let someone turn all my pictures into horses?"

After much discussion, I determined that the photos were on her website. Like most ISPs at the time, ours offered each customer a few MBs of disk space (which was plenty to host a website at the time). HL had somehow managed to figure out how to put up a website, and I pulled it up.

It looked like a run-of-the-mill amateur website at the time, and indeed all photos on the site were of horses. Incongrous horses. Instead of whatever was supposed to be there -- navigation icons, a map, etc -- EVERYTHING was now a horse (or more). I had to mute myself when I saw it come up on screen or the customer would have heard my laughter. Nothing on the site had anything to do with horses, and yet there it was -- full of horses.

I looked into it more. Nothing had been recently modified. It turned out that she didn't have any pictures in her public_html directory at all. Every image was coming from a differnt server by using its URL in her IMG SRC= tags. In other words, she was basically stealing photos & bandwidth from someone else.

I suspected that person found out and replaced all their images with horses[3], but maybe they just took a random turn for the equine.

In any case, despite my attempts, it was impossible to get Horse Lady to understand that she had not been hacked. Or how IMG tags work. Or even that she was mooching off someone else, and that what is behind a given URL that she doesn't control might change at any time.

Finally I said, "OK, let me ask the company owner to look into it and make sure you weren't hacked. OK?"

She sounded relieved. "Finally!"

Now it was my turn to go to an office. I went to my boss's office (who happened to be one of the owners of the company), stood in his doorway with that same pleading tone of voice, and:

"I have a mad customer on the line, and she is sure she has been hacked. I don't think she has, but the only thing that will make her happy is knowing you've double-checked." I explained the saga, watching him try -- and fail -- to contain the smile that grew into a chuckle.

"Who is this customer?"

"HL."

Now it wasn't a chuckle; it was outright laughter.

Without turning to look at his screen or touch his keyboard, he said, "Tell her I've checked and her account is secure."

"OK, thanks."

I backed out, told this to HL, and it somehow pacified her a bit and we ended the call.

Boss's office was right next to mine, so occasionally we could hear each other's conversations. I heard several conversations from his office that day that went like this:

"Universal_Binary came to me today to ask of a customer account had been hacked. Apparently all her photos changed to horses."

"What? Horses? Had it been hacked?"

"Of course not."

"Then what happened?"

"The customer was HL."

"Ahh, Hahahahahaha!"

Apparently I was one of the few that had never had a run-in with HL before. But I still remember it, nearly 3 decades later.

[1] Clearly I hadn't been doing support long enough then yet. This call was one that helped cure me of that.

[2] This was the 90s; the pay was bad, but even though I was a part-time jr. sysadmin, I had an office with a window, desk, a couple of visitor chairs, and a door that could close.

[3] Yeah, the 90s was a different era. I'm sure it would have been a lot worse than horses if someone had tried that today.