VP Convinced Hacker Named 'General Failure' Was Ransacking His Hard Drive

There is a certain type of Friday afternoon tech support call that begins with a senior executive and ends with a sysadmin quietly suppressing a laugh. This is one of those calls.

Our reader this week, who we'll call Lee, was working as a freshly certified Novell NetWare engineer around the year 2000, administering servers at the headquarters of a retail company. He'd built a solid reputation there, eventually running the teams responsible for email infrastructure and desktop support across more than a thousand users. The kind of person everyone rings when something breaks.

One Friday afternoon, a VP called in a state. He couldn't access his files, he said, because someone else was using them. Which struck Lee as unusual. He asked the obvious question: was there a 'file in use' dialog open in Word or Excel?

The VP said no. What he was actually seeing was a message that read 'General Failure is reading Drive C' and he had, with full executive confidence, concluded that some rogue actor had chosen the alias 'General Failure' to cover their tracks while poking around the company network.

Lee, to his credit, kept it together. He asked the VP to read the error message back to him one more time, very carefully.

The VP obliged. The actual text, he now confirmed, was 'General Failure reading Drive C:'

No 'is'. No hacker. Just a dying hard drive throwing up a perfectly standard DOS-era error message that, when read without technical context, apparently sounds like a sinister pseudonym.

Lee delivered the news: the disk was gone, but there was no intruder. Nobody on the network was calling themselves General Failure. The company's data wasn't being rifled through by a suspiciously theatrical cybercriminal.

The VP got a new hard drive. Possibly a whole new PC. And Lee got a story worth telling for the next twenty-five years.