30 years ago, when I was in high school, I embarrassed a teacher so publicly and savagely that she quit her job and moved.

I’ve never told anyone about this, until now anyway. There was a notoriously rude teacher in my high school, we’ll call her Ms. Smith. She had many years of tenure within the school district, and by the time I was in high school, I had endured her verbal abuse in the classroom for several years since she previously taught junior high and then transferred to the high school the same year I did. She would yell at students, call them names, the kind of thing that would never fly today. It was a different era, before cameras were everywhere and when kids weren’t really heard about things like this as much as they are today. In my senior year, I had an elective period where I was working in the library for an hour per day. It was more or less a waste of time. I would do tasks like straighten shelves, check books in and out, that sort of thing. I started to get bored. Really bored. I would do all my library tasks for the day in less than 15 minutes, then I would sit there at the desk for the next 45 minutes just waiting for someone to come and need help or to check out a book. That’s when I started poking around in the library’s computer. It was a single computer at the front desk with a monochrome monitor, an old dot matrix printer that was ancient even back then, and a simple scanner we could use to scan the little barcodes on books to check them in and out. It ran on an older version of MS-DOS, and wasn’t even connected to any other computers, let alone the internet. At this time, the internet was in its infancy and there was no broadband or laptops or anything like we have today. The library had a simple program that they ran on this computer which would print out a large batch of late notices on the attached printer, and a school employee would hand-write students’ addresses on envelopes and mail them out to their homes in an attempt to get them to return overdue library books. I was heavily into computers and trying to teach myself programming at the time, so naturally, I had started exploring the library’s computer. It was primitive. All text based, running on an older version of DOS, but it worked for what they used it for. It didn’t take me long to come upon the text file that the overdue books program would use to print text on the notices. The way it worked was the system would run a list of overdue books, then print out an overdue notice using students’ names and addresses from a simple database along with this block of text which was just to ask students to return their books. One day, Ms. Smith called me out in front of an entire classroom of students and accused me of messing with her desk, which I definitely didn’t do. She was screaming and furious. It was horrible. Later that day, in my library period, I hatched a plan. I first changed the system date and time on the library computer to the previous Saturday. Then, I went in and edited the overdue notice text file. I typed up several long paragraphs detailing a number of Ms. Smith’s finer moments. It was nothing crazy, just detailing what an evil person she was. I held nothing back. When I was finished, I changed the system time on the computer back to be current and checked my work. The timestamp showing the last time the file in question was edited showed Saturday. The notices were printed and mailed once a month, and as far as I knew we had about a week until they ran the program and mailed them out. I waited, and in about 10 days, students were talking about the notices. Teachers weren’t saying anything, but everyone knew. My plan had worked. I don’t know how many homes my custom late notice text was mailed to, but at the time, I guessed it to be around 40 or so. The school of course changed the late notice back to something close to what it was originally, but no one ever asked me about it and I never told anyone. A couple of weeks later, Ms. Smith quit and rumor had it she also moved. I don’t know for sure that it was my little text file edit that caused her to leave, but I sure hope it was.