Call centre, around 40-50 of us working the phones, doing technical support. Mostly software support on a premium-rate phone line. Since people didn't usually want to stay on the call longer than they had to, as that got expensive, it wasn't too uncommon for people to call and ask for someone specific, who had been helping them. Very rarely, the right person might just happen to answer that call when the customer called back. This seemed to be the case for Tony Koala. Yes, it's a fake name, but it was someone with a fairly unusual name, wouldn't be likely to be mixed up with anyone else. He answered the call, and the customer said "Oh, Tony? I was just talking to you a minute ago." "You were? I don't remember, but go on." "Yeah, you don't sound the same, but they said to call back and ask for them by name, Tony Koala." "OK, strange, but go on, what were you doing?" Not exact quotes, I got the story second-hand, but that's about how it went. The customer explained they'd called because their screen kept going blank, and they had to move the mouse to bring it back. Seems obvious, but this was a time when a lot of customers had never used a computer before, even a screensaver could be confusing and a bit scary. Simple enough fix, thought Tony. Until the customer explained what they'd been doing. Whoever they'd spoken to, the Phantom Tony, had got them to the DOS command line, and got them to type "format c:", then said to call back when it was done. Wiping their hard drive completely, losing any data they had on their computer, and making it so the computer couldn't even start up. Back then, a lot the computers we supported didn't even have media supplied for re-installing Windows, and very few people had a clue about doing any sort of backups. So this was very destructive. And, it turned out, not the only time this had happened. A few customers had the same experience. Simple fault, or even no fault, just something they didn't understand. Machine completely wiped. Fake name given to call back. So management started secretly recording calls, and looking for the culprit. They found him. Called him in to a meeting. Told him they knew what he'd been doing, and played him the recording. He pointed out that recording customer calls without a warning wasn't entirely legal. They couldn't have him working on the phone lines. But they couldn't fire him without him causing them a major headache. So they promoted him to supervisor. But we all knew what he'd done, so nobody took any notice of anything he said. He was left trying to manage a team who completely ignored him.