That’s the question asked by Google Blogoscoped, and it’s a damn good one. Me? I’d be screwed. I don’t want to think about all of the private data that’s sitting in my archive, likely forever.

Having (virtually) unlimited email space isn’t always a good thing

Jeff Atwood has a great post about ’Goating’, the office pastime of taking advantage of coworkers who forget to lock their workstation before leaving their desk for extended periods of time.

At Climax ‘goating’ usually involved sending an email from the goatee who’d suddenly decided to out themselves on the company or team mailing list, often while declaring undying love for a coworker.

I liked to be a bit more creating though, my favorites were the desktop-screenshot-as-wallpaper, and changing the current language into Russian. (It was surprising how many people thought the Russian characters represented some form of genuine OS corruption, and how hard it can be to reset the language when you can’t read the dialogs)

A few years ago I had a friend James who would use the language trick to ’goat’ peoples mobiles phones if they left them unattended at bars. This was especially effective since it was in Europe where the choices went far beyond just the English/Spanish. The alcohol factor also kicked things up a notch in the amusement factor.