I was a pirate fence

All Fool's Day! In the mid-1990s, The Man made me Director-and-sole-employee [DASE?] of INCBI the Irish National Centre for BioInformatics. My brief was to make available DNA and protein sequence databases and appropriate analytical software for Irish researchers. As most of the potential clients knew nada about such databases, I also devised some training courses to get everyone up to speed with this new future. We were a little ahead of the curve and some of our deliverables were at the very frontiers of science [then]. I clocked up some airmiles hawking myself, and these courses, about: NI, NL, BE, CH, NO, SE, FI, TR, ZA. Never made it to Iceland, but might have.

I was better at some aspects of my job [making tea; designing logos; writing book-reviews for Briefings in Binf] and not-so-good at others [firmware updates; blagging people for money; writing, like, papers]. I'd meet with the team [that would be Me] on Monday morning to allocate tasks on the Things To Do list. I had some cyber-adventures.

It may be hard to credit now, but pre-Tiger Ireland was a poor, almost Third World, country: certainly a nett beneficiary of the levelling up aspirations of the EU. 

Giving me systems admin privs over an internet connected server caused a National RedFace Incident in about 1997. As well sponging off the EU, Ireland Inc. was also a nett consumer of internet resources. It was a source of interest and not a little pride when a manager at the National Academic Internet Hub noticed a large blip of out-going traffic - the country was at last providing the world with something useful. The Hub sent a congratulatory message to my Institution, who tracked the source of traffic to my server and asked "what gives?". I was baffled. 

With a lot of help from local IT effectives it transpired that I'd set up an FTP-server to facilitate sharing of DNA data but set the privs to allow read and write access to all. An enterprising anarchist had uploaded some pirated Microsoft products and other [GTA.1-like] tasty resources and let it be known that everyone could stick-it-to-the-man by downloading stuff from my server. I learned a lot on that job - mostly by making mistakes.