An I.T. Administrator at a local financing branch was attempting to run routine updates on a server. After signing in to a machine and running the 'whoami' command, it returned null, causing her to experience existential dread.
"I didn't know what to do. Its never returned null before. Sometimes it's empty, but that's a real error. As soon as I saw null, so many questions raced through my head. 'Have I been fired?', 'Did I type the wrong command?', 'Is this a cruel prank?', 'Should I blame this on Greg?' "
After further troubleshooting, the administrator determined the machine had a misconfigured alias. The 'whoami' command was instead running 'whoami-hacked'. The security team was alerted, and determined it was a prank setup by a now-fired developer.