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User swore hacker called General Failure had invaded his PC
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personal tech User swore hacker called General Failure had invaded his PC Maybe they were looking for Private Data Simon Sharwood Simon Sharwood APAC Editor Published fri 3 Jul 2026 // 07:30 UTC ON CALL Fronting up to work on Friday morning can feel like a mistake, but The Register tries to make it worthwhile by bringing you a new installment of On Call – the reader-contributed column that shares your tech support stories. This week, meet a reader we'll Regomize as "Lee" who told us about his time as sysadmin at the headquarters of a retail company. "It was about the year 2000 and I was a newly minted Certified NetWare Engineer administering Novell servers," Lee reminisced. Before long, Lee was running the teams that managed email servers and provided desktop support for over a thousand users. REG AD "I got to know just about everybody in the HQ and became known as the go-to guy for all things technical," he proudly told On Call. REG AD One Friday afternoon, a vice president called to complain he couldn't access any files from his PC because someone else was using them. Lee found this a little odd, so he asked if the veep was seeing a "file in use" dialog in Word or Excel. The veep replied that he was indeed seeing an error that read "General failure is reading Drive C" – but that was obviously someone using the handle "General Failure" to mask their identity. Lee's next question was very precise. "I asked if the error message read 'General failure is reading Drive C:'" he told On Call. MORE CONTEXT Security boss thought MFA would be too much security Users claimed they’d never seen a spell checker and panicked at the sight of red squiggles This is your BIOS speaking. Please fix me. Your PC is broken Tech support chap hauled out to help SWAT team saw his life flash before his eyes The VP re-read the dialog and corrected himself, telling Lee the exact text was "General failure reading Drive C:" At this point, Lee had good news and bad news. The bad news was tha