About 15 years ago, I wrote a program called Chirper. It would cause each key to emit a particular musical note through the PC speaker when pressed. It was *intended* for blind users - particularly a fellow student that was blind, who showed me the major problem with the software is it would voice out all the key presses and so it's maximum working speed was a dumb crawl of 20wpm. My answer to this was the Chirper. Once a user learned the sound of the keys they could recognize them by the sound and it was not limited by the speed of the speech processor. It could be toggled on and off by double-pressing the Control Key.

Well this friend of mine worked for the US postal service tech support dept and there was this arrogant, and abusive, know-it-all supervisor everyone hated and they installed Chirper on his workstation and when the guy came to work he started typing away and asked what that chirping noise was.

One of the workers jumped back and said "Oh you got the "Chirper Virus! Stay away from my machine or you give it to it."

The supervisor said "You idiot! You can't give a computer a virus by touching it!". Another worker said "Oh yes you can!" and Dave (Name changed) said "It only responds to the person who gave the computer the virus in the first place. ... Let me show you." So Dave goes up, toggles it off and shows how he can type on this supervisor's computer without getting chirps and then toggles it back on and says "Now You try" and of course it chirps.

The supervisor fell for it, and all that week he would get callers asking what the chirping noise was and when he attempted to explain that he had given the computer the virus and that it had to just "Run it's course" like some cold and would get ridiculed by the callers who would insist on talking to someone else.

So on Friday at end of day they uninstalled it and left him a note telling him how he had been the fool of the week. The supervisor was furious but could not do a thing about it. He couldn't very well fire the entire work force, and he couldn't even complain because he'd have to divulge how much of a fool he had been.

Never piss off a bunch of computer techs. They will get you in the end.

In case you doubt here is the assembly language code for Chirper.asm as it was submitted to the public domain in 1992 ... http://read.pudn.com/downloads152/sourcecode/asm/662703/80X0393/CHIRPER....