Tell us your naughty stories

[neilk]

Paul Graham recently mentioned that one of the characteristics Y Combinator looks for is "naughtiness" -- an intolerance for bureaucratic rules, a history of beating the system. Go read about it here: (http://paulgraham.com/founders.html)

So what are your stories?

[olalonde]

(I know, that's totally wrong and probably not what PG refers to by "beating the system".)

Some years ago, my friend and I decided to kick off the night by drinking some beer in a park, downtown Montreal. After a few minutes, it started raining like hell. We had to get inside somewhere and the closest place was a university building which was "fortunately" still opened. We went inside and walked by the security, each carefully dissimulating our beer through our jacket. After wandering some time through the hallways, we finally found an unlocked classroom to finish our booze. Once done, we slowly walked back to the main entrance. We would soon realize that time had flied by and the building was long closed.

Fortunately there was still a security guy. We kindly asked him if he could unlock the door for us. Of course, we looked somewhat drunk and he asked us, on an authoritative tone, what we were doing here. My friend came up with the lamest lie. The guy wasn't stupid and obviously knew we were hiding something. By that time, another security guy had came by. "I have to get us out of the shit", I thought to myself. I took all my courage and asked: "Ok, so you won't let us out just because we are gay?". The guy became visibly panicked, probably frightened to lose his job over homophobia. He almost apologized and quickly let us out. I was really proud of social engineering our way out of this delicate situation. My friend wasn't, he started yelling incoherently at me. I told him to get over it: "Who cares if he thinks you're gay? You're never going to see him again". I was wrong. Remember the second security guy who was standing there all along? It happened to be a friend of his very catholic father.

[burningion]

Free College Hack:

In high school, I had a rough time with family stuff and my grades started to slack. I knew that getting a scholarship would be crucial if I wanted to go to college in the future. However, my grades simply weren't going to cut it for the Florida Lottery Bright Futures scholarship. I needed a 3.5+ GPA, a 1250+ SAT score, and 60 hours of community service in order to get their best 100% scholarship.

At the rate I was going, my GPA wouldn't be near that.

So I did some research, and I found out that the Bright Futures Scholarship was also applicable to home schooled students. Intrigued, I researched a bit into what made up a home schooled student's GPA.

I found a legal loophole here. One of the ways that the State of Florida graded home schooled students was by letting them talk to a psychologist. The psychologist said you were performing at a grade level, and you graduated. Grades were simply "made up".

So I dropped out of high school end of sophomore year, and created my own home schooled program. Which basically consisted of building a boat, programming, and volunteering at ECHO (echonet.org)

In dropping out, I basically had two years to practice taking the SAT's in order to get above a 1270. I scored a 1280 and got a 100% free ride into any State school.

But by the time I'd spent 2 years out of the educational system, I'd decided a year of living in the rain forest would be better than partying at school. So I turned down the scholarship and moved to the Panamanian rain forest instead.

[jasonkester]

I used to work as a salaried employee for a consulting firm. I'd record my hours on a timesheet so that they could bill the right clients, but anything over 40 hours a week was ignored on my paycheck. The understanding was that if ever your hours dropped below 40, you could bill an overhead number to make up for the difference, thus the fairness of not getting paid for overtime.

So a year in, I only managed to find 35 hours of work one week, so I called up HR and got that overhead number to put down for those extra 5 hours. Next day, I found myself in a meeting with my boss and his boss, being put on some form of probationary "hourly" status, working part time until I could get my workload back up to speed. I could work as few as 24 hours per week, and I'd only get paid for the hours I worked.

So naturally things picked up and soon I found myself working 50 and 60 hour weeks again, and amazingly, my new "hourly" status meant I was getting paid for all of them. HR sent up the necessary paperwork to get me back onto "Salaried" mode and I told them I'd get it right back to them.

1 month later, they sent that paperwork again, and I apologized for letting it go on so long.

Next month, my boss delivered it by hand and I promised to "get right on it."

Finally, after 180 days of billing 60 hour weeks and getting paid for all of it, I found myself back in that same room with my boss, his boss, and now his boss, all of whom wanting to know why I hadn't filled in that paperwork.

I laid out the math for them. Silence... Then uncontrolled laughter from all hands. Congratulations, son. But how about we fill out that paperwork right now?

[davidst]

I rode a motorcycle across Russia and several of the former Soviet republics eight years ago. You can't help but learn many useful hacks along the way.

Here's one: How to deal with the police. Their work is boring and it's not unusual for them to go long stretches of time without being paid. They see you coming up the road-- They're curious and you look interesting. They motion for you to pull over and unless you've managed to get so close that you can plausibly claim you didn't see the baton waving you'd better obey them.

The hack: For goodness sake don't sit their dumbly and wait for them to speak up! If you do they'll have to justify pulling you over. "Document!", and you're screwed. The next thirty minutes are spent going through your papers and your belongings while they look for any pretense to hit you up for a fine/bribe. Yes, it's corrupt, but understand that is the only way of life for them. Empathy and understanding will get you much further than casting judgment.

Be the first to speak. Raise your helmet visor, smile and ask for help of some kind. Even something as simple as, "Skolka kilometer Volgograd?" will do. When they answer, nod, smile, shake their hand and say, "Speciba."

There's a 75% chance you're done and you can go on your way. The remaining 25% involves a longer conversation with limited English (and compliment them on their English no matter what) and pointing out your route on a map and where you're going. They may offer you a drink or to share a meal. Feel free to do so if you have time.

I never once paid a bribe which must be some kind of record.

[kareemm]

Reminds me of a friend's story.

He had just moved to New York from a Texas border town in the 70s. Being a starving grad student, he was a white guy living in Spanish Harlem, a pretty sketchy neighborhood at the time.

When walking home at night, he'd avoid the sidewalks and walk in the street so that he was less of a target and could see people coming.

One night he was walking home and saw three tough looking guys notice him and veer off the sidewalk to follow him. They were walking behind him and gaining fast.

Instead of running, he turned, and, in flawless Spanish (learned from his days growing up on the US-Mexico border) greeted them, told them he was lost, and asked them for help finding his way.

He said the guys looked slightly confused before one offered help, and the three guys ended up walking him to his door to make sure he got home safely.

[TooSmugToFail]

I did the similar thing at Heathrow Airport. I took the underground from London to Heathrow, but I only had Zones 1 & 2 travel card, while Heathrow is in Zone 4.

When I went out the train, I've put my worried face and I walked hurriedly to the guy on the exit gates (there's always a guy manually opening the door). When I got fairly near, I flashed my travel card asking in a worried voice "What's the quickest way to Terminal A?" Worked like a charm.

[xentronium]

Awesome. I wonder if this works for foreigners only.

[amadiver]

What does '"Skolka kilometer Volgograd?" will do. When they answer, nod, smile, shake their hand and say, "Speciba."' mean? I'm having no luck with online translators.

[jgrahamc]

I spent 6 months commuting between France and Germany flying on a Sunday night in one direction and a Friday night in the other. To avoid waiting in airports for any length of time I hacked my boarding passes.

I was always flying in economy but I would check in on line and print my real boarding pass, then modify the PDF of the boarding pass and change it to a seat in business with whatever other indications where necessary for a genuine business class passenger (e.g. the word BUSINESS or PREMIUM in big letters). I got all that information by picking up a discarded boarding pass at the airport.

Then I could arrive at the airport and skip all the lines using my fake boarding pass to go down the special business class channel and then use my real boarding pass to board the plane.

I only did this at airports where boarding passes were manually verified.

[ceejayoz]

I wonder how many terrorism charges you'd be up on if you did that in the US these days.

[sanswork]

When I use to have to commute from Birmingham to London regularly I would always buy the economy ticket, get on the train in first class tell the attendants I didn't want a meal then go to sleep. Since I was always in a suit with a laptop bag sleeping no one bothered me and first class was always almost empty where economy would have people forced to stand in the areas at the end of the carriages.

[gaius]

Were you not a member of any loyalty programme? If you get silver or equivalent status they let you use the business class checkin regardless of the class you're actually traveling in. No need for any tricks.

[phjohnst]

Nice. This would definitely work today (at least at the airports that I usually fly through).

Also would be a pretty good hack to do some duty-free shopping in the international terminal - at security they usually only seem to glance at your boarding pass and wave you through. Who's to say you don't just go shopping and walk back out the arrivals exit?

[redwoods]

Nice.

[jasonkester]

Fast Food Hack:

When I was in highschool, Burger King ran this "checkers" game, where you'd get a card with a little checkerboard on it, then scratch your way across it by picking squares until you either lost or won a prize. The one feature they advertised was that "Every card is a winner", meaning that if you picked the right path you were guaranteed to win something.

A friend had a sister who worked at a Burger King, so he picked up a huge stack of these cards and spent a night scratching off all the spaces from all of them. It turned out they had a control code at the bottom that could be correlated back to the card configuration, so he was able to put together a cheat sheet that had the winning moves for every code.

All that month, meals for every kid in the school would consist of walking into Burger King, asking for a "Complimentary Game Card", which they were legally obligated to provide. Then, after a minute of consultation at a table, returning to the counter: "Looks like I won a small fries. And could I have another game card?"

Fun times. The kid who discovered the pattern claimed to have won a Carribbean Cruise.

[zumbojo]

I haven't been to BK in a while, but during grad school the back of every receipt asked you to call a number, complete a survey, write down a code, and redeem the receipt for a free Whopper. The code consisted of two letters corresponding to the month (the key to which was easily found online) and four digits (which I just randomized).

The kicker was that BK would give you the free Whopper...and a receipt for the free Whopper. And the cycle continues.

[TooSmugToFail]

This reminded me of the time when I was a kid (maybe 5 or 6 years old), I went with my aunt to buy the newspaper or something like that. They were also selling these scratch lottery tickets and my aunt would usually buy me one or two.

I don't really remember how, but I figured out that the scratch-off paint on the winning tickets had a slightly jagged edge.

My aunt couldn't beleive it, nor could the seller: she would buy me the first ticket, I'd pick it out, scratch it and use the proceeds to buy another one. This went on for a few days... After my aunt bought me the first one, I'd proceed going through the whole stack until I picked out all the winning tickets.

Unfortunately, the best I could do is win back the money invested, as the most frequent prize amount was the price of the ticket.

[bnycum]

I was once in San Francisco at a Burger King and noticed one of the workers doing something besides working while I was waiting for my food. They were scratching the scratch off tickets for whatever contest was going on at the time. I decided to snap a picture with my (horrible) cell phone at the time to send to the consumerist when the manager noticed me. She quickly ran over to the worker and told the worker to go do that in an area more private. I was pretty shocked, but I enjoyed my burger and went on.

[spinlock]

We did the same thing. BK even changed up the codes after a while but we just kept at it until we had a key for the new codes. I bet this is still a story they tell at BK about how that stupid promotion cost them 100x what they thought it would.

I wonder if they ever got any value out of it? BK did become the high-school hang-out after that. I just wonder if that's a good thing for people trying to run a business.

[araneae]

To be fair, that wasn't really your hack. It was the other kid's. But neat.

[harold]

I once had a client that paid with a bad check. To make matters worse, the check had arrived several weeks late. Rumor had it that his business was on shaky ground.

I knew something was up when the teller at my bank noticed the client's name and said they would have to verify the check (check was drawn on a different bank) And of course it was revealed there were non sufficient funds.

Bad check in hand, I went to his bank and tried to cash it, knowing they would not do so. Sure enough, the teller apologized and asked me to contact the client for resolution. Maybe it was her sympathetic tone that prompted me to ask, but she revealed the account was only $18 short of clearing. So I pulled $18 out of my pocket and asked her to deposit it on behalf of that account. She then cashed my check for $2,850.

The client called a few days later, very angry, because several of his checks to "more important" people had bounced instead. His business failed a few months later.

[earbitscom]

At my very first internet job, in 1998 or so, I was hired as a temp. They said they wanted me to find websites that would be good publishers for their content network. They said to do so by searching AltaVista for sites, and then looking to see if they had a web counter, the kind that say "You are visitor number XXX". If the counter said over 100,000 they considered that a good sized publisher and someone else would be in charge of recruiting them. In retrospect, of course, there was no indication of how long it had taken the site to get that 100,000 visitors, nor did any good site use the counters much. But I didn't really know all of that then.

So I ask the other temp, "How do you do this?" And he says, "Well, right now I decided to find sports sites, so I just search for the word 'football' and click each result, scroll down, and see if there is a counter over 100,000." I said, "How many do you usually find?" He says, "Yesterday, I found 6."

I did this for about 2 minutes until I got smart. I searched for 'You are visitor number' and instantly got only sites with counters. Within a few hours I had logged a ton of sites. At the end of that day, they fired the other temp and asked me to work full time, but the agreement with the temp agency said that they couldn't hire me for 90 days after they let me go. So, they fired me and told me that I could work from home as an independent contractor for the 90 day period. They would pay me to keep finding sites, and offered to pay me $10 per site that I found for up to 50 sites per week ($500). They had no idea I was able to find sites so quickly.

I spent the next 90 days building a Rage Against the Machine fan site with my friend at home and, every Friday, I'd spend 20 minutes logging 50 sites using my "You are visitor number" technique, drive into the office, drop off my list, and collect my $500 check that they thought I had worked all week to earn.

[lisper]

I used to be a researcher, so I wrote a lot of grant proposals. I started to get tired of having to speculate about what I might be able to deliver so I spent a year or two under-promising on my proposals and eventually got a year ahead of my proposals. So what I wrote up in my proposals was something that I had already done the year before but not yet published. So I'd get my grant, work on something completely new, then deliver the previous year's work, and then write up a new proposal to do whatever I had actually done most recently. I got a reputation for consistently delivering on my promises.

Then one year I had a proposal rejected on the grounds that what I was proposing was impossible to do on the budget I had allocated. That's when I decided to quit and do something else.

[aeontech]

That is brilliant.

[randomtask]

I lived in Germany for a bit. While there I really wanted to learn to speak German properly, but when I first arrived my spoken German was pretty awful. Since many Germans speak English pretty well and could evidently tell from the way I was pronouncing things that I was an English speaker they would often switch to speaking English with me mid-conversation. This annoyed me because I'd gone to a lot of effort to move there, was trying my best to learn the language, and this was clearly hindering my efforts.

So I came up with a plan. Whenever a conversation would switch to English in this way I'd lay on a really thick accent, use lots of slang and idiomatic phrases, and generally try and make things difficult for the other person to understand. The result was often that the other person would look puzzled and the conversation would switch back to German. Eventually I learned how to pronounce things in a way that didn't immediately betray me as a foreigner, but this trick helped a good bit in the beginning.

[Mz]

Surfed the zero percent interest rate promos on credit cards: rolled debt onto a zero percent card (thus not really making a payment that month because you just moved the debt around) and had lower payments until the promo ran out. Repeat with new promo on a different card.

One I'm proud of but might not be counted as a hack here (not exactly naughty, but good for blowing people's minds, so similarly satisfying to me): Amicable divorce without lawyers. Saved probably tens of thousands of dollars on lawyers fees and had the added bonus that since we didn't lawyer up, we weren't getting antagonistic "cover your ass" advice from lawyers. This meant there was more money to go around (and less paranoia), so we both were able to refrain from squabbling about the small stuff and say "whatever makes it easiest for you". I had people tell me I was crazy to trust my ex but I got a lot more money out of it than I otherwise would have (more than I could have legally insisted on had I fought with him).

We went to the courthouse together to file the papers. The person behind the counter was telling him "you need to do yadda yadda". I guess they thought I was his new love interest, not the future ex. He turned to me and said something like "Did you hear that? You need to sign here." I signed there while the person behind the counter tried to pick their eyeballs back up off the floor. I guess they had never seen anything like it before.

[nhebb]

Studying for an engineering dynamics final, the old "when in doubt, pick C" saying popped into my head, so I decided make a frequency plot of answers for the 4 quizzes we had that term. The prof had B as the correct answer ~50% of the time. At the end of the 2 hour final I had only finished 13 of the 20 problems, so I quickly marked B for the 7 remaining. I got the 2nd highest grade in the class, bumping my grade from a B to an A.

----

My last year of college I was low on funds, so at the beginning of each term I would go to the school library and see if they stocked any of the textbooks. I could usually find 1 or 2. I'd check them out and keep them the whole term, paying only a $5 late fee - vs. the $100 textbook cost. (In case you think this is inethical, based on the past checkout records, nobody ever checked these books out)

----

Hack I wish I'd thought of: A college buddy spent the first day of summer vacation going into all the bars in downtown Portland and getting info about their happy hours. He had every day of the week mapped out and got dinner and a beer for $1/night.

[dageroth]

I bootstrapped my first startup by playing roulette in a casino every night. A Cinema close by was giving out 10 Euro coupons for the casino to play with, so we went first to the cinema every night, asked the people coming out for their tickets and then hit the casino to play with the 10 Euros. Each of us were netting about 400 Euros per month, which was enough to cover the ramen ;-) And that for a nice refreshing half an hour tour in the evening.

The stupid EU put an end to it by changing the gambling laws and prohibiting casinos to give out coupons for chips - someone might get addicted - instead the new coupons allowed free entry and a drink, but until then it worked like a charm.

The casino people were a little freaked out at first, shooting us suspicious looks but after three weeks they got used to us...;-)

[maxklein]

On my recent trip to Africa, I avoided giving bribes at 3 different spots in the airport by doing the following:

When they asked me for "something to have lunch with", I'd lower my voice and say "it's not possible now" then quickly glance at the person behind me.

Neither I nor them had to pay anything.

[eapen]

Brilliant - I wish you posted this tip earlier when I went to Africa. Will do it the next time I go to India for sure.

[OoTheNigerian]

What country in Africa? There are 54 of them.

[bvi]

Ok, I don't get it.

[Zakuzaa]

Genius.

[cixa]

This reminds me of the opening scene in Juzo Itami's <i>Minbo-no Onna</i>. Nobuko Miyamoto's character does something similar with the yakuza.

[garrettgillas]

When I was in 6th grade ('94) I scanned articles from our encyclopedias onto our 386 and then used OCR software to make it usable as a class research paper. You can imagine what happened the following year when I got dial up.

_________________________________________

I also had a computer hardware class in high school that the teacher would often leave for extended periods of time. The other students and I get enough systems running and scrounged a router so that we could play multiplayer Warcraft II during class (which was an old game even back then). We pulled this off for about a month before we got caught. It turned out the teacher really didn't care anyway.

_________________________________________

When I lived in rural Mexico, I used to tape pictures of Jesus to the outside of my packages that I sent home so that the shady people in the mail system wouldn't mess with them.

_________________________________________

My old boss used to add useless revisions every time that I sent him an email saying that part of a project was finished such as "Change the font up to 12px on that navigation please. What? It's already at 12? Can you make it 12 and a half? No, 13px is way too big but I want it bigger than 12 so just fix it OK?"...yeah, that guy. Anyway, I found that if I sent him emails at the end of the day, he would not read them until the following morning when he had the most emails to respond to. Therefore, sending him finished tasks at the end of the day meant fewer useless revisions. I found that outlook has a "delay delivery" setting so as I finished tasks through the day, I would que them to send at about 7:30 at night, when I could be sure that he wasn't working. Lo and behold, the endless revisions went down by about 90% and I got a lot more stuff done.

[garrettgillas]

Ok, one more hack from college although it probably won't work these days.

All of the professors in the science department at my university would tape lists of their student's IDs and their test grades outside their office through out the semester including finals. When looking for classes for the following semester, I just had to look at which professors gave better grades on average and sign up for their classes. The difference was quites staggering.

Some professors consistently failed roughly half of their students while others would have over 3/4 the class with A's consistently. Granted, there were some variable to consider like which course was being taught and the fact that some groups of students are sometimes simply better performers than others. But there was no way I was going to see that kind of data displayed publicly and not take advantage of it.

[dkokelley]

I love the delayed delivery feature. My friend works as a personal banker, and often has to stay late calling on prospect lists* (which had a conversion rate of near 5% - it was really a waste of time). When he was done he was supposed to email the branch manager with the results of the night (appointments, sales, etc.). He liked the OT, but most of the time he already had his appointments and sales met, so I suggested the delayed delivery feature - send the email at 7:30 with your results, get the OT, but don't stay late.

[raintrees]

I had a boss a few decades back that used to give me another task or two every time we passed in the halls. Being already overloaded, I wasn't very appreciative.

I started saving all of my questions for him until these pass-by's. I started giving him so much more stuff, that he began seeing me coming and would jokingly say "Oh, piss off!"

I later heard of another colleague who would answer an additional job request with the question "Okay, what DON'T you want me to do?"

[Jun8]

This is really sad: as about the same time you were doing the scanning and OCR'ing in '94, I was in a PhD program, and did the same thing thing for our research project in the Wavelet Signal Processing course, because I started it too late. Scanned papers, OCR, and edit, Had a 30 page report in no-time, pure bliss. Always felt bad about it, though.

[Xk]

About ten years ago, I went to my father's work one Saturday afternoon. He worked at [big software company]. Throughout the entire building there were doors that were locked, and to open them, you'd put your badge next to the scanner and the door would open. These doors were everywhere. The doors had to be able to be opened from the other side without a badge, though. In case there was ever an emergency, people would need to be able to get out without a badge.

I noticed this when we let the building for lunch: the door was automatically opened as we walked towards it. When we got back from lunch, being the curious ten year old I was, I tried to figure out how it worked. It turns out they had a motion detector pointing in front of the door, and whenever it detected motion, the magnetic locks on the door would open.

So, I asked my father for a stack of paper, went to the elevator room on the locked side of one of these doors, and for thirty minutes made paper airplanes and threw them through the crack in the middle of the double doors until I found out how to make a plane which would expand enough to trip the motion detector. After another half hour of practice, it would only take one or two throws to trip the detector.

The next time I visited his work, and after a few emails to the building security, the cracks in all the doors were sealed.

I've been interested in security ever since then.

[rjurney]

For my first experiment testing boundaries, I went round the building taping off red high five zones, put up posters outlining an official high five incentive program, and started recruiting a high five squad. The Wall Street Journal picked the story up and it worked out well for everyone. We still high five a lot.

Then I stole a conference room called Battle Ship, moved into it with my big purple chair, end table and lamp, renamed it Pirate Ship, and repurposed it as a library for quiet hacking. I posted to the company group, "I sank your battleship," with a humorous story, and it was a hit. I drew a sketchup file of a remodeled room with pyramid foam like at YC, an egg chair, and a data scientist brain washing video on a pull down screen from the overhead projector. I knew I was at the right company when the official response was to rebuild the room to my design (it was even dirt cheap to do so). We brainwashed our first candidate this week.

Finally I promoted myself because I didn't like my old title. That's going well so far.

Probably none of this would have gone as well without a supportive boss running cover I never saw, but if you mean well, are a type A, and are totally committed... at most companies you can get away with anything that advances the mission. As in all walks of life you have to sell.

Shenanigans like these taught me how the system operates, so now I can get real things done the same way.

[makmanalp]

This is great! Are you hiring?

[brandnewlow]

Journalism Hack:

During J-School I found a letter to the editor in a neighborhood paper from someone complaining about the busted up sidewalks. I decided to do a story about it and needed to interview the original letter writer. Unfortunately the paper only published her first name, "Judy" and no contact info.

I found the piece of sidewalk in question. Stopped, turned, and looked around at the 4 high-rise appt. buildings across the street. I pulled out my notebook, wrote "Please let Judy know a reporter is here to talk about the sidewalks with her," on it, walked into the fanciest, snootiest building, gave it to the doorman, and 15 minutes later, the writer of the letter to the editor "Judy" came down and did the interview. I got my source.

I was pretty sure the writer of such a letter would have to be well-off and cantankerous enough to be top-of-mind with her doorman.

[_b8r0]

I used to live in a new build block of flats that was mostly buy to let - it was actually still being built at the time and I was amongst the first to move in. I wanted high speed broadband but it was quite expensive at the time (8mbit was about £50/month back then) but I was close enough to the exchange to get it. I bought a wireless access point, set myself up as a linksys reseller and sold WRTs to most of my floor offering unlimited Internet access for £10/month. I then used a Linux box as my gateway for the wireless, split everyone off from my internal network and throttled connections based on the amount they paid. When new people moved in I came round to see them (usually with a pre-configured router) and offered them 12 months (as that's how long most tenancy agreements were) for £100 plus £50 for the router.

I ended up having 5 8 meg ADSL lines and almost the entire block on the network, each getting 512k-2mbit for £10 a month and a nice profit margin too!

[bugsy]

I started work at a place where I didn't have an office but worked on a folding table with a broken chair in a small storage room. After the first month of this it became intolerable. I noticed though that there was a very large office formerly used as a hardware testing lab that was no longer occupied. I came in one weekend with some friends when no one was there and moved most everything out of that room up two stories to a large storage area, and furnished it with the good old filing cabinet and hollow door desk, put posters on the wall, and swapped in a new high end computer and monitors that were supposed to be for an executive. Everyone assumed that someone else had cleared this and by the time anyone figured it out (if they did) no one said anything.

At places where I don't get a business card, I borrow one from the executives and have it cloned at a card shop with my own info. Usually I will get two or three boxes each with different titles and then pass these out at conferences with a title appropriate to whatever I am discussing with someone.

Speaking of conferences, I have never asked for permission to go to them. I just do, and then submit expenses.

[RK]

At my university, they don't give grad students business cards and the only way to order them is to use an internal requisition code. Recently the university spent a huge amount of money on a new "branding campaign". I found some branding documents buried deep in the university website that specified exactly how university business cards should appear. Now I have some very convincing cards from a cheap online stationary vendor.

I give them out all of the time at conferences and other grad students here are always surprised that I have "official" university business cards.

[wyclif]

Speaking of conferences, I have never asked for permission to go to them. I just do, and then submit expenses.

In certain cases it's far easier to apologise later than ask for permission first.