101–110 of 268 posts
I won't read this as by rule I am against everything related to pranks, and especially today of all days. I will take this space however to say that we should really do away with this nonsense.
As a senior leader, I welcome the free boost to camaraderie and team spirit and I recognize the creativity that goes into some of these pranks.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The deal is they pay you a fair amount of money to put up with that. Whereas people such as the gentlemen in the article are causing people stress for no reason and with no compensation - and barely even an acknowledgement of misbehaviour. There are worse crimes in the world, but it is bad.
> There are worse crimes in the world, but it is bad Bollocks, and bollocks to the parent hot take. Any moral framework that forbids fun, whether it's because it offends God or "causes people (a tiny bit of) stress", is repugnant to me
You can't even make the (quite bad) defense that people should have known better and it's their own fault for falling for it. The message was 100% plausible.
In high-school I replaced all the printers ready message to “Insert Coin”. I didn’t not check the parameters of the script and because of their network configuration, deployed to the whole district. Surprisingly this wasn’t the reason the banned me from the network.
At my very first real job, back in 1997-98, I worked in tech support for an insurance company. We used Lotus Notes for email (initially just internally, with no Internet email). I had programmer access to Notes because I built some forms for user requests (Notes was more than email, it also had forms, a whole programming language, workflows, etc.). Some Fridays (once a month?) were casual dress days where you could w…
So... Did everyone wear pants on the designated pants-less Friday?
Hot take: workplace and social media April Fools jokes aren't funny and are often inappropriate and disrespectful to people's time. It's cool to do these to your friends in High school, but I once wasted a good amount of time at work because of an April's fool joke. I already didn't want to do the work so I got really upset to have wasted time doing something boring and useless. Additionally, the scale of social medi…
Imagine being one of the people who had to field all of those phone calls. Probably quite a few of those callers were quite angry. Imagine being subject to that anger because some moron in IT you never met thought it would be funny to play a prank that lands on your head.
At my very first real job, back in 1997-98, I worked in tech support for an insurance company. We used Lotus Notes for email (initially just internally, with no Internet email). I had programmer access to Notes because I built some forms for user requests (Notes was more than email, it also had forms, a whole programming language, workflows, etc.). Some Fridays (once a month?) were casual dress days where you could w…
The power of being able to send this file via msn to a friend, convince them to open it, and then get a full message in capitals of "YOU HACKED ME! MY COMPUTER IS BROKEN!" Before watching them go offline (the script shut down their computer after 30 seconds) was a real heart racer. I am sure it contributed to my interest in computers in the following years.
This was a lot of fun to read and really tells the story well. I am thoroughly amused. Thanks for sharing this!
I think the real value in this writeup up of a clever little prank is the way the author/prankster could map out the social reactions and how the spirit in which the prank was received cascades through a whole entire organization in ways that hinge on little cues, little things about who knows who and whether you're physically present before a particular impression crystallizes in people's minds. It's just such a gre…
Sounds like part of the problem was that they actually were considering introducing fees for printing, and this wasn’t their preferred method of communicating that.
Back in college, they cut access to the printers for users off-campus, which had previously been a feature. Someone I knew wrote a printing service script in AppleScript that, when fed a PostScript doc, would ssh into one of the on-campus terminals with the user's credentials and feed the doc to the printer. He got in a bunch of trouble because apparently, computer services had cut off-campus access for data-tracking purposes as prelude to an as-yet-unannounced shift to pay-per-page printing (i.e., they wanted to see how much inconvenience the student body would tolerate), and having the inconvenience routed around in software fucked up their numbers.
... now that I tell this story, it occurs to me that nobody ever called computer services on the whole "Running an unsanctioned social experiment on the faculty and student body" part of all this...
(p.s: I think, perhaps, computer services learned the wrong lesson here, because when they rolled out the program at a uni with a massive computer science program, the techniques the students invented to route around paying for print jobs were legendary. Things like "wrap the PostScript job in a detector that tells the daemon tracking pagecount 'I am printing one blank page' and tells the daemon that feeds the job to the printer 'here are the actual pages'". Perhaps their takeaway should have been "If you add friction and cost to the process, bored students will volunteer time to reduce the friction and cost").