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The April Fools joke that might have got me fired

oldvcr.blogspot.com

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Re: The April Fools joke that might have got me fired

#121

Post by myself248 »

In high school, we had a Netware 3.12 environment, and the Guest account was enabled, albeit with very limited privileges. But for some reason, Guest could still use NET SEND, which popped up a little message in the bottom row of the destination machine's display.

The whole district shared a T1 connection to the internet. Which was more than plenty for email, but as this world-wide-web thing started gaining traction, it became quite the bottleneck. And as some of us had discovered mp3 files, the slowness simply would not do.

One day there was some severe weather and a power hiccup during school hours, and every station got a message from ADMIN informing us that the server room was running on UPS power and we should save our files and log out immediately.

Hmmmm.

A few weeks later, one of the bright sparks in the technology program realized that having everyone log off would free up some bandwidth. So he logged onto the next machine over as GUEST, and used a NET SEND ALL "SERVER ROOM POWER FAILURE - 11 MIN OF BATTERY REMAIN - SAVE FILES AND LOG OFF" and sure enough, within about a minute, the whole T1 was his. Did what he needed to do (i.e. leeching an entire fserv) for about 8 minutes, then NET SEND ALL "POWER RESTORED - RESUME YOUR WORK".

A few weeks later some hot commodity had just dropped and he repeated the drill. It still worked.

Nobody noticed that these messages came from GUEST, even the district administrator, who eventually called an electrical contractor to figure out why the power in the server room was so flaky. Someone eventually pointed it out to him, which got a very red-faced "that's really clever but please knock it off", and no further punishment. The next day, the Guest account had a lot fewer privileges.

Re: The April Fools joke that might have got me fired

#122

Post by SilasX »

autarch wrote: post #120
SilasX wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

I think it was funny for being unexpected in the work context, not because "no pants" was some brilliant bit of humor.

Because it's so hard to come up with something inappropriate to do in a work environment?

Re: The April Fools joke that might have got me fired

#123

Post by autarch »

SilasX wrote: post #122
autarch wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it was funny for being unexpected in the work context, not because "no pants" was some brilliant bit of humor.

Because it's so hard to come up with something inappropriate to do in a work environment?

Well, clearly you are a smarter and funnier person than I am. And now you've shown it to everyone on HN. That must feel amazing! This must be one of the best days of your life.

Re: The April Fools joke that might have got me fired

#124

Post by tempestn »

Best one I've ever heard was from my friend Bill March. (His real last name, not his real first.) He was relatively new to the company, came into the office on April 1, which also happened to be payday, and was handed a check addressed to Bill April.

The funny part is that it wasn't actually an April Fools joke.

Re: The April Fools joke that might have got me fired

#125

Post by enlightens »

oldgradstudent wrote: post #74
autarch wrote: post #64

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…

> We used Lotus Notes for email My condolences.

I had a client (a national company with multiple locations and call centers!) that was using Lotus Notes for email in 2022, and for all I know they could still be using it. They had to run parallel calendars to work with external event invites, and apparently one of the calendars was backed by a system with a clock that was 5 minutes off because everyone was always getting to virtual meetings at the wrong time.

Re: The April Fools joke that might have got me fired

#126

Post by freehorse »

wat10000 wrote: post #102
circlefavshape wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

It's not the offense, it's the wasted time and money. Think of one of those meeting timers that counts in dollars instead of minutes. Now apply that to all the time spent by random people calling the main office, and by the main office fielding all those calls. It's one thing to cost your employer thousands of dollars because you made a mistake (I'm sure we've all been there), and quite another to cost your employer…

> timers that counts in dollars instead of minutes

Not the best way to measure time imo.

Re: The April Fools joke that might have got me fired

#128

Post by pests »

myself248 wrote: post #121

In high school, we had a Netware 3.12 environment, and the Guest account was enabled, albeit with very limited privileges. But for some reason, Guest could still use NET SEND, which popped up a little message in the bottom row of the destination machine's display. The whole district shared a T1 connection to the internet. Which was more than plenty for email, but as this world-wide-web thing started gaining traction,…

I had discovered the windows net send command as a highschooler too. We mainly just messaged jokes back and forth. One student later decided to try the wildcard to send to everyone, just a simple "Hi". It went out over the entire district hitting multiple schools. I forget why, but no one knew who did it at first. But we had some software installed that let the admin/teacher remotely blank screens or lock the computer, etc. I remember they blanked his screen remotely and once he complained they knew it was him. Didn't get in too much trouble, but I still felt bad for teaching everyone about net send.

Re: The April Fools joke that might have got me fired

#129

Post by Suppafly »

romanhn wrote: post #112
oldgradstudent wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We used Lotus Notes for email My condolences.

To this day, 22 years after I have last used Lotus Notes, it remains the worst software product I have had to work with. It tried to be everything and ended up being bad at all of it.

There are tons of things I miss about Notes email almost daily when I use Outlook. I supported Notes though, so I actually knew how to use search and agents and stuff that most of the people that whine about Notes never learned to use correctly. It's funny how all the companies that ditched Notes end up rewriting all the same applications in Sharepoint and then again in ServiceNow. The industry eats and regurgitates itself every couple of years without actually improving much.

Re: The April Fools joke that might have got me fired

#130

Post by xeromal »

myself248 wrote: post #121

In high school, we had a Netware 3.12 environment, and the Guest account was enabled, albeit with very limited privileges. But for some reason, Guest could still use NET SEND, which popped up a little message in the bottom row of the destination machine's display. The whole district shared a T1 connection to the internet. Which was more than plenty for email, but as this world-wide-web thing started gaining traction,…

I have a very similar story. In high school, our library was using a windows environment and through some luck, I discovered NET SEND or something like that. I figured out my friend's computer names and I started sending them messages. We eventually communicated this way even under the strict librarian and I eventually hatched a plan to annoy everyone. I put together a crappy batch file that iterated through every computers name and just mass sent messages but screwed up the iterator and it went forever. I think we had to restart all the computers but no one figured out it was me except my friends.

Miss those days and also miss playing soldat on those crappy PCs.

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