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The April Fools joke that might have got me fired

oldvcr.blogspot.com

131–140 of 268 posts

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

#131

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…

What a beautiful bit of history! I had no idea.

You expanded my mind today, and I thank you for that!

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

#132
post #128

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 compute…

I just wrote a comment on this thread and I almost thought you were talking about me for a second. lol

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

#133

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.

Then you should be happy to learn that Trump just passed an executive order making workplace pranks a felony, so hopefully the world will be finally free of this plague on efficiency and profits.

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

#134
post #22

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…

>Feel free to prank your friends, but don't bring it to work or the Internet, please.

Hell don't even prank your friends, most of them don't appreciate it either.

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

#136
post #128

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 compute…

I did the same thing by accident, except mine was "test", I heard murmors around about some strange message on computers in multiple schools in our district, so I fessed up immediately. Our network administrator was just mildly amused about the whole affair and no punishments were carried out.

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

#137
This was the most hilarious part to me:

  That went wrong also, because my retraction said that campus administration was not considering charging per-page fees when in fact they actually were, so I had to retract it and send a new retraction that didn't call attention to that fact

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

#139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The whole point is to measure what really matters to the business, instead of measuring time.

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

#140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All jobs I have ever worked have collectively wasted more man hours through incompetence and the usual corporate BS than I could ever hope to with any conceivable April fools joke.

That doesn't mean you go and deliberately make it worse for a laugh.

It's just disingenuous to pretend it's about corporate efficiency when it's more about personal feelings/vibes.
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