Live data from Hacker News

The April Fools joke that might have got me fired

oldvcr.blogspot.com

151–160 of 268 posts

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

#151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Switched from notes to Microsofts cloud thing and Lync, notes was better. We also had hundreds of not thousands of small apps in notes. Supposedly Microsofts solution was going to be much cheaper if everyone got off notes, but we were given to time, budget, framework or even guidance when it came to the apps. Several years later they still paid a lot for notes.

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

#152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yea, that’s what I thought, too. The prankster inadvertently floated a very unpopular plan that leadership had and proved it was unpopular before they could implement it. That was probably the root of what actually got admin pissed. Nobody gets disciplined for a harmless joke—you get in trouble when you make the boss’s boss’s boss look bad.

[deleted]

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

#153
post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having approval from one of them would be quite the saving grace. I had a CTO tell me to fill a cubicle with quick drying cement after a prank went wrong but I stalled him long enough to cool down. I knew the building management company would have been furious had I followed orders. The CSO had pranked the CTO with a dongle that opens excel and slowly types "I know what you were doing..."

the building company would be more than furious. you could lose your lease over this and pay damages. next time recommend using expanding insulation foam instead, but first cover everything with big sheets of plastic. the victim will still have a hell of a time getting rid of the foam. that stuff hardens...

Oh trust me I know. This was CBRE and they are cantankerous and contentious on good days.

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

#154

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…

Is this overstated?

i.e. I wonder about the gap between clever little prank and sending a dry email to everyone re: a new printing policy.

Much of this hinges on the gradient from the "uproarious laughter" they received from some, to the frustration from others...which I find hard to believe as self-reported, in what context would this be uproariously funny?

I see the value as a simplistic fable re: empathy, and in having it before, not after.

I almost feel like I missed something huge in the email that signals it's a joke, or adds another layer of humor, but after multiple readings, it looks identical to a janitor emailing everyone on campus to tell them keys will be required for bathrooms from now on. Although, that is significantly more implausible than the IT worker emailing everyone on campus to tell them there are charges for printing.

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

#155

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,…

Oh, wow, Novel Netware. That takes me back to high school.

Our computer lab had Novel Netware, I forget which version. Every once in a while, our regular programming classes (Pascal in first two years, C and Assembly Language in third year, Prolog and Theory of Relational Databases in fourth year) would be held in the lab, instead of the classroom, and we would get to put what we learned to use and do some actual programming.

Now, some of us had computers at home and had been using them since before the high school, so we tended to finish our work really fast and then get bored. And just like a lone sharpie cap is the most terrifying thing a parent can stumble upon, so a bored high school kid is the worst thing for your computer security.

Each student had their own account, but teachers shared a limited number of teacher accounts, with special privileges, such as monitoring other students' screens, having full write access to every student's files, etc.

For some reason, I don't remember why, teachers would occasionally go to a student's workstation and log in as a teacher there, to fix the problem. I honestly can't remember why, but it was a common enough problem that it wouldn't raise any brows even if one of us "advanced" kids did it.

So, of course, I eventually came up with the idea of writing a really small and simple program that would look exactly like the Netware login prompt, with one small difference: when you entered the password, it would write it to a file on the filesystem spit out whatever the "incorrect password, try again" reply was, and then execv the actual login program.

The ruse worked perfectly: I called the teacher, they tried to log in, thought they mistyped the password, tried again, succeeded, did whatever it was they were supposed to do, and logged out. Now I had the teacher account password, and so did my best friends in mischief.

We had some innocent fun by pulling a couple of very minor pranks on our fellow students that flew under the radar, so none of the teachers realized that the security was compromised.

But then the annual programming competitions came, and those went all the way from school level, to municipality, to city, to republic, to federal. I was one of the people who qualified to the city-level competition, and what do you know, that year it was hosted in our school's lab.

I finished all the problems with plenty of time to spare, which is how I came up with the "brilliant" idea of helping some of my peers by sharing my solutions with them using the teacher account. Now, one thing they neglected to teach us was the importance of testing, but I'll be honest, even if they did that, I was a typical teenage "gifted kid", which meant I was overconfident and lazy. As a result, everyone who I shared my solutions with happened to have the exact same bugs in them.

A few days later, they called me to the teachers' room in the computer lab, and said that they knew I cheated, that I was already disqualified, and that I should save myself some trouble and explain what I did. So naturally, I came clean and I thought that was the end of it.

Indeed, it was the end of it for me. Nothing else happened, at least nothing of consequence for me. Years later, I found out that I almost got expelled. They held a teacher assembly or conference or whatever it's called when you get all of them together to make a decision, and the decision was whether to kick me out of the school. Fortunately, they decided to let me off with a warning and the official reprimand from the headmaster.

My mom didn't think that was funny at all.

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

#156
post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm not claiming to be better than anyone, I just want to know if there's some subtlety I'm missing, or it's just people overplaying regular toilet humor.

If toilet humor is your thing -- more power to ya! I just have a hard time reconciling it with "best joke ever".

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

#157
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…

> but one reason is that it was more challenging

I feel like that's the most relevant thing here. Bored people do ~stupid pranks. And under-challenge leads to boredom

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

#158
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Haha, the times they are a changing. I still remember c't april fools joke from the 90s where they published a scencil (template) to indicate where you have to drill a hole into your pentium CPU to be able to overclock it. I still chuckle about the whole thing almost 30 years after the fact, still wondering how many morons actually destroyed their perfectly working CPU back then. At times, active thinking of your pee…

This reminds me of the joke videos where you could drill a hole into the iPhone to access the headphone jack or microwave it for wireless charging. I don't recall seeing any pictures of people actually doing those things though, just "angry" comments which were also probably jokes.

Someone actually did it (for real): https://youtu.be/utfbE3_uAMA

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

#159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Not every second of working time has the same level of productivity/value. Having a clock that measures time in dollars makes no sense because it assumes some linear relationship between them.

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

#160

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…

Is this overstated? i.e. I wonder about the gap between clever little prank and sending a dry email to everyone re: a new printing policy . Much of this hinges on the gradient from the "uproarious laughter" they received from some, to the frustration from others...which I find hard to believe as self-reported, in what context would this be uproariously funny? I see the value as a simplistic fable re: empathy, and in…

I agree. It seems like hardly anyone got to experience the fun part of the prank - the number of people who actually saw INSERT 5 CENTS on their VFD panel was probably close to zero given "By 8:30am it was chaos". So for 99.9% of people the entirety of the prank was a dry email stating campus was going to start charging for printing, which was true.
Post reply on HN