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The April Fools joke that might have got me fired

oldvcr.blogspot.com

251–260 of 268 posts

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

#251

Thought I'd drop my prank as well. In highschool early 2011-2013ish QR codes were just becoming a thing. We had a mild vendetta against the year book committee due to the pricing of the yearbooks and their cliquey group. We copied their "Reserve a year book early poster and save". Then used photoshop to edit it to say "50% off your year books with this QR code". The QR code then linked to a gorilla eating a taco (goo…

searched google. nothing funny found. very disappointed.

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

#255

Thought I'd drop my prank as well. In highschool early 2011-2013ish QR codes were just becoming a thing. We had a mild vendetta against the year book committee due to the pricing of the yearbooks and their cliquey group. We copied their "Reserve a year book early poster and save". Then used photoshop to edit it to say "50% off your year books with this QR code". The QR code then linked to a gorilla eating a taco (goo…

searched google. nothing funny found. very disappointed.

I think it's this one: https://www.pbh2.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/go...

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

#257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It sucks when school administrators are needlessly punitive. In my school, some jackass kid made a photocopy of a $20 bill, on a little mid-1990s HP Officejet in the library. Even in those days, they were programmed to make bad copies of US currency (I think they were enlarged and the color messed up). It was more of an innocent “woah look at this thing”, there was no intent or effort to glue it together and try to u…

I would imagine as in the professional world, there are certain school jobs that attract sociopaths/narcissists/psychopaths. Yes, I’m talking of course about vice principals. My elementary, middle and high school principals were very nice. The VPs were mostly unapproachable hardasses. It may have something to with the principal vs vice principal responsibilities in the U.S. I’m not sure how it is elsewhere in the wor…

I've never met a principal or vice principal who was not either bullied as a child or a bully.

Something about having healthy self esteem in childhood causes you to avoid education administration career paths.

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

#258

Waaay back in the mists of time, when behemoths roamed the plains and cell phones smaller than bricks had yet to be invented, I was an undergraduate student in Physics at Imperial College, London. The physics teaching lab had a large number of BBC Micro computers, these were the precursor to the ARM RiscOS ones made by Acorn, and physics departments loved them because (a) they were full of ports that could be attache…

That’s a pretty wild ride. Thanks for sharing. You must have been absolutely terrified when it began again the second time !

Yep, it was sufficiently "up there" that I remember all the details many decades later.

It makes a good story now, though :)

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

#259
post #15

I worked at a biotech startup about 20 years ago. - Two of the VPs at the company were named Jim Collinsworth and Peter Sachs (not their real names). - For reasons I can't remember, I was able to send emails through the company's Windows email server under any name that I wanted. - So, I merged the two VP names and I sent an email blast to the entire company from "Peter Collinsworth" (just swapping first and last nam…

When I was junior IT at a smaller place (150ish people), we set up DMARC for the first time in "quarantine" mode. Plan was to eventually set it to full reject but only if folks didn't report issues for a month or so.

While it was in quarantine mode, I asked my boss if we could use it for an object lesson in email trust at our next security training. He said sure, got permission from the CEO, and then an hour before the next quarterly IT security training meeting everyone in the company got an email from the CEO's address saying "URGENT all-hands company meeting, attendance mandatory!" (which came from a Postfix running under my desk, sans DKIM validation record).

In DKIM "quarantine" mode, everyone's Outlook flagged the message with a banner or popup or something saying it was suspicious, I think it also had a prompt to auto-spambox future validation failures. Plenty of folks saw that and/or the Nigerian-prince-style typos I put in the "CEO"'s message. They checked with him or IT, who told them congrats, feel free to head home 30min early after the security training.

The more credulous folks that came to the URGENT all-hands were surprised to find themselves in a regular IT security training, no CEO in attendance. We started off with "so today we are going to talk about phishing, sender forgery, and you...".

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

#260
post #225

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

There is an irony that you're adjudicating away other people's stress while holding up your own opinions and feelings of repugnance as evidence of a problem. The reality of professional standards is we can't control what people feel or happens to them but we sure can put a good faith effort in to try and make the experience as neutral as possible. This April fools prank breached that standard in an unpleasant way. I…

> The reality of professional standards is we can't control what people feel or happens to them but we sure can put a good faith effort in to try and make the experience as neutral as possible.

You should use some Microsoft or Google products. They "sure can put a good faith effort in to try and make the experience as" crappy and masochistic as possible, while siphoning all your data.

And yes, avoid people without humor, especially the serious types.

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