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The April Fools joke that might have got me fired

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

#81

Post by linsomniac »

ToddWBurgess wrote: post #51

I thought the joke was things were running on HP-UX (said the guy that had to use campus services running on HP-UX in the 90s). Let the 90's Unix flame wars begin!

I tell you, I was an HP-UX sysadmin into the late '90s and the regional telco used a LOT of HP-UX.

Around '95 I spent a solid year setting up a pair of T520s worth about a million bucks, to be a HA cluster responsible for part of the billing process, which was being ported to Unix from the IBM mainframe by a team of 20 (mostly inept, a few smart cookies) programmers. Only to be cancelled at literally the last possible moment to keep on the mainframe. I highly suspect that it was all a ploy to get better mainframe upgrade terms.

Not on April 1st, but at one point management spent the last of their budget for the year on upgrading this pair of T520s from 2GB to 4GB of RAM. BUT they didn't buy extra drives to grow swap, and we were already WAY into the deployment so we couldn't just go repartitioning. HP-UX required all memory to be backed by swap to be able to use it, so the extra 2GB of RAM went entirely unused.

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

#82

Post by rcarmo »

I did something similar a long while ago, albeit less inspired: https://www.flickr.com/photos/ruicarmo/10493954496/in/album-...

(there's a photo of a Nokia "running" Linux in that album - https://www.flickr.com/photos/ruicarmo/16931940010/in/album-... - I got a lot of mileage out of that animated GIF)

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

#83

Post by hackable_sand »

glimshe wrote: 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…

April 1st always falls on a weekend though

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

#84

Post by ryandrake »

dullcrisp wrote: post #78
glenstein wrote: post #36

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.

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.

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

#85

Post by mwigdahl »

busyant wrote: post #43
LinuxBender wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. I know of several fortune 100 companies that still allow this due to the way they set up email protection with o365 and Proofpoint, ironically. not naming them. I've done similar pranks and got by with the skin of my teeth but would not recommend people do this early in their career especia…

> especially if leadership are sensitive to embarrassment. Funny thing is that I cleared my prank with Peter Sachs because he was a bit of a stick-in-the-mud, but he told me to go for it and he thought it was hilarious. I didn't clear it with Jim Collinsworth because he was a bit of a jokester himself so I (incorrectly) assumed he'd have no problem with it.

Some jokesters are surprisingly picky about which side of the joke they're on.

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

#86

Post by MBCook »

donatj wrote: post #52

I think the joke would have been funnier without the accompanying email. The fear I guess is people trying to jam change into the printers.

Throughout the whole story that’s what I expected to happen. The administration getting mad because people were trying to stick coins in the printers and breaking them costing a lot of money to fix.

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

#87

Post by moduspol »

xandrius wrote: post #60
anshumankmr wrote: post #38

A year ago on March 31st, was my ex's birthday - she told me she loved me. Today, I just don't know if that was the most elaborate prank I ever fell for. Kudos to this guy, at least his prank email was kinda funny.

April Fools day is on the 1st, so no?

She called him from New Zealand.

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

#89

Post by jamesrat »

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.

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

#90

Post by genewitch »

rcarmo wrote: post #82

I did something similar a long while ago, albeit less inspired: https://www.flickr.com/photos/ruicarmo/10493954496/in/album-... (there's a photo of a Nokia "running" Linux in that album - https://www.flickr.com/photos/ruicarmo/16931940010/in/album-... - I got a lot of mileage out of that animated GIF)

I have a Nokia that runs Linux, what's the joke?
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