In the early '90s, I was a fresh Computer Science undergraduate student at a state university. Our computer lab was packed with the Sun SPARCstation IPCs, each

In the early '90s, I was a fresh Computer Science undergraduate student at a state university. Our computer lab was packed with the Sun SPARCstation IPCs, each running SunOS. We had this rudimentary email system that everyone in the department used to communicate. The tech-savvy folks, of course, had started exploring Usenet, but for the majority of us, the e-mail was our digital universe. One day, my group of friends and I decided to have some fun. We concocted an idea inspired by the famous 'fortune' command that prints out random adages. We wrote a simple shell script that would take a random line from a text file full of humorous and nonsensical messages we'd written, then mail it to a random user in the computer science department. The script was set up as a cron job, scheduled to send one of these messages every hour. Initially, it was just a harmless prank. People found the messages funny and would often share them in the lab. The source of these messages became the talk of the department, but nobody knew where they were coming from. We took great pleasure in watching our peers and professors speculating about the mysterious sender. However, things started to get out of hand when the Dean received an especially absurd message that read, "Why do computer scientists confuse Christmas and Halloween? Because Oct 31 == Dec 25!" He found the joke incomprehensible and thought it was some sort of cryptic message or even a potential threat. The campus IT team was called in to investigate, and a week-long frenzy ensued as they tried to trace the source of the emails. My friends and I watched in trepidation, wondering if we'd be found out and expelled for our seemingly harmless prank. Finally, after several sleepless nights, we decided to turn ourselves in. We went to the Dean and confessed. After an anxious silence, he started laughing. Apparently, he had been let in on the joke by one of the Computer Science professors and was waiting to see how long it would take for us to come forward. He was good-natured about the prank and found our initiative creative, although he warned us about the unintended consequences of such pranks. Looking back, it was a fun, memorable prank that gave us a valuable lesson about the ethics of technology use. It's a story I often recount when I'm teaching my own Computer Science students about the importance of ethical conduct in the digital world.