15 ms·

The April Fools joke that might have got me fired

528 points by goldenskye 2y ago

tux3 2y ago
<This comment requires a Hacker News premium account>
- _tk_ 2y ago
  <This comment requires a Hacker News premium account>
  - blueflow 2y ago
    <This comment requires a Hacker News premium account>
    - enterpriss 2y ago
      <This comment requires a Hacker News premium account>
      - spogbiper 2y ago
        <This comment requires a Hacker News premium account>
        BanazirGalbasi 2y ago
        <This comment requires a Hacker News premium account>
        romanhn 2y ago
        <The above comment has been deleted>
        thecosmicfrog 2y ago
        <The below comment has been deleted>
        peterpost2 2y ago
        [Deleted]
        kps 2y ago
        [Removed by Reddit]
        simondanerd 2y ago
        Snook boom five seven supercalifragilisticexpialidocious bum fortnite. This post has been removed by Redact for HN.
        LADuranRizo 2y ago
        [flagged]
- deadbabe 2y ago
  <This comment requires a Hacker News premium account>
- xg15 2y ago
  <This comment has been redacted due to National Security reasons>
  - actionfromafar 2y ago
    HN is now a federal organization. Your account is marked for deletion in the next efficiency round.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
- tetris11 2y ago
  Look, whilst I agree with you in principle, your metaphor on the sexual preferences of honey badgers really did not do you any favours. <Replying to this comment requires a Hacker News premium account>
  - aneutron 2y ago
    While that may be the case, this subject is quite delicate and is best debated within the confines of informed animal sexology: <Parts of this comment are protected by Hacker News Premium Private Debates>
    - zakki 2y ago
      Yeay, I'm a premium user.
- tdstein 2y ago
  Can anyone tell me how to setup a premium account? I can’t figure it out.
  - mankyd 2y ago
    You gotta start by typing your password into a comment. Like this: ****.
    - virgilp 2y ago
      123456 edit: What now?
      - waltwalther 2y ago
        ...just wait for the email, click the link, enter your credit card number, and...
      - MisterTea 2y ago
        AMAZING! That's the same combination on my luggage.
        em-bee 2y ago
        your luggage locks have six digits? or is that two locks: 123 and 456?
    - Aardwolf 2y ago
      hunter2 edit: hey that doesnt look like stars to me
      - actionfromafar 2y ago
        Everybody else but you sees the stars, but not you because you are logged in to your account. To me your message appears as: ******* edit: hey that doesnt look like stars to me
- kotaKat 2y ago
  [preflagged for convienence]
  - alex1138 2y ago
    We have detached this thread, as it was off-topic
- as1mov 2y ago
  (User was banned for this post)
  - Bluecobra 2y ago
    Hope you got 10 bux!
- datadrivenangel 2y ago
  <This comment requires Internet Explorer 6>
- b8 2y ago
  This comment has been redacted by the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation.
- MadVikingGod 2y ago
  <The Central Intelligence Agency can neither confirm nor deny the presence of this post>
heavymetalpoizn 2y ago
[dead]
distalx 2y ago
<Please disable your ad blocker to view this comment>
busyant 2y ago
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 names). - "Peter" Collinsworth's email said something to the effect of "In honor of the 765th anniversary of the establishment of the Exchequer and the signing of the Magna Carta, <biotech-startup-x> is declaring April as 'English Unit' Celebration Month. All laboratory generated results will be reported using the following units: Instead of mg/kg/day, we will use pounds/stone/fortnight ...." etc. etc. etc. - Well, Jim Collinsworth (real VP) saw the email and even he thought that the email had been sent under his own name. - So, Jim fired off an email blast saying, "I did NOT send this. I don't know what this is about." - Everyone soon realized it was an April Fool's joke. - Jim eventually made his way to my office to say ... "That was really funny. Don't EVER do it again."
- mschuster91 2y ago
  > 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. The glorious days of open relays, back when spam was in its infancy. Today it's mostly done on a whitelist basis to let tools like JIRA or Gitlab send notifications under the name of users themselves instead of some noreply address.
- LinuxBender 2y ago
  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 especially if leadership are sensitive to embarrassment.
  - busyant 2y ago
    > 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.
glimshe 2y ago
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 media can create situations where it wastes everybody's time several times per day... Including on HN. Feel free to prank your friends, but don't bring it to work or the Internet, please.
- II2II 2y ago
  My take is that April fools jokes cross the line when they affect people you do not know. Put in other terms: if you can't deliver a direct and sincere apology, you're being a jerk.
- johnisgood 2y ago
  "Don't bring it to work" I could agree with, not the whole Internet, however.
- ghaff 2y ago
  I probably wouldn't make it so absolute. But when I was doing some writing for CNET, there was invariably a warning leading up to April 1 that if you are considering an April Fool's joke in print, just don't.
- fkyoureadthedoc 2y ago
  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.
  - roenxi 2y ago
    The deal is they pay you a fair amount of money to put up with that. Whereas people such as the gentlemen in the article are causing people stress for no reason and with no compensation - and barely even an acknowledgement of misbehaviour. There are worse crimes in the world, but it is bad.
glenstein 2y ago
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 great example of how people could react either with uproarious laughter or by feeling that some boundary has been violated and can think that either reaction was the most self-evidently obvious one in the world and the reasons for it were entirely contingent. It's something where you can only really witness the irrationality of it if you're in the author's position. I once heard it speculated that philosophy might have emerged in Greece because the circumstances of being merchants engaging in interstate trade, you could see the way that certain things regarded as received knowledge were really customs, peculiar to certain cultures and locations. When you're the prankster and you can see different people reacting in different ways that seem to be tied to patterns of the circumstances of how they experienced it, you can kind of witness the contingency of those reactions playing out in real time.
- cnity 2y ago
  Both the OP and your summary are very astutely written. Thank you.
- jimmydddd 2y ago
  Great comment! That's it.
- dullcrisp 2y ago
  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.
  - ryandrake 2y ago
    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.
anshumankmr 2y ago
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.
- xandrius 2y ago
  April Fools day is on the 1st, so no?
  - moduspol 2y ago
    She called him from New Zealand.
paxys 2y ago
Goes to show that jokes are 50% about the material and 50% about the audience.
- permo-w 2y ago
  probably more like 20/80
- antisthenes 2y ago
  And 90% about the delivery ;)
cab11150904 2y ago
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.
- darkwater 2y ago
  <This comment requires a Hacker News premium account>
- swader999 2y ago
  As a senior leader, I welcome the free boost to camaraderie and team spirit and I recognize the creativity that goes into some of these pranks.
  - keybored 2y ago
    <This comment requires a B-level leadership position>
- freehorse 2y ago
  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.
sillyboi 2y ago
As they say, "With great power comes great responsibility." Or in this case, with great printer access comes great pranking potential!
ToddWBurgess 2y ago
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!
- linsomniac 2y ago
  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.
- hylaride 2y ago
  My first time on the internet was on HP-UX machines at my mom's work (BNR or Bell Northern Research - a large telecom research department that was one of the eventual precursors to Nortel). She often had to work weekends and would haul my brother and me in, where we'd surf the early 1990s internet or play netrek, so I have a soft spot for it. I admin'd some HP-UX machines for a hot minute in the early 2000s. It pretty much cancelled out any goodwill, but I do sometimes think back with nostalgia for the workstations.
donatj 2y ago
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.
- MBCook 2y ago
  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.
blantonl 2y ago
Informix is the april fools joke. Does anyone remember the Informix / Oracle wars? What a time to be alive that was.
gwbas1c 2y ago
TLDR: Just skip to the 7th paragraph where the story starts. For reference, see the HN thread from a few days ago: "How to write blog posts that developers read": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43503872 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43503872 Edit: A few section headers might help. For example, paragraphs 2-6 could be under "Background," then add a header "The Joke" before paragraph 7. "Aftermath" might be good towards the end, too. --- BTW, taking a joke is an important life skill, too. The people who flipped out over a silly April Fool's email need to get a life.
- darkwater 2y ago
  The whole post is very well written and worth reading. But maybe it's just me always liking a nice BOFH story.
- jfengel 2y ago
  The entire point of an AFJ is that they don't know it's a joke. As the name says, the goal is to "fool" them. They don't know it's a "silly April Fool's email". Designing an AFJ is tricky, and the larger your audience the trickier it gets. Your friends know you're a jokester; they figure it out almost immediately. When you send it out to a bunch of people you don't know, somebody is going to forget the date and assume you're serious -- because it's supposed to look serious. Further, if it looks like something that might be a problem they have to solve, somebody is going to start solving that problem immediately. You don't know what's going on in their day -- if they've already got six crises going, they're not going to "take a joke" well. The wider your audience, the more obvious you have to be. Knowing how to deliver a joke is also an important life skill -- as is learning not to blame your failure on the target.
CivBase 2y ago
> By 8:30am it was chaos in the main office and this filtered up to the head of HR, who most definitely did know me, and told me I'd better send a retraction before the CFO got in or I was in big trouble. 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. I wonder if the joke would have gone over better with the higher ups if it didn't coincide with their plans to implement an actual pay-to-print system. I'm sure they were none too happy about having attention drawn to an unpopular change they were already planning.
autarch 2y ago
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 wear jeans instead of slacks (this was the distant past, when most professional workplaces still had real dress codes). This was an IT/Eng-wide thing, so we'd get an email reminder about this from an admin person in the department. One time, I thought it would be funny to send my own email announcing pants-less Friday. So I took a copy of the email this admin sent and adjusted it accordingly. I did of course specify that you still had to wear underwear. I'm not a monster. Because I had programmer privileges in Notes, I was able to forge the sender so that it appeared to come from the department admin person, not me. I _meant_ to send it to the small email group for just the other tech support folks (around 15 people or so). But I accidentally (?) sent it to all of IT/Eng, around 200-300 people, IIRC. Oops. Needless to say, my boss's phone started ringing off the hook. I immediately went over to tell him what I'd done. He wasn't pleased, but I didn't get fired. I did have to write an apology email. Of course, many folks in the department later told me it was the funniest thing they'd ever seen happen. Soon after, I moved to programming at a different company. I think this was a good thing for many reasons, but one reason is that it was more challenging, so I wasn't bored with time on my hands to do stupid things like send prank emails to my coworkers.
- oldgradstudent 2y ago
  > We used Lotus Notes for email My condolences.
  - romanhn 2y ago
    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.
    - Suppafly 2y ago
empath75 2y ago
I think the email is what shifted it from being a funny joke to being super obnoxious to a lot of people. If it had just been the message on the printer, a lot of people wouldn't have noticed it and a lot of people that did would have had a quiet chuckle about it at worst. The email is what turned it from being a speed bump to a major impediment to people, at least mentally.
locallost 2y ago
The funniest part "...and told me I'd better send a retraction before the CFO got in or I was in big trouble. That went wrong also, because my retraction said that campus administration was not considering charging per-page fees when in fact they actually were"
rcarmo 2y ago
I did something similar a long while ago, albeit less inspired: https://www.flickr.com/photos/ruicarmo/10493954496/in/album-72157636969944404 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-72157636969944404 https://www.flickr.com/photos/ruicarmo/16931940010/in/album-... - I got a lot of mileage out of that animated GIF)
- genewitch 2y ago
  I have a Nokia that runs Linux, what's the joke?
  - 4ggr0 2y ago
    the implication
- russellbeattie 2y ago
  Rui! That gif is fantastic! Wish I thought of it at the time! Maybe you did share it and I missed it, but that would have been great to flip people out. (Also, a long while ago is like two decades. Gah!)
  - rcarmo 2y ago
    I might have it around someplace… I think. I copied all my Zip disks for safekeeping, never really sorted out the contents. :)
jamesrat 2y ago
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.
- lief79 2y ago
  Ok, what was the reason?
beAbU 2y ago
Ah, the ol' change-printer-ready-message-to-insert-coin prank. I did this in the early 10s on a fleet of hateful HP MFPs at my first job. I think it's the only way that people who get the "printer guy" label can stay sane in the office.
dan_can_code 2y ago
This reminds me of the time I just learned how to write .bat scripts for Windows, when I was a teenager. The power of being able to send this file via msn to a friend, convince them to open it, and then get a full message in capitals of "YOU HACKED ME! MY COMPUTER IS BROKEN!" Before watching them go offline (the script shut down their computer after 30 seconds) was a real heart racer. I am sure it contributed to my interest in computers in the following years. This was a lot of fun to read and really tells the story well. I am thoroughly amused. Thanks for sharing this!
- bitwize 2y ago
  > be me > start up BASIC > PLAY "l16ecececececececececececececececec" > thunderous footsteps as my dad RUNS to pick up the phone that isn't ringing
ge96 2y ago
Imgur was pretty good the negative points and comic sans
spacedcowboy 2y ago
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 attached to experiments for data-gathering, and (b) they were easy to use and had a (for the time) fairly high-res screen for displaying results. One of those ports was the "econet" port, which linked all the computers together to a fileserver with (gasp) a hard disk on it, giving a primitive (by today's standards) networking ability. So we were all given YR1.<letter><letter> usernames, and the letters more or less corresponded with our initials. I figured out that they'd actually just made all combinations of YR1.AA to YR1.ZZ, so I logged into a spare one for deniability using the supplied default password (it was a different age...), bought a copy of the "Advanced User Guide" and the "Econet user guide" and history was about to be made... Myself and a couple of friends decided we'd write a networked virus - viruses weren't very common in those days, they mainly came on floppy disks for Amigas or Atari ST's and did something nasty to your computer. Networked computers were rare outside of government or big business, so the opportunity was there, and we took it :) I probably ought to say that the virus didn't do anything destructive, it just appended "Copyright (c) The Virus, 1988" to the end of any directory listing (get a directory listing was one of the vectors). [technical aside] The BBC micro had two different "interrupt" type mechanisms ("events" and "interrupts"), and the OS was highly vectored (so on an interrupt or event, the 6502 would jump to the location provided by a table of 2-byte entries in RAM, with the event/interrupt being the index into that table). Everything was vectored, "get a character", "write a byte to a device", "perform an OS call", ... And all the devices (floppy disk, network, ...) were implemented in a similar manner. It was a hackers dream of a computer, really. [/aside] What we also did was enable the virus from any event (key-press mainly) or interrupt (VBI, NMI,...), and the events enabled the interrupts, and the interrupts enabled the events. We also made it re-enable itself specifically when you typed "*." (which made the "get a directory listing on the current device" OS call) - this was sneaky, we thought, because if you'd somehow managed to disable the other code, you'd do a "*." to see if the virus was still there... The virus wrote itself as !Boot in the root directory of the current media (and of course hid that entry from view, so you couldn't see it) which meant the next time you used that account, it would be activated on that machine. Come April Fools day, we decided we were ready. We put the virus on one machine in the lab, one of the 10 machines that were in the "damn I need to get my lab-report written up" section that wasn't actually in the lab itself, but was still networked to your account. We were sitting in the same section updating our own lab work, and heard the "WTF!" Students gathered round, the affected person logged out, went to a different machine (thinking there was a problem with the machine) and logged in there, infecting that second machine with the virus. Someone else logged into the first machine, and they were infected too... Since the !Boot file was on the account on the network server, turning the machine off/on and then logging in re-infected the machine... It spread like wildfire. We had built in a vulcan-death-grip-style "disable the virus" key combination, so we wouldn't be affected, and thought ourselves very clever. The idea was not to be affected, but soon after release it was necessary to ignore that because 3 accounts unaccountably (sorry!) uninfected would have stood out like a sore thumb. A couple of days later, an all-students meeting was called. "Authority" was taking this very seriously, they shut down the network, turned off all the machines, and disinfected the network server by hand, removing the !Boot file from every account. They said something along the lines of "this was not funny, don't do it again or there'll be serious consequences". Everyone went back, and life went on. About a week later, the virus again raced through the network, infecting every account in a matter of hours. We hadn't re-released it, and with some horror, realised what had happened - someone had done a "*." on their backup floppy disk, and then brought it back into the lab and booted from it, infecting the machine, and thereafter the network. The thing was too damn infectious for its own good. If we thought "Authority" had no sense of humour last time, this time the meeting was very short, the message was "when we find who did this, we will expel them". Excrement and Fans were in close proximity. Hitting each other, one might say. We couldn't "own up", it was too late. We had no control over what people did with their floppy disks, and things had escalated way too far. We came up with a plan... We wrote another virus. Hear me out. This one was silent, had a time-to-die (when it would delete itself) of about 2 months, and (virtually) "pressed" the key combination that deleted the old virus. We purposefully infected lots of machines with the new virus, waited, and prayed. Things worked out fine. Everyone got infected with the new virus for a while, which destroyed the old one, without being aware of that fact, "Authority" thought they'd laid down the law and been taken seriously, and we managed to not get expelled. And breathe I have never written anything remotely like a virus ever since.
myself248 2y ago
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, it became quite the bottleneck. And as some of us had discovered mp3 files, the slowness simply would not do. One day there was some severe weather and a power hiccup during school hours, and every station got a message from ADMIN informing us that the server room was running on UPS power and we should save our files and log out immediately. Hmmmm. A few weeks later, one of the bright sparks in the technology program realized that having everyone log off would free up some bandwidth. So he logged onto the next machine over as GUEST, and used a NET SEND ALL "SERVER ROOM POWER FAILURE - 11 MIN OF BATTERY REMAIN - SAVE FILES AND LOG OFF" and sure enough, within about a minute, the whole T1 was his. Did what he needed to do (i.e. leeching an entire fserv) for about 8 minutes, then NET SEND ALL "POWER RESTORED - RESUME YOUR WORK". A few weeks later some hot commodity had just dropped and he repeated the drill. It still worked. Nobody noticed that these messages came from GUEST, even the district administrator, who eventually called an electrical contractor to figure out why the power in the server room was so flaky. Someone eventually pointed it out to him, which got a very red-faced "that's really clever but please knock it off", and no further punishment. The next day, the Guest account had a lot fewer privileges.
- pests 2y ago
  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 computer, etc. I remember they blanked his screen remotely and once he complained they knew it was him. Didn't get in too much trouble, but I still felt bad for teaching everyone about net send.
  - xeromal 2y ago
tempestn 2y ago
Best one I've ever heard was from my friend Bill March. (His real last name, not his real first.) He was relatively new to the company, came into the office on April 1, which also happened to be payday, and was handed a check addressed to Bill April. The funny part is that it wasn't actually an April Fools joke.
ffitch 2y ago
somewhat unrelated to the topic, but I really liked this part of one of the sentences: “did not not only did not”. it does make sense in the sentence btw.
thruway516 2y ago
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
- instagib 2y ago
  Probably because they were considering more per page and 5 cents was too low.
- whycome 2y ago
  Right? It actually kinda makes it most believable!
pedrocr 2y ago
I learned of these in-band commands at Stanford and created a very short print file to be able to change the status message of any printer on campus. I couldn't push it centrally but I just queued the file into the global print queue and was able to change any printer by walking to it and asking for my print. To not be too disruptive and given the character limits I only ever put in something like "READY FOR CAL" in reference to the Bay area school rivalry. I don't think anyone was ever annoyed by it, or maybe even noticed it beyond the few people I showed it to, but hopefully the statute of limitations has also passed.
zusammen 2y ago
[dead]
Civitello 2y ago
The email was a bit much, just altering the ready message should have been sufficient.
automationwiz 2y ago
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 (google this its pretty funny), adding to confusion. The year book committee had a FREAK out and sent out a mass email that the QR code was fake and not to follow it and you COULD NOT GET 50% off a year book no matter what link you followed. Needless to say sparked more interest in said QR code and soon the whole school had loaded a gif of a gorilla eating a taco.
- knowitnone 2y ago
  searched google. nothing funny found. very disappointed.
  - cess11 2y ago
    I think it's this one: https://www.pbh2.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/gorilla-eats-a-taco.gif https://www.pbh2.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/go...
kmoser 2y ago
So many pranks, I didn't bother waiting until April 1st to pull them. Prank 1: In high school we wrote a fake DOS for our Apple II+. It accepted commands and ran them, but occasionally would reply with a snarky message. Our teacher was not amused. Prank 2: This was the late 1970s/early 1980s when laser printers cost many thousands of dollars, and neither me nor my high school peers had ever seen one. I found some CGI images in a computer magazine and Xeroxed them onto pin-feed paper for dot-matrix printers. I showed them to my friends and convinced them that I owned a laser printer. The pin-fed holes just added to the authenticity, since they had no idea how a real laser printer worked. Prank 3: My parents changed checking accounts and had a whole book of unused checks. I told my father I wanted to do a prank and he agreed to write one of those checks for $600. I showed the check to one of my classmates at the beginning of the day and told him I was going to buy a computer after school, and he could come with me. When school ended and my classmate found me, I took out the check, declared I no longer wanted a computer, and ripped it up in his face. He was stunned. Prank 4: The local library had an Atari 400 with a coin-operated TV screen ($0.25 for 15 minutes). Without the use of the screen, I wrote a simple BASIC program to emit a beep randomly every few minutes, started it running, and walked out the door.
- snerbles 2y ago
  > I wrote a simple BASIC program to emit a beep randomly every few minutes, started it running, and walked out the door. Some 15+ years ago ThinkGeek productized this as the Annoy-a-Tron, a small magnetic circuit board which could run on a coin cell for weeks. Tuck one of these into a well-hidden place and it will dismantle the sanity of anyone spending enough time around it. Other more refined versions exist now from a plethora of vendors, I will refrain from linking them here.
  - flakes 2y ago
    On one of my internships there was a small handheld radio floating around the office. I changed it to some local AM jazz station, set it to the lowest possible volume (such that it was barely audible), and hid the radio inside another interns desktop. I told the other interns about it, and we agreed that whenever he asked anyone if they could hear music, that we would tell him we couldn't hear anything. At first he seemed mildly annoyed but mostly ignored it. You couldn't always hear it depending on what song was playing, so that helped keep it hidden for a while. Fast forward one week, we came back from lunch to find that the guy had disassembled almost everything in his cubicle before finding it. He angrily held up the radio and called us all jackasses. I have a little chuckle every time I remember this!
jsphweid 2y ago
I pranked someone (probably not on April Fools) at an office job I had in High School decades ago. I had a summer job digitizing documents. I discovered that I could access the Startup folder on other employee's machines on the network via Windows Explorer. I put a script in one of my very rule-following co-worker's folder that was something like: dir dir dir dir (x100) echo All files have been deleted. I watched them from around the corner when they booted up, saw the flood of file names flash across the screen, and flipped out when they read the message at the bottom. They reached for phone immediately to call the IT admin and I rushed out from around the corner explaining the joke. Never got in trouble. Good times.
mywittyname 2y ago
I guess I'll contribute my best prank. In the late '00s I was working at a small ed tech company that had recently moved into a nice new HQ with a large kitchen. They got this pretty fancy popcorn maker and the IT team put it together (I was a dev, so I was not on this team). People kept burning the popcorn, so it became the office/facilities manager, Tim's duty to make the popcorn (which he was not exactly happy about). I was in the IT closet looking for some cables and noticed a bunch of spare networking equipment laying around. So I grabbed an old four-port switch, an external wifi antenna, and some cables, then I stayed late one night and "installed" them on the popcorn machine in a manner that was surprisingly convincing. IoT Popcorn machine before IoT was a thing. I also wrote up a script that would connect to our Outlook server, and send an email to Tim, "FROM: TECH-POP <techpop-machine@companyname>" with "SUBJECT: TECH-POP IS READY TO BE REFILLED" and some techy-sounding status updates in the body of the email. I even kept track of the number of popcorn bags remaining in the cabinet. Once every few hours, I'd run the script, and Tim would dutifully get up and make some popcorn. After about a day, I ran the script and heard loud, "GOD FUCKING DAMNIT", and the slamming of a chair. Tim went over and ripped all of the networking stuff off of the popcorn machine and threw it in the trash. He then paid a visit to the IT manager to clarify who it was that thought it was his job to "refill the fucking popcorn". The IT manager, with a completely straight face, gets up and I see them walking my direction. They get to my desk, and the guy is coming down from being piss-pissed. His face is all red and eyes are watering. The IT manager tells him, "it was this fool's idea." They laugh and say it was a funny prank and Tim playfully grabs my collar and shakes me a little. After that, I get a message from the IT manager to avoid pranking Tim in the future.
zootski 2y ago
"....could have got me fired"
zootski 2y ago
"....could have got me fired" not "...might have got me fired".
geocrasher 2y ago
Early 90's, 386/16's in the computer lab in high school. I wasn't taking any of the classes but had access to the computers at lunch. I was teaching myself Borland Turbo C++ at home. Guess what these computers had installed? Growing bored with playing Gorilla.bas, I wrote a program that let out a several second long, <100hz tone, a "Fart" if you will, and then printed "oh, sorry, I couldn't contain myself!". I backed up autoexec.bat as autoexec.old, wrote a new autoexec that ran my program, deleted it, and then restored the original autoexec.bat to cover its tracks. We weren't present when it did its thing, but the next day I was informed that if it happened again, I'd lose access, and that was it. No "hacking" accusations or anything.
- geocrasher 2y ago
  EDIT: I left out an important detail! The teacher of the programming class was actually a student who was apparently quite gifted, and guess whose computer the program was installed on? Right. I also remembered another detail: Apparently the same fellow, who had a reputation for smart but also extremely difficult to deal with (I wouldn't know, never met them) also had their fingers in one of the first dialup Internet services in the area, cleverly named DNIS (Desert Network Internet Service, I think? It was basically an Internet connected Linux shell if I recall) but everyone locally called it PNIS. Poor guy.
ycombinatrix 2y ago
>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. oof
lopatin 2y ago
I always thought a fun but fireable April Fools joke would be to sprinkle the words "probably" and "likely" to key parts in technical documentations.
mortar 2y ago
Very tame in the scheme of things, but my go to prank was on a Windows machine, take a screenshot of the desktop with all of its icons, and then disable the icons. Doing it in a whole computer lab caught far more people double clicking in confusion than I expected.
miningape 2y ago
I became a lot engaged more in class after realising I could remotely shutdown the teacher's computer with a custom message. In middle school our entire school network was running some strange windows server p2p setup. What this means is that any computer could issue commands across the network to other computers, purely by knowing the name of the port. Luckily, every ethernet "outlet" had a label stating the port's name. This made it stupidly simple to issue a `shutdown \M <PORT>` in the middle of class.
- ALLTaken 2y ago
  Omg, I know I did this, but throw a double proxy. I thought a special education pupil howto remote shutdown and wrote a script. I told him they'd know it's him. So we scripted the Internet Explorer icon with a pre-exec command script, that basically did a network-scan for IPs and shutdown each one remotely. Poor fella sitting there didn't even know what's happening. Was a bully, but still. They interrogated him and he didn't even know what happened. We sat there and saw every computer at the school turn off with a custom message. Except his computer. He really looked dumbfounded.. I get a smile when I think of it.. it wasn't anything evil or bad, but just fun. Good 'ol times. He didn't get into any trouble, just disciplinary extra curricular work. Which I think was good for that bully anways.. he was lacking behind. Also I remember accesing everyone $C drive and copy a counter-strike map of the school I was modeling into. So, the next time anyone went to a LAN-Party (THOSE were GOOD Times), everyone would see the school name as a map and nobody would know who made it. Obviously no violence intended. I just wanted to play in an environment that I spent most of my day and have fun afterwards at they way we could have some fun. Asking everyone to download it would've just led to trouble. Of course I heard of school shootings, but counter-strike was harmless. Those who did think of worse had this in mind anyways.
philsnow 2y ago
> Fortuitously I had learned Perl in, appropriately enough, a computational linguistics course This sentence increases the likelihood that I have crossed paths with the author by something like a factor of a million, as I estimate that the number of people who have ever taken that class is certainly lower than 100k and quite likely lower than 10k.
dexen 2y ago
At my old uni there were a couple public terminals running DOS, most of the time sitting idle at the prompt. It was bespoke kiosk cabinets only exposing keyboard and screen. One April Fool's I had the bright idea to change PROMPT to something along the lines of "This terminal out of service." - and to increase the confusion, also to change PATH to a non-existent directory, so that most commands wouldn't work and instead flash "Bad command or file name.". For a couple minutes observed people coming up to a terminal, trying a few things, and stepping away in frustration. I sure hope administration did restart the terminals overnight to return regular function; normal users were unable to access the power & reset controls.
temporallobe 2y ago
This reminds me of a prank that almost got me fired from a federal government contract. Our team was working on a modern web UI replacement for a legacy green screen system written in back in the 80s. One day I was messing with the CSS and created a style that made the interface look EXACTLY like the green screen system it replaced, which was activated by a hidden button on the screen. It was a joke I shared with a few of my trusted developer friends who thought it was hilarious. I never meant for it to get pushed to PROD, but that’s exactly what happened. One of the end-user testers stumbled on it (I guess the button was as hidden as I thought) and was confused as to why this new feature was present. I probably could have passed it off as a testing or comparison feature if I hadn’t ALSO displayed a silly and somewhat sarcastic pop-up message when that mode was activated. For the first tine in my professional career I was actually written up and I had to submit a written apology to the client. The client nearly had me removed from the contract, but I happened to be a very important key engineer at the time so they gave me a second chance. I was also placed on a PIP for a while and I never quite lived that incident down. I’m no longer with that company but I’m sure the incident is still in their HR files!
kittikitti 2y ago
Subject: You're hired! Body: April Fools!
TacticalCoder 2y ago
[dead]
curtisszmania 2y ago
[dead]
that_guy_iain 2y ago
To me, the administration clearly screwed up. They were thinking about implementing something that was done as a prank. They could have just told everyone it was a prank and not to worry but instead, they reacted like the backlash was too bad and then told everyone we might be doing it anyway but not just now. This would have been an easy way for them to see the reaction and be thankful that they didn't do it and could just say it was a prank.
noisy_boy 2y ago
sl is installed in /usr/games so that can be a check. Otherwise, I think this is quite reliable: $ grep -q --binary-files=text ACCIDENT `which sl` $ echo $? 0
LADuranRizo 2y ago
[flagged]
tracker1 2y ago
The most I've done, is sneak a mouse dongle into a neighbor/cube's computer... throughout the day I'd just move the mouse in one direction, frustrating the user across the partition.
anotherevan 1y ago
I changed the display on the printers in our office to read, "Needs Chocolate".
lynchjac000 1y ago
if you want t o kidnap me here'ss my address 5463
blackgreek 1y ago
[flagged]

528 points by goldenskye 2y ago

tux3 2y ago

_tk_ 2y ago
<This comment requires a Hacker News premium account>
- blueflow 2y ago
  <This comment requires a Hacker News premium account>
  - enterpriss 2y ago
    <This comment requires a Hacker News premium account>
    - spogbiper 2y ago
      <This comment requires a Hacker News premium account>
      - BanazirGalbasi 2y ago
        <This comment requires a Hacker News premium account>
        romanhn 2y ago
        <The above comment has been deleted>
        thecosmicfrog 2y ago
        <The below comment has been deleted>
        peterpost2 2y ago
        [Deleted]
        kps 2y ago
        [Removed by Reddit]
        simondanerd 2y ago
        Snook boom five seven supercalifragilisticexpialidocious bum fortnite. This post has been removed by Redact for HN.
      - LADuranRizo 2y ago
        [flagged]
deadbabe 2y ago
<This comment requires a Hacker News premium account>
xg15 2y ago
<This comment has been redacted due to National Security reasons>
- actionfromafar 2y ago
  HN is now a federal organization. Your account is marked for deletion in the next efficiency round.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
tetris11 2y ago
Look, whilst I agree with you in principle, your metaphor on the sexual preferences of honey badgers really did not do you any favours. <Replying to this comment requires a Hacker News premium account>
- aneutron 2y ago
  While that may be the case, this subject is quite delicate and is best debated within the confines of informed animal sexology: <Parts of this comment are protected by Hacker News Premium Private Debates>
  - zakki 2y ago
    Yeay, I'm a premium user.
tdstein 2y ago
Can anyone tell me how to setup a premium account? I can’t figure it out.
- mankyd 2y ago
  You gotta start by typing your password into a comment. Like this: ****.
  - virgilp 2y ago
    123456 edit: What now?
    - waltwalther 2y ago
      ...just wait for the email, click the link, enter your credit card number, and...
    - MisterTea 2y ago
      AMAZING! That's the same combination on my luggage.
      - em-bee 2y ago
        your luggage locks have six digits? or is that two locks: 123 and 456?
  - Aardwolf 2y ago
    hunter2 edit: hey that doesnt look like stars to me
    - actionfromafar 2y ago
      Everybody else but you sees the stars, but not you because you are logged in to your account. To me your message appears as: ******* edit: hey that doesnt look like stars to me
kotaKat 2y ago
[preflagged for convienence]
- alex1138 2y ago
  We have detached this thread, as it was off-topic
as1mov 2y ago
(User was banned for this post)
- Bluecobra 2y ago
  Hope you got 10 bux!
datadrivenangel 2y ago
<This comment requires Internet Explorer 6>
b8 2y ago
This comment has been redacted by the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation.
MadVikingGod 2y ago
<The Central Intelligence Agency can neither confirm nor deny the presence of this post>

heavymetalpoizn 2y ago

[dead]

distalx 2y ago

busyant 2y ago

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 names). - "Peter" Collinsworth's email said something to the effect of "In honor of the 765th anniversary of the establishment of the Exchequer and the signing of the Magna Carta, <biotech-startup-x> is declaring April as 'English Unit' Celebration Month. All laboratory generated results will be reported using the following units: Instead of mg/kg/day, we will use pounds/stone/fortnight ...." etc. etc. etc. - Well, Jim Collinsworth (real VP) saw the email and even he thought that the email had been sent under his own name. - So, Jim fired off an email blast saying, "I did NOT send this. I don't know what this is about." - Everyone soon realized it was an April Fool's joke. - Jim eventually made his way to my office to say ... "That was really funny. Don't EVER do it again."

mschuster91 2y ago
> 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. The glorious days of open relays, back when spam was in its infancy. Today it's mostly done on a whitelist basis to let tools like JIRA or Gitlab send notifications under the name of users themselves instead of some noreply address.
LinuxBender 2y ago
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 especially if leadership are sensitive to embarrassment.
- busyant 2y ago
  > 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.

glimshe 2y ago

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 media can create situations where it wastes everybody's time several times per day... Including on HN. Feel free to prank your friends, but don't bring it to work or the Internet, please.

II2II 2y ago
My take is that April fools jokes cross the line when they affect people you do not know. Put in other terms: if you can't deliver a direct and sincere apology, you're being a jerk.
johnisgood 2y ago
"Don't bring it to work" I could agree with, not the whole Internet, however.
ghaff 2y ago
I probably wouldn't make it so absolute. But when I was doing some writing for CNET, there was invariably a warning leading up to April 1 that if you are considering an April Fool's joke in print, just don't.
fkyoureadthedoc 2y ago
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.
- roenxi 2y ago
  The deal is they pay you a fair amount of money to put up with that. Whereas people such as the gentlemen in the article are causing people stress for no reason and with no compensation - and barely even an acknowledgement of misbehaviour. There are worse crimes in the world, but it is bad.

glenstein 2y ago

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 great example of how people could react either with uproarious laughter or by feeling that some boundary has been violated and can think that either reaction was the most self-evidently obvious one in the world and the reasons for it were entirely contingent. It's something where you can only really witness the irrationality of it if you're in the author's position. I once heard it speculated that philosophy might have emerged in Greece because the circumstances of being merchants engaging in interstate trade, you could see the way that certain things regarded as received knowledge were really customs, peculiar to certain cultures and locations. When you're the prankster and you can see different people reacting in different ways that seem to be tied to patterns of the circumstances of how they experienced it, you can kind of witness the contingency of those reactions playing out in real time.

cnity 2y ago
Both the OP and your summary are very astutely written. Thank you.
jimmydddd 2y ago
Great comment! That's it.
dullcrisp 2y ago
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.
- ryandrake 2y ago
  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.

anshumankmr 2y ago

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.

xandrius 2y ago
April Fools day is on the 1st, so no?
- moduspol 2y ago
  She called him from New Zealand.

paxys 2y ago

Goes to show that jokes are 50% about the material and 50% about the audience.

permo-w 2y ago
probably more like 20/80
antisthenes 2y ago
And 90% about the delivery ;)

cab11150904 2y ago

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.

darkwater 2y ago
<This comment requires a Hacker News premium account>
swader999 2y ago
As a senior leader, I welcome the free boost to camaraderie and team spirit and I recognize the creativity that goes into some of these pranks.
- keybored 2y ago
  <This comment requires a B-level leadership position>
freehorse 2y ago
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.

sillyboi 2y ago

As they say, "With great power comes great responsibility." Or in this case, with great printer access comes great pranking potential!

ToddWBurgess 2y ago

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!

linsomniac 2y ago
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.
hylaride 2y ago
My first time on the internet was on HP-UX machines at my mom's work (BNR or Bell Northern Research - a large telecom research department that was one of the eventual precursors to Nortel). She often had to work weekends and would haul my brother and me in, where we'd surf the early 1990s internet or play netrek, so I have a soft spot for it. I admin'd some HP-UX machines for a hot minute in the early 2000s. It pretty much cancelled out any goodwill, but I do sometimes think back with nostalgia for the workstations.

donatj 2y ago

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.

MBCook 2y ago
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.

blantonl 2y ago

Informix is the april fools joke. Does anyone remember the Informix / Oracle wars? What a time to be alive that was.

gwbas1c 2y ago

TLDR: Just skip to the 7th paragraph where the story starts. For reference, see the HN thread from a few days ago: "How to write blog posts that developers read": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43503872 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43503872 Edit: A few section headers might help. For example, paragraphs 2-6 could be under "Background," then add a header "The Joke" before paragraph 7. "Aftermath" might be good towards the end, too. --- BTW, taking a joke is an important life skill, too. The people who flipped out over a silly April Fool's email need to get a life.

darkwater 2y ago
The whole post is very well written and worth reading. But maybe it's just me always liking a nice BOFH story.
jfengel 2y ago
The entire point of an AFJ is that they don't know it's a joke. As the name says, the goal is to "fool" them. They don't know it's a "silly April Fool's email". Designing an AFJ is tricky, and the larger your audience the trickier it gets. Your friends know you're a jokester; they figure it out almost immediately. When you send it out to a bunch of people you don't know, somebody is going to forget the date and assume you're serious -- because it's supposed to look serious. Further, if it looks like something that might be a problem they have to solve, somebody is going to start solving that problem immediately. You don't know what's going on in their day -- if they've already got six crises going, they're not going to "take a joke" well. The wider your audience, the more obvious you have to be. Knowing how to deliver a joke is also an important life skill -- as is learning not to blame your failure on the target.

CivBase 2y ago

> By 8:30am it was chaos in the main office and this filtered up to the head of HR, who most definitely did know me, and told me I'd better send a retraction before the CFO got in or I was in big trouble. 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. I wonder if the joke would have gone over better with the higher ups if it didn't coincide with their plans to implement an actual pay-to-print system. I'm sure they were none too happy about having attention drawn to an unpopular change they were already planning.

autarch 2y ago

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 wear jeans instead of slacks (this was the distant past, when most professional workplaces still had real dress codes). This was an IT/Eng-wide thing, so we'd get an email reminder about this from an admin person in the department. One time, I thought it would be funny to send my own email announcing pants-less Friday. So I took a copy of the email this admin sent and adjusted it accordingly. I did of course specify that you still had to wear underwear. I'm not a monster. Because I had programmer privileges in Notes, I was able to forge the sender so that it appeared to come from the department admin person, not me. I _meant_ to send it to the small email group for just the other tech support folks (around 15 people or so). But I accidentally (?) sent it to all of IT/Eng, around 200-300 people, IIRC. Oops. Needless to say, my boss's phone started ringing off the hook. I immediately went over to tell him what I'd done. He wasn't pleased, but I didn't get fired. I did have to write an apology email. Of course, many folks in the department later told me it was the funniest thing they'd ever seen happen. Soon after, I moved to programming at a different company. I think this was a good thing for many reasons, but one reason is that it was more challenging, so I wasn't bored with time on my hands to do stupid things like send prank emails to my coworkers.

oldgradstudent 2y ago
> We used Lotus Notes for email My condolences.
- romanhn 2y ago
  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.
  - Suppafly 2y ago

empath75 2y ago

I think the email is what shifted it from being a funny joke to being super obnoxious to a lot of people. If it had just been the message on the printer, a lot of people wouldn't have noticed it and a lot of people that did would have had a quiet chuckle about it at worst. The email is what turned it from being a speed bump to a major impediment to people, at least mentally.

locallost 2y ago

The funniest part "...and told me I'd better send a retraction before the CFO got in or I was in big trouble. That went wrong also, because my retraction said that campus administration was not considering charging per-page fees when in fact they actually were"

rcarmo 2y ago

I did something similar a long while ago, albeit less inspired: https://www.flickr.com/photos/ruicarmo/10493954496/in/album-72157636969944404 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-72157636969944404 https://www.flickr.com/photos/ruicarmo/16931940010/in/album-... - I got a lot of mileage out of that animated GIF)

genewitch 2y ago
I have a Nokia that runs Linux, what's the joke?
- 4ggr0 2y ago
  the implication
russellbeattie 2y ago
Rui! That gif is fantastic! Wish I thought of it at the time! Maybe you did share it and I missed it, but that would have been great to flip people out. (Also, a long while ago is like two decades. Gah!)
- rcarmo 2y ago
  I might have it around someplace… I think. I copied all my Zip disks for safekeeping, never really sorted out the contents. :)

jamesrat 2y ago

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.

lief79 2y ago
Ok, what was the reason?

beAbU 2y ago

Ah, the ol' change-printer-ready-message-to-insert-coin prank. I did this in the early 10s on a fleet of hateful HP MFPs at my first job. I think it's the only way that people who get the "printer guy" label can stay sane in the office.

dan_can_code 2y ago

This reminds me of the time I just learned how to write .bat scripts for Windows, when I was a teenager. The power of being able to send this file via msn to a friend, convince them to open it, and then get a full message in capitals of "YOU HACKED ME! MY COMPUTER IS BROKEN!" Before watching them go offline (the script shut down their computer after 30 seconds) was a real heart racer. I am sure it contributed to my interest in computers in the following years. This was a lot of fun to read and really tells the story well. I am thoroughly amused. Thanks for sharing this!

bitwize 2y ago
> be me > start up BASIC > PLAY "l16ecececececececececececececececec" > thunderous footsteps as my dad RUNS to pick up the phone that isn't ringing

ge96 2y ago

Imgur was pretty good the negative points and comic sans

spacedcowboy 2y ago

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 attached to experiments for data-gathering, and (b) they were easy to use and had a (for the time) fairly high-res screen for displaying results. One of those ports was the "econet" port, which linked all the computers together to a fileserver with (gasp) a hard disk on it, giving a primitive (by today's standards) networking ability. So we were all given YR1.<letter><letter> usernames, and the letters more or less corresponded with our initials. I figured out that they'd actually just made all combinations of YR1.AA to YR1.ZZ, so I logged into a spare one for deniability using the supplied default password (it was a different age...), bought a copy of the "Advanced User Guide" and the "Econet user guide" and history was about to be made... Myself and a couple of friends decided we'd write a networked virus - viruses weren't very common in those days, they mainly came on floppy disks for Amigas or Atari ST's and did something nasty to your computer. Networked computers were rare outside of government or big business, so the opportunity was there, and we took it :) I probably ought to say that the virus didn't do anything destructive, it just appended "Copyright (c) The Virus, 1988" to the end of any directory listing (get a directory listing was one of the vectors). [technical aside] The BBC micro had two different "interrupt" type mechanisms ("events" and "interrupts"), and the OS was highly vectored (so on an interrupt or event, the 6502 would jump to the location provided by a table of 2-byte entries in RAM, with the event/interrupt being the index into that table). Everything was vectored, "get a character", "write a byte to a device", "perform an OS call", ... And all the devices (floppy disk, network, ...) were implemented in a similar manner. It was a hackers dream of a computer, really. [/aside] What we also did was enable the virus from any event (key-press mainly) or interrupt (VBI, NMI,...), and the events enabled the interrupts, and the interrupts enabled the events. We also made it re-enable itself specifically when you typed "*." (which made the "get a directory listing on the current device" OS call) - this was sneaky, we thought, because if you'd somehow managed to disable the other code, you'd do a "*." to see if the virus was still there... The virus wrote itself as !Boot in the root directory of the current media (and of course hid that entry from view, so you couldn't see it) which meant the next time you used that account, it would be activated on that machine. Come April Fools day, we decided we were ready. We put the virus on one machine in the lab, one of the 10 machines that were in the "damn I need to get my lab-report written up" section that wasn't actually in the lab itself, but was still networked to your account. We were sitting in the same section updating our own lab work, and heard the "WTF!" Students gathered round, the affected person logged out, went to a different machine (thinking there was a problem with the machine) and logged in there, infecting that second machine with the virus. Someone else logged into the first machine, and they were infected too... Since the !Boot file was on the account on the network server, turning the machine off/on and then logging in re-infected the machine... It spread like wildfire. We had built in a vulcan-death-grip-style "disable the virus" key combination, so we wouldn't be affected, and thought ourselves very clever. The idea was not to be affected, but soon after release it was necessary to ignore that because 3 accounts unaccountably (sorry!) uninfected would have stood out like a sore thumb. A couple of days later, an all-students meeting was called. "Authority" was taking this very seriously, they shut down the network, turned off all the machines, and disinfected the network server by hand, removing the !Boot file from every account. They said something along the lines of "this was not funny, don't do it again or there'll be serious consequences". Everyone went back, and life went on. About a week later, the virus again raced through the network, infecting every account in a matter of hours. We hadn't re-released it, and with some horror, realised what had happened - someone had done a "*." on their backup floppy disk, and then brought it back into the lab and booted from it, infecting the machine, and thereafter the network. The thing was too damn infectious for its own good. If we thought "Authority" had no sense of humour last time, this time the meeting was very short, the message was "when we find who did this, we will expel them". Excrement and Fans were in close proximity. Hitting each other, one might say. We couldn't "own up", it was too late. We had no control over what people did with their floppy disks, and things had escalated way too far. We came up with a plan... We wrote another virus. Hear me out. This one was silent, had a time-to-die (when it would delete itself) of about 2 months, and (virtually) "pressed" the key combination that deleted the old virus. We purposefully infected lots of machines with the new virus, waited, and prayed. Things worked out fine. Everyone got infected with the new virus for a while, which destroyed the old one, without being aware of that fact, "Authority" thought they'd laid down the law and been taken seriously, and we managed to not get expelled. And breathe I have never written anything remotely like a virus ever since.

myself248 2y ago

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, it became quite the bottleneck. And as some of us had discovered mp3 files, the slowness simply would not do. One day there was some severe weather and a power hiccup during school hours, and every station got a message from ADMIN informing us that the server room was running on UPS power and we should save our files and log out immediately. Hmmmm. A few weeks later, one of the bright sparks in the technology program realized that having everyone log off would free up some bandwidth. So he logged onto the next machine over as GUEST, and used a NET SEND ALL "SERVER ROOM POWER FAILURE - 11 MIN OF BATTERY REMAIN - SAVE FILES AND LOG OFF" and sure enough, within about a minute, the whole T1 was his. Did what he needed to do (i.e. leeching an entire fserv) for about 8 minutes, then NET SEND ALL "POWER RESTORED - RESUME YOUR WORK". A few weeks later some hot commodity had just dropped and he repeated the drill. It still worked. Nobody noticed that these messages came from GUEST, even the district administrator, who eventually called an electrical contractor to figure out why the power in the server room was so flaky. Someone eventually pointed it out to him, which got a very red-faced "that's really clever but please knock it off", and no further punishment. The next day, the Guest account had a lot fewer privileges.

pests 2y ago
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 computer, etc. I remember they blanked his screen remotely and once he complained they knew it was him. Didn't get in too much trouble, but I still felt bad for teaching everyone about net send.
- xeromal 2y ago

tempestn 2y ago

Best one I've ever heard was from my friend Bill March. (His real last name, not his real first.) He was relatively new to the company, came into the office on April 1, which also happened to be payday, and was handed a check addressed to Bill April. The funny part is that it wasn't actually an April Fools joke.

ffitch 2y ago

somewhat unrelated to the topic, but I really liked this part of one of the sentences: “did not not only did not”. it does make sense in the sentence btw.

thruway516 2y ago

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

instagib 2y ago
Probably because they were considering more per page and 5 cents was too low.
whycome 2y ago
Right? It actually kinda makes it most believable!

pedrocr 2y ago

I learned of these in-band commands at Stanford and created a very short print file to be able to change the status message of any printer on campus. I couldn't push it centrally but I just queued the file into the global print queue and was able to change any printer by walking to it and asking for my print. To not be too disruptive and given the character limits I only ever put in something like "READY FOR CAL" in reference to the Bay area school rivalry. I don't think anyone was ever annoyed by it, or maybe even noticed it beyond the few people I showed it to, but hopefully the statute of limitations has also passed.

zusammen 2y ago

[dead]

Civitello 2y ago

The email was a bit much, just altering the ready message should have been sufficient.

automationwiz 2y ago

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 (google this its pretty funny), adding to confusion. The year book committee had a FREAK out and sent out a mass email that the QR code was fake and not to follow it and you COULD NOT GET 50% off a year book no matter what link you followed. Needless to say sparked more interest in said QR code and soon the whole school had loaded a gif of a gorilla eating a taco.

knowitnone 2y ago
searched google. nothing funny found. very disappointed.
- cess11 2y ago
  I think it's this one: https://www.pbh2.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/gorilla-eats-a-taco.gif https://www.pbh2.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/go...

kmoser 2y ago

So many pranks, I didn't bother waiting until April 1st to pull them. Prank 1: In high school we wrote a fake DOS for our Apple II+. It accepted commands and ran them, but occasionally would reply with a snarky message. Our teacher was not amused. Prank 2: This was the late 1970s/early 1980s when laser printers cost many thousands of dollars, and neither me nor my high school peers had ever seen one. I found some CGI images in a computer magazine and Xeroxed them onto pin-feed paper for dot-matrix printers. I showed them to my friends and convinced them that I owned a laser printer. The pin-fed holes just added to the authenticity, since they had no idea how a real laser printer worked. Prank 3: My parents changed checking accounts and had a whole book of unused checks. I told my father I wanted to do a prank and he agreed to write one of those checks for $600. I showed the check to one of my classmates at the beginning of the day and told him I was going to buy a computer after school, and he could come with me. When school ended and my classmate found me, I took out the check, declared I no longer wanted a computer, and ripped it up in his face. He was stunned. Prank 4: The local library had an Atari 400 with a coin-operated TV screen ($0.25 for 15 minutes). Without the use of the screen, I wrote a simple BASIC program to emit a beep randomly every few minutes, started it running, and walked out the door.

snerbles 2y ago
> I wrote a simple BASIC program to emit a beep randomly every few minutes, started it running, and walked out the door. Some 15+ years ago ThinkGeek productized this as the Annoy-a-Tron, a small magnetic circuit board which could run on a coin cell for weeks. Tuck one of these into a well-hidden place and it will dismantle the sanity of anyone spending enough time around it. Other more refined versions exist now from a plethora of vendors, I will refrain from linking them here.
- flakes 2y ago
  On one of my internships there was a small handheld radio floating around the office. I changed it to some local AM jazz station, set it to the lowest possible volume (such that it was barely audible), and hid the radio inside another interns desktop. I told the other interns about it, and we agreed that whenever he asked anyone if they could hear music, that we would tell him we couldn't hear anything. At first he seemed mildly annoyed but mostly ignored it. You couldn't always hear it depending on what song was playing, so that helped keep it hidden for a while. Fast forward one week, we came back from lunch to find that the guy had disassembled almost everything in his cubicle before finding it. He angrily held up the radio and called us all jackasses. I have a little chuckle every time I remember this!

jsphweid 2y ago

I pranked someone (probably not on April Fools) at an office job I had in High School decades ago. I had a summer job digitizing documents. I discovered that I could access the Startup folder on other employee's machines on the network via Windows Explorer. I put a script in one of my very rule-following co-worker's folder that was something like: dir dir dir dir (x100) echo All files have been deleted. I watched them from around the corner when they booted up, saw the flood of file names flash across the screen, and flipped out when they read the message at the bottom. They reached for phone immediately to call the IT admin and I rushed out from around the corner explaining the joke. Never got in trouble. Good times.

mywittyname 2y ago

I guess I'll contribute my best prank. In the late '00s I was working at a small ed tech company that had recently moved into a nice new HQ with a large kitchen. They got this pretty fancy popcorn maker and the IT team put it together (I was a dev, so I was not on this team). People kept burning the popcorn, so it became the office/facilities manager, Tim's duty to make the popcorn (which he was not exactly happy about). I was in the IT closet looking for some cables and noticed a bunch of spare networking equipment laying around. So I grabbed an old four-port switch, an external wifi antenna, and some cables, then I stayed late one night and "installed" them on the popcorn machine in a manner that was surprisingly convincing. IoT Popcorn machine before IoT was a thing. I also wrote up a script that would connect to our Outlook server, and send an email to Tim, "FROM: TECH-POP <techpop-machine@companyname>" with "SUBJECT: TECH-POP IS READY TO BE REFILLED" and some techy-sounding status updates in the body of the email. I even kept track of the number of popcorn bags remaining in the cabinet. Once every few hours, I'd run the script, and Tim would dutifully get up and make some popcorn. After about a day, I ran the script and heard loud, "GOD FUCKING DAMNIT", and the slamming of a chair. Tim went over and ripped all of the networking stuff off of the popcorn machine and threw it in the trash. He then paid a visit to the IT manager to clarify who it was that thought it was his job to "refill the fucking popcorn". The IT manager, with a completely straight face, gets up and I see them walking my direction. They get to my desk, and the guy is coming down from being piss-pissed. His face is all red and eyes are watering. The IT manager tells him, "it was this fool's idea." They laugh and say it was a funny prank and Tim playfully grabs my collar and shakes me a little. After that, I get a message from the IT manager to avoid pranking Tim in the future.

zootski 2y ago

"....could have got me fired"

zootski 2y ago

"....could have got me fired" not "...might have got me fired".

geocrasher 2y ago

Early 90's, 386/16's in the computer lab in high school. I wasn't taking any of the classes but had access to the computers at lunch. I was teaching myself Borland Turbo C++ at home. Guess what these computers had installed? Growing bored with playing Gorilla.bas, I wrote a program that let out a several second long, <100hz tone, a "Fart" if you will, and then printed "oh, sorry, I couldn't contain myself!". I backed up autoexec.bat as autoexec.old, wrote a new autoexec that ran my program, deleted it, and then restored the original autoexec.bat to cover its tracks. We weren't present when it did its thing, but the next day I was informed that if it happened again, I'd lose access, and that was it. No "hacking" accusations or anything.

geocrasher 2y ago
EDIT: I left out an important detail! The teacher of the programming class was actually a student who was apparently quite gifted, and guess whose computer the program was installed on? Right. I also remembered another detail: Apparently the same fellow, who had a reputation for smart but also extremely difficult to deal with (I wouldn't know, never met them) also had their fingers in one of the first dialup Internet services in the area, cleverly named DNIS (Desert Network Internet Service, I think? It was basically an Internet connected Linux shell if I recall) but everyone locally called it PNIS. Poor guy.

ycombinatrix 2y ago

>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. oof

lopatin 2y ago

I always thought a fun but fireable April Fools joke would be to sprinkle the words "probably" and "likely" to key parts in technical documentations.

mortar 2y ago

Very tame in the scheme of things, but my go to prank was on a Windows machine, take a screenshot of the desktop with all of its icons, and then disable the icons. Doing it in a whole computer lab caught far more people double clicking in confusion than I expected.

miningape 2y ago

I became a lot engaged more in class after realising I could remotely shutdown the teacher's computer with a custom message. In middle school our entire school network was running some strange windows server p2p setup. What this means is that any computer could issue commands across the network to other computers, purely by knowing the name of the port. Luckily, every ethernet "outlet" had a label stating the port's name. This made it stupidly simple to issue a `shutdown \M <PORT>` in the middle of class.

ALLTaken 2y ago
Omg, I know I did this, but throw a double proxy. I thought a special education pupil howto remote shutdown and wrote a script. I told him they'd know it's him. So we scripted the Internet Explorer icon with a pre-exec command script, that basically did a network-scan for IPs and shutdown each one remotely. Poor fella sitting there didn't even know what's happening. Was a bully, but still. They interrogated him and he didn't even know what happened. We sat there and saw every computer at the school turn off with a custom message. Except his computer. He really looked dumbfounded.. I get a smile when I think of it.. it wasn't anything evil or bad, but just fun. Good 'ol times. He didn't get into any trouble, just disciplinary extra curricular work. Which I think was good for that bully anways.. he was lacking behind. Also I remember accesing everyone $C drive and copy a counter-strike map of the school I was modeling into. So, the next time anyone went to a LAN-Party (THOSE were GOOD Times), everyone would see the school name as a map and nobody would know who made it. Obviously no violence intended. I just wanted to play in an environment that I spent most of my day and have fun afterwards at they way we could have some fun. Asking everyone to download it would've just led to trouble. Of course I heard of school shootings, but counter-strike was harmless. Those who did think of worse had this in mind anyways.

philsnow 2y ago

> Fortuitously I had learned Perl in, appropriately enough, a computational linguistics course This sentence increases the likelihood that I have crossed paths with the author by something like a factor of a million, as I estimate that the number of people who have ever taken that class is certainly lower than 100k and quite likely lower than 10k.

dexen 2y ago

At my old uni there were a couple public terminals running DOS, most of the time sitting idle at the prompt. It was bespoke kiosk cabinets only exposing keyboard and screen. One April Fool's I had the bright idea to change PROMPT to something along the lines of "This terminal out of service." - and to increase the confusion, also to change PATH to a non-existent directory, so that most commands wouldn't work and instead flash "Bad command or file name.". For a couple minutes observed people coming up to a terminal, trying a few things, and stepping away in frustration. I sure hope administration did restart the terminals overnight to return regular function; normal users were unable to access the power & reset controls.

temporallobe 2y ago

This reminds me of a prank that almost got me fired from a federal government contract. Our team was working on a modern web UI replacement for a legacy green screen system written in back in the 80s. One day I was messing with the CSS and created a style that made the interface look EXACTLY like the green screen system it replaced, which was activated by a hidden button on the screen. It was a joke I shared with a few of my trusted developer friends who thought it was hilarious. I never meant for it to get pushed to PROD, but that’s exactly what happened. One of the end-user testers stumbled on it (I guess the button was as hidden as I thought) and was confused as to why this new feature was present. I probably could have passed it off as a testing or comparison feature if I hadn’t ALSO displayed a silly and somewhat sarcastic pop-up message when that mode was activated. For the first tine in my professional career I was actually written up and I had to submit a written apology to the client. The client nearly had me removed from the contract, but I happened to be a very important key engineer at the time so they gave me a second chance. I was also placed on a PIP for a while and I never quite lived that incident down. I’m no longer with that company but I’m sure the incident is still in their HR files!

kittikitti 2y ago

Subject: You're hired! Body: April Fools!

TacticalCoder 2y ago

[dead]

curtisszmania 2y ago

[dead]

that_guy_iain 2y ago

To me, the administration clearly screwed up. They were thinking about implementing something that was done as a prank. They could have just told everyone it was a prank and not to worry but instead, they reacted like the backlash was too bad and then told everyone we might be doing it anyway but not just now. This would have been an easy way for them to see the reaction and be thankful that they didn't do it and could just say it was a prank.

noisy_boy 2y ago

sl is installed in /usr/games so that can be a check. Otherwise, I think this is quite reliable: $ grep -q --binary-files=text ACCIDENT `which sl` $ echo $? 0

LADuranRizo 2y ago

[flagged]

tracker1 2y ago

The most I've done, is sneak a mouse dongle into a neighbor/cube's computer... throughout the day I'd just move the mouse in one direction, frustrating the user across the partition.

anotherevan 1y ago

I changed the display on the printers in our office to read, "Needs Chocolate".

lynchjac000 1y ago

if you want t o kidnap me here'ss my address 5463

blackgreek 1y ago

[flagged]