The April Fools joke that might have got me fired

Posted by goldenskye 4/1/2025

The April Fools joke that might have got me fired(oldvcr.blogspot.com)

528 points | 252 commentspage 3

rcarmo 4/1/2025|

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

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

russellbeattie 4/1/2025||

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 4/2/2025||

I might have it around someplace… I think. I copied all my Zip disks for safekeeping, never really sorted out the contents. :)

genewitch 4/1/2025||

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

4ggr0 4/1/2025||

the implication

beAbU 4/1/2025||

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.

miningape 4/1/2025||

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 4/1/2025|

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.

mywittyname 4/1/2025||

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.

lopatin 4/1/2025||

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.

dexen 4/2/2025||

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.

ToddWBurgess 4/1/2025||

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 4/1/2025||

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 4/1/2025||

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.

blantonl 4/1/2025||

Informix is the april fools joke.

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

pedrocr 4/1/2025||

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.

ycombinatrix 4/1/2025|

>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

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