* Why have sophisticated technology if you can't have a little fun with it?
Tomorrow (or today, if you went home early yesterday) is April 1 – April Fool’s Day, “Poisson d’Avril” for my French speaking friends. It’s a traditional time to play practical jokes and one of my favorites hinges on identity management.
I first did this almost 20 years ago, when desktop machines were DOS based and my network servers were bindery-based NetWare. But the idea should still work, although the programming might be a bit tougher. I simply used a batch file.
Back then, users really did turn off their PCs at night, then turn them back on in the morning. It would automatically boot to the network login screen, they’d enter a user name and password, then their personal menu would be launched. All cut and dried, easy to do with the elementary scripting language that was supported by DOS batch files.
But around 1986, someone (and I don’t remember who it was any more) created some batch file commands that could read the NetWare environment – including the username and other bindery (i.e., “identity”) information about that user. So here’s what we did.
Before launching the menu system for the user, this batch language would check the month and day. If it wasn’t April 1, then the menu would launch normally. If it was the first of April though, we’d check to see if the user account was more than a year old (by reading the creation date and doing some calendar math). We only wanted to play the trick once on any particular user.
If it was April 1 and this was a first time user, then the menu would be bypassed and the screen would read something like:
“Good morning, Tom [or whatever the user’s name was]. I’m not feeling well today, I think I’ll take the day off.”
No cursor, no “continue” button, just that message. The user would typically then press a key, which would clear the screen and bring up:
“I said I’m not feeling well. Go away, I’m not going to work today!”
If the user persisted, the screen would clear, print “Good bye!” delay a few seconds and then shutdown. Should the user reboot, this would be repeated. Later, a colleague added a check to see if the user had rebooted and the insults got a little nastier each time until finally the user’s machine would simply shutdown as soon as it was booted.
Those sitting around the affected user had to stifle their guffaws, but it got even harder when the user called the help desk only to be asked to repeat all of the messages in excruciating detail. Depending on the gullibility of the user, they might even be accused of abusing the “sick” computer until it died.
I’m not sure how well this would work with today’s more sophisticated users. Certainly I haven’t tried it since the early 1990s. But today’s more encompassing identity management would allow you to include a lot more detail (e.g., threaten to inform the user’s boss, and name her) giving it verisimilitude. After all, why have sophisticated technology if you can’t have a little fun with it?
