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.
Sounds like part of the problem was that they actually were considering introducing fees for printing, and this wasn’t their preferred method of communicating that.
Yea, that’s what I thought, too. The prankster inadvertently floated a very unpopular plan that leadership had and proved it was unpopular before they could implement it. That was probably the root of what actually got admin pissed. Nobody gets disciplined for a harmless joke—you get in trouble when you make the boss’s boss’s boss look bad.
Oh yeah. That'll get you.
Back in college, they cut access to the printers for users off-campus, which had previously been a feature. Someone I knew wrote a printing service script in AppleScript that, when fed a PostScript doc, would ssh into one of the on-campus terminals with the user's credentials and feed the doc to the printer. He got in a bunch of trouble because apparently, computer services had cut off-campus access for data-tracking purposes as prelude to an as-yet-unannounced shift to pay-per-page printing (i.e., they wanted to see how much inconvenience the student body would tolerate), and having the inconvenience routed around in software fucked up their numbers.
... now that I tell this story, it occurs to me that nobody ever called computer services on the whole "Running an unsanctioned social experiment on the faculty and student body" part of all this...
(p.s: I think, perhaps, computer services learned the wrong lesson here, because when they rolled out the program at a uni with a massive computer science program, the techniques the students invented to route around paying for print jobs were legendary. Things like "wrap the PostScript job in a detector that tells the daemon tracking pagecount 'I am printing one blank page' and tells the daemon that feeds the job to the printer 'here are the actual pages'". Perhaps their takeaway should have been "If you add friction and cost to the process, bored students will volunteer time to reduce the friction and cost").
We had a similar setup at my university - printing to a lab printer was disallowed from a machine that wasn't physically in the lab. The printers had routeable IPs, so I'm guessing they did some kind of whitelisting at the printer itself.
The problem was, we were a Sun campus, and my tablet PC ran Linux. So I could SSH in, open up StarOffice, and hit Print on a document - all from the tablet PC in the crook of my elbow - then walk into the lab and pick the documents up out of the tray.
I never got in "trouble" for this, per se, but I did have a lab technician once look at me as if to say, "that's not allowed..."
Is this overstated?
i.e. I wonder about the gap between clever little prank and sending a dry email to everyone re: a new printing policy.
Much of this hinges on the gradient from the "uproarious laughter" they received from some, to the frustration from others...which I find hard to believe as self-reported, in what context would this be uproariously funny?
I see the value as a simplistic fable re: empathy, and in having it before, not after.
I almost feel like I missed something huge in the email that signals it's a joke, or adds another layer of humor, but after multiple readings, it looks identical to a janitor emailing everyone on campus to tell them keys will be required for bathrooms from now on. Although, that is significantly more implausible than the IT worker emailing everyone on campus to tell them there are charges for printing.
As someone who makes dry sarcastic jokes pretty often, I’ve learned you have to really put some ridiculous stuff in there to signal it’s a joke. This also scales with audience size and delivery method.
With so many people, you’d actually have to make the price ridiculous or something like that. Because some people, once they read that the printing is five cents, are going to be upset enough to not read the rest of the email.
I wouldn’t actually do this prank, but if I like had to, it would be more like the “charge” was to sing a song and the email would actually say April Fools in it. Maybe less funny, but a lot more easily seen as a joke. Makes handling the calls to the admins much easier, too.
I agree. It seems like hardly anyone got to experience the fun part of the prank - the number of people who actually saw INSERT 5 CENTS on their VFD panel was probably close to zero given "By 8:30am it was chaos". So for 99.9% of people the entirety of the prank was a dry email stating campus was going to start charging for printing, which was true.
For 99.9% of people, the funny of the prank would only hit later. Ie, upon finding out it was a prank, and hearing about the "insert 5 cents" part that they probably didn't see with their own eyes. Plus the retraction, and 2nd retraction. And reactions of other staff who fell for it (and caused chaos) before 8:30.
And then extra value upon retelling all of the above to others.
Someone relating that sequences of events to me as funny, especially if they said it was only funny after the pileup, would significantly adjust my prior as to dark triad characteristics in their psychology.
"prank" = IT guy sent campus wide email saying some printers will now charge $0.05/page
"that they probably didn't see with their own eyes" = they did not check physically very every printer on campus to verify none of the printers had the characteristic, the only way to falsify what the IT guy said, that some printers had a characteristic.
"Plus the retraction, and 2nd retraction." = 3x the time wasted for everyone on campus
"And reactions of other staff who fell for it" = people who believed the dry email from IT
"(and caused chaos)" = chaos isn't funny
"And then extra value upon retelling all of the above to others." = It sounds like we're assuming the relayer would get value from relating this, but the extra value is to the listener, it'd only harm the relayer.
As a listener, now I know that I have to verify 100% of everything the relayer tells me. They think a good prank is when you leverage your professional role to lie and cause chaos, which is justified because those poor sheep were complaining about something they didn't even verify with their own eyes. i.e. thousands of people should have gone through an absurdly onerous verification rather than trust communications you make in your professional role.
Me checking my inbox at 9:30am...
7:28 New Campus Policy printing now costs 5-cents per page
8:34 Re: New Campus Policy - April Fools! Printing is free.
9:14 Re: Re: New Campus Policy - Printing is still free, for now.
Absolutely.* Does that shed any light, here? They're not claiming it is a triviality, instead, quite specifically, they are claiming the funny part is chaos and the number of people who reacted differently.
* modulo marking the IT department as spam
The fact that you don't find the ensuing chaos amusing has me wondering - do you find Bedlam DL3 entertaining?
Note that finding something amusing isn't necessarily related to whether or not you feel the perpetrator conducted himself appropriately.
The trickster is indeed an ancient archetype that can bring both wisdom and chaos. Historically, however, my understanding is that prior to Plato, essentially all knowledge, including philosophy, was understood to be received from divine sources. It was through the Socratic dialogues that the idea of knowledge as being something gained through human reason gained a foothold.
One could easily argue then that Plato was essentially a prankster and what we know as western civilization is a consequence of his trickery.
> essentially all knowledge
In one particular European tradition, maybe? But elsewhere the trickster may themselves be a divine source of insight. Hermes in Greek, the Southwest American Kokopelli, etc.
My point is that the trickster as philosophical root is an idea that has tendrils far beyond a Western viewpoint. I cant find the ref now but IIRC some Native American traditions have the viewpoint that connecting to the divine cannot be made without first laughing, as that opens the mind to the new experience. Reminds me of some Far Eastern traditions where you need a sharp break from your normal world view to achieve an enlightening breakthrough.
I think people who perform these kinds of pranks vastly overestimate the positive reactions they get.
FTA,
> Having sent this out, I fielded a few anxious calls, who laughed uproariously when they realized, and I reset their printers manually afterwards. The people who knew me, knew I was a practical joker, took note of the date, and sent approving replies.
I doubt a single person "laughed uproariously". Most often they probably rolled their eyes and gave a sympathy chuckle. The people who knew he was a "practical joker" understood how much of this guy's ego was tied to his inaner sense of humor and laughed along to get out of the conversation with him.
What a beautiful bit of history! I had no idea.
You expanded my mind today, and I thank you for that!