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511 points goldenskye | 4 comments | | HN request time: 0.8s | source
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autarch ◴[] No.43546581[source]
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.

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SilasX[dead post] ◴[] No.43548250[source]
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1. autarch ◴[] No.43548270[source]
I think it was funny for being unexpected in the work context, not because "no pants" was some brilliant bit of humor.
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2. SilasX ◴[] No.43548348[source]
Because it's so hard to come up with something inappropriate to do in a work environment?
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3. autarch ◴[] No.43548385[source]
Well, clearly you are a smarter and funnier person than I am. And now you've shown it to everyone on HN. That must feel amazing! This must be one of the best days of your life.
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4. SilasX ◴[] No.43550031{3}[source]
I'm not claiming to be better than anyone, I just want to know if there's some subtlety I'm missing, or it's just people overplaying regular toilet humor.

If toilet humor is your thing -- more power to ya! I just have a hard time reconciling it with "best joke ever".