The April Fools joke that might have got me fired

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.

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").