This reminds me of a prank that almost got me fired from a federal government contract. Our team was working on a modern web UI replacement for a legacy green screen system written in back in the 80s. One day I was messing with the CSS and created a style that made the interface look EXACTLY like the green screen system it replaced, which was activated by a hidden button on the screen. It was a joke I shared with a few of my trusted developer friends who thought it was hilarious. I never meant for it to get pushed to PROD, but that’s exactly what happened. One of the end-user testers stumbled on it (I guess the button was as hidden as I thought) and was confused as to why this new feature was present. I probably could have passed it off as a testing or comparison feature if I hadn’t ALSO displayed a silly and somewhat sarcastic pop-up message when that mode was activated. For the first tine in my professional career I was actually written up and I had to submit a written apology to the client. The client nearly had me removed from the contract, but I happened to be a very important key engineer at the time so they gave me a second chance. I was also placed on a PIP for a while and I never quite lived that incident down. I’m no longer with that company but I’m sure the incident is still in their HR files!