Getting more out of work with play

by Tris Hussey on May 21st, 2007

Ah Biz Channel Theme Day. It feels like it’s been, um, a month! Hee, hee of course it’s been a month! Regardless TaxGirl is hosting this month’s theme day on Work and Play and I can’t think of a better way to pimp you work than to have some fun.

Tech companies and IT departments are famous for Nerf rocket fights, after-hours Doom death matches (yes I’m dating myself) and other jokes to bring some fun into the day.

Like when I was in tech support. There was this sneaky little program for Macs that when activated remotely would cause the Energizer Bunny to walk across the victim’s screen (thumping away on his drum). In fact the user couldn’t stop it. Even better … the bunny would march from one computer to another in the same AppleTalk zone. So imagine … you hear thump-thump-thump coming from one corner of the room. Then it starts to get closer, then … it’s on your screen!

Okay for novice computer users it could be more than disconcerting, but for us geeks … we’d be rolling on the floor. We would plant the little extension on a new tech’s Mac as a rite of passage. See how they handled it and if they could find it on their own. Good times, good times.

The story doesn’t end there though … some joker named this joke extension like essential MS Mail driver and it found its way on to a lot of user machines by accident. OMG was the boss pissed. Of course us section heads thought it was just too funny. Social engineering at its best!

Good moral to the story isn’t it? We had fun as techs, but it also served an extremely useful function-a real world test for techs to see if they could find a problematic piece of software.

All work and no play … makes for bored geeks, and Lord knows you don’t want that!

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