If you’re paying attention, you’ll notice that today is April 1st. Most of the big websites put up something to commemorate the day, and naturally the Internet has a new RFC.

I engaged in my own bit of fun today as well, though at the time I actually was not thinking about it being April 1.

My immediate supervisor is named David. The IT department was having an email discussion regarding some server upgrades. My last contribution to this discussion was:

There is also [old server], but that is headed for the bit bucket when [new server] tells dave that it is fully operational and all its circuits are functioning perfectly.”

I then got an Evil Idea(tm) that I could carry out from the mailserver. I made a direct connection to the SMTP port and manually hammered out an email transaction that looked something like this (April 12, 2001 is the date that the monolith was uncovered):

To: IT
From: hal9000
Date: 12 Apr 2001
Subject: Fully Operational?
-
I'm sorry, Dave ... I'm afraid I can't do that.

A little while later, my cow-orker Scott comes in and asks me “was that you?” At first I didn’t know what he was talking about, but then I figured it out, admitted that it was, and we had a laugh.

Apparently, David had not read the first message about the new server, and was rather concerned about the message. He thought maybe his computer or our network had been compromised. He did appreciate the humor once he understood, though.