Behold! The Big Red Button
As is often the case when you are the newest member of staff and in particular the youngest member of staff, you will invariably find yourself the recipient of many the office pranks from your more learned and experienced colleagues. There reaches a point where it ceases to be amusing and you develop a strong urge to reciprocate. This happened to me about twelve years ago I worked for a local company and I had reached the point where I had enough and was plotting to mete out my own form of retribution.
I would not necessarily describe what happened next as being unduly wicked towards my colleagues, probably closer to cruel and unusual punishment.
Amongst the many things I have done for my employer over the years, database management and development was something that I quite enjoyed. With an aptitude for figures and a flair for flowery and dramatic improvements to mundane management systems, I was asked one year by my employer to give the system a major overhaul and freshen it up a bit. On completion, he was suitably impressed to ask me to do the same for his other company, which was the print element. The print industry is not unlike many other industries where the newbies get picked on and although I worked ‘upstairs’, I was not immune to practical jokes from them either.
As we could not afford to take the system offline whilst I carried out the improvements, my colleagues were aware I was making changes and odd things would appear from time to time onscreen and I would send a round robin email to ask people to log off when I carried out major script changes that affected the whole system. It was during one such moment that the method of delivering my revenge became obvious.
Throughout antiquity, we have had many such expressions of forbidden fruit, from Eve in the Garden of Eden, through to Persephone and the pomegranate, Pandora’s Box; the list goes on. However, in this day and age, this trope has now evolved to the Big Red Button, a device that will prove irresistible to even the most strong-willed individual, for the very reason that it is declared to be off-limits or the operation is unquestionably prohibited. A Big Red Button will often feature prominently in movies as a switch that spells the end of the world, capable of launching nuclear missiles, or, in more mundane environments back in the real world, a master switch that will act as an emergency cut-out for large machines that should only ever be used in an emergency and never, ever, under any circumstances be pushed unless absolutely necessary.
This primeval desire to rebel and do the exact opposite to what you are told seeded a fiendish idea in my head to get my own back against my colleagues. I opened up some desktop publishing software and drew a conspicuously large and rather fetching three dimensional representation of a red button and placed it on the most noticeable spot I could think of on the main screen. Above the button, I wrote the specific instructions ‘DO NOT PUSH THIS BUTTON’ and in slightly smaller words underneath ‘under any circumstances’ followed by an exclamation mark to underpin the fact that bad things could happen if you did.
Within the database, there was a series of different layouts that you could move between without opening a new window. I simply created a new layout within the database that was nothing more than a blank template and then wrote a script that created a pop-up window, which featured a status bar that went from zero to one hundred percent. This in itself was neither difficult to engineer, nor concerning to an operator in any way; rather the simple words underneath that stated in bold letters that the database was currently ‘deleting all files’. Once the status bar reached one hundred percent, the pop up window would disappear, leaving a blank page with no method of getting out of it and where you would remain.
I proceeded to send an email around to everybody saying that I was carrying out ‘essential maintenance’, and that ‘one or two things would be changing’. I sorted out the bits that required all users to be logged out, let them back on again, and keep tinkering while I waited for the inevitable call.
There was a lot of murmuring in the room next door, and then complete silence. I could not even hear the radio playing. Complete silence. Ten minutes went by, and then came the internal call. Jenny (not her real name), who was one of our repro operators said in a meek and scolded schoolgirl voice that she was ‘experiencing some difficulties’ with the database. A pregnant pause followed and I made that noise only mechanics or tradesmen make when they are about to tell you some bad news. I sucked in a lungful of air and I asked her in a frantic voice whether she had pushed the big red button or not, because I put a bold script next to it specifically saying not to push the big red button. A meek ‘yes’ came back. ‘Oh God’ I said, ‘do you know what you have done?’ ‘No’, an anxious voice replied. ‘Absolutely nothing’ I cried ‘I’ll be around to fix it in a jiffy’. Suffice to say, this did not go down too well, however, I was never picked on again.
Perhaps these experiences inspired me to create a convoluted conspiracy against the protagonist of my novel “Like a Shag on a Rock”
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