Blog.

So I had been waiting all year to pull a prank inspired by the original Upside-Down-Ternet, and today turned out to be a good time to try it out.

After arriving at work in the morning, Karl, my manager had organised to have the batteries removed from my keyboard. I had totally forgotten about April Fools (so ha ha, joke’s on me). Little did he know, I was going to pull a prank that would spank the pants off him (although unfortunately, we’ve already seen Karl pantless).

At around 10:30am: It started with some subtle BlurryNet only affecting a couple of people’s computers in the office (Karl, Mat). That went on for about half an hour, and they didn’t notice. No fun.

Screenshot 1

Around 11am: Time to crank it up a bit. This time with more blur, but still subtle. It just so happens I had to take a support call from a client at the time (Sydney Eye Specialists). Ironic.

Screenshot 2

Screenshot 3

Okay, now Mat and Karl started to notice. I quickly enabled “-flip”:

Screenshot 4

Karl now thinks that Safari has an “April Fools time bomb”. Mat exclaims that he is getting flipped images too. “Is must be Google!” says Karl. “But how are they doing that?”

Casey chimes in (he is in on the joke) and suggests to Karl that his computer might have a virus.

To remove anyone’s suspicious of me, I walk into the main office: “what is going on with our internets?”

The blame starts flying. Micky cops it.

Around 11:30am: Everything back to normal, so people can start doing their work. A little while later, we find out who the culprit is: Ceiling Cat!

Screenshot 5

That’s right, Ceiling Cat has begun to annotate all the images people are downloading. He is even infecting Karls’ iTunes:

Screenshot 6

Finally, just after 12pm, everyone received an email around letting them know Ceiling Cat had got in touch, and that he was going to restore our internet services soon.

The moral of the story: don’t mess with your sysadmins!