April Fool’s Day at Apple
Although Apple was founded on April Fool’s day, there isn’t a big emphasis on it within the company. Folks don’t really plan much in the way of jokes, and it’s reasonably safe to believe what you read in emails and conversations much of the time.
That said, I did pull an April Fool’s Day prank many years back, and it caused one idiot at Apple to spend much of the rest of the day trying to get me fired. Back in 1994, I was working in Apple’s information systems division on the application which everyone used to look up phone numbers and email addresses ( and Applelink IDs! ), etc for everyone else. It was the Apple Directory, and it had been around since 1988 as a desk accessory. I was working on a rewrite of the entire thing, mostly on the client ( which I rewrote an an app, 68k and PowerPC native ) and also on the back-end server and system, which used Oracle and a custom ADSP/TCP server process.
At the time it was a pretty useful app—a fast way to find out how to call someone, or their email address, or even a map of their floor with their cube location highlited so you could find their office. Since I was still working on the system, it was in a late beta, and so I had a couple hundred users, while most folks still had the old version. We didn’t restrict who could get it—if you could get the client, it would work, and since it automatically updated itself to the latest version, my beta pool kept growing as folks would show the new ‘cool’ app to their coworkers.
For April Fool’s day, I decided that everyone at Apple should have a nickname. So, since I knew the back end server reloaded all of the data every day at 4:30am from Apple’s Human Resource system, I set an alarm for 5am, then got up and connected into campus using Apple Remote Access, then telnet into the back end server machine, then ran a query to change everyone’s first name in the table the new client was using to end in “-o”. So, “Keith” became “Keith-o”; “John became John-o”, etc. Viola! Everyone has a secret Apple nickname.
I’d also put something into the client and server a few days earlier so that the “-o” part wasn’t searchable. If you searched for John Vink; you’d see John-o Vink; if you searched for John-o Vink you’d seed John-o Vink. In effect, the nicknames didn’t keep anyone from finding anyone.
And, during that morning I got emails from my beta list of folks, mostly complimenting me on the joke. I got one or two bug reports saying that everyone’s name seemed to have been corrupted by the server, and so I explained that the problem would be resolved the following day. Everyone was happy.
Everyone, that is, except a certain lead engineer over in Apple’s Copland group, who decided that because I’d stuck “-o” on the end of everyone’s name in a beta, I should be fired. I know this because he called me just after lunch and screamed at me for a bit, then let me know he’d be calling my boss to get me fired. It kind of pissed me off, but I wasn’t going to let this idiot ( let’s call him “Wayne” ) bug me, so I did what I thought was reasonable: I telnet-ed back into the server, and changed his name in the table back to “Wayne” from “Wayne-o”, then went and warned my boss.
And, “Wayne” did in fact call my boss, who essentially told him to take a hike, so he called my director, who told him to screw off, so he called the vice president of IS&T, who was out of the office, so I think that’s where it ended. “Wayne” got shown the door at Apple a couple months later, not because of this but because Copland failed, but I did a little happy dance that day.