We’ve all seen it. It started circulating in the 90s, when a video like this took 20 minutes to download.
An office worker get frustrated with his computer and starts smashing it up.
That it went viral back then, when it was simply emailed around, says a lot.
But it was a fake.
Wired – Licciardi decided he wanted to be a “disgruntled employee,” which gave his boss an idea. “It was pretty ad hoc,” Jankowski says. “We had some computers that had died and monitors and keyboards that weren’t working, so we basically set that up in a cubicle on a desk.”
Jankowski directed the shoot, as Licciardi went to town on a broken monitor and an empty computer case. It took two attempts. “The first take, people were laughing so hard we had to do a second one,” Licciardi says.
They converted the video to MPEG-1, so that it’d work best on Windows Media Player and reach the largest amount of people. (“Great resolution—352 x 240,” Jankowski adds, laughing.) They put them on promo CDs and handed them out at trade shows with a company brochure; then they forgot about them.
Over the next year, badday.mpg began to circulate through various companies. The large file caused some problems. “Loronix would get calls from these companies saying, ‘Hey you know this video of yours is getting passed around, and it’s crashing email servers,’” Licciardi says.
The story of the BAD DAY guy HERE
Actually … I never saw this before. THIS took 20 minutes to load?
At a lot of tech companies, including Very Big Software of Redmond, you would get in a lot of trouble if you sent this around.
It’s just Gov. Kristie pissed off that his PC is not a donut delivery system.
I know the actual smashing of the computer went viral because I’m one of the guilty.
Ah, windows 3.1, you always thought your machine was malfunctioning.
@Abigail – kinda like posting a Dilbert comic.
Although Dilbert may really be taboo nowadays, if bosses are aware that Scott Adams is a conservative.
There were people that thought this was real?
Huh. What about that.
Left Coast Dan — I meant to say “at the time”. I remember that Gates made it his personal business to know who was sending around junk email in large broadcasts; server bandwidth being a critical resource. I’m not sure if ever actually happened, but there grew the company legend of “that dummy, So-And-So, being canned for it.”
Billy and Paul built an Empire on tinfoil and plastic. It didn’t work well then, and it is still a huge waster of time. It’s most notable achievement is moving society into the acceptance of bi-annual upgrades for all things. May they rot.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3c6UxGCyhQY
In 1984 I paid 800 bucks for a refurbished external 5 megabyte hard drive. It was a steal!