Katy Dickinson

Sun April Fool's Day Prank Museum

When rummaging in a storage area in Sun's soon-to-be-vacated Newark campus, we found a large framed print of a black and white photo of Scott McNealy enjoying his 1990 April Fool's Day prank. The joke that year was that Scott kept describing the Sun corporate strategy as "All the wood behind one arrowhead", so the instigators put a 60' fletched and arrowheaded telephone pole through Scott's office and through his 5th floor window and 12 feet out over the front entrance of the building. The framed picture shows Scott working at his desk with the huge arrow going through the window behind him.
It is similar to this photo:

Sun Copyright 1990 photo, reprinted with permission

I reported to Eric Schmidt when Sun's first prank ("Office in Pond") was played on him in 1985, and Adrian Cockcroft and I lead the 2003 team which played the "BFWTS (Big F* Web Tone Switch)" prank on Scott, so I found the picture particularly charming. It has now been moved to a place of honor in Sun's Menlo Park campus Prank Museum. The "museum" is really a small stairwell we commandeered three years ago when we realized that all of the prank artifacts were scattered and getting damaged and lost. In it, we have assembled for posterity the following timeless objects:

• 2003 "BFWTS (Big F* Web Tone Switch)" switch, rack, quality dial, and stack of CDs
• 1996 Java Espresso coffee dispenser and huge cup
• 1993 "Sharkstation" computer with a shark fin on top
• 1990 "All the wood behind one arrowhead" framed photo

As soon as we assembled our museum, someone put a big printed sign over it saying "Where are the museum looters when you need them?" in typical Engineer dark humor... we left the sign up, of course.

Posted at 02:37PM Aug 03, 2006 by katysblog in Mentoring & Other Business  |  Comments[1]