It's weird how... servile... this person sounds. They're wondered why they weren't fired, when their prank had no negative side effects and the only issue was a department head being a dick about it? hey think the lesson here was that they needed to learn professionalism? They should be bemoaning the world of power-tripping unreasonable bosses. No need to warp your idea of what's right around what someone got mad at you about.
> They're wondered why they weren't fired, when their prank had no negative side effects and the only issue was a department head being a dick about it?
There are plenty of companies where your boss being upset with you can lead to you being fired irrespective of whether it's logically justified. The author doesn't seem servile so much as green (which they admit and talk about quite a bit).
> No need to warp your idea of what's right around what someone got mad at you about.
Part of being an adult is the ability to mentally square how the world ought to be with how it actually is. It is perfectly reasonable to acknowledge that a decision you made wasn't optimal in retrospect even if it was the theoretically-correct one. This isn't "warping" anything as much as it is getting on with your life.
Carl Sagan had sued Apple the prior year for merely using his name as a project codename that was never going to be published anywhere or included in any customer product. John had placed an excerpt of a still-copyrighted text into a resource fork that would ship to customers—and in fact had already been burned to discs.
I think it would have been an overreaction to fire him, but it was absolutely within the realm of plausible outcomes.
> sued Apple the prior year for merely using his name as a project codename
This just highlights the fact that you can be sued for anything. For example, you could be sued for the same thing (even though CDs were destroyed) based on information from this blog.
It sounds like they had to scrap a CD run, so it wasn't exactly "no negative side effects." But yes, it's always a bad sign when the project you were hired for is canned and you get a new manager.
It sounded like they didn't have to scrap it, but did anyway? Or at least did not feel like it had to actually be justified to him.
> I remember him explaining how many CDs would have to be destroyed (had they already been created?) and the cost of those. I think I weakly explained that I had assumed that there were no copyright conflicts but he wasn’t hearing it. After that half-hearted defense I let him berate me and more or less accepted whatever fate was coming my way.
It sounds like he thought it was fair use and their lawyers were less confident in that assessment. Technically at that point it's up to management about whether the cost of remastering / producing outweighs the EV of that easter egg, but they're not gonna be happy about having to make that tradeoff either way. And really, from stories 20 years ago with substantial adrenal and emotional impact, I figure the story is about the clearly recalled emotional beats than a technical analysis of costs.
Yeah. I see what you are saying. I think the reason I am embarrassed about it is not that I am averse to offending upper management (my corporate overlords) but that I offended on petty grounds. An Easter egg is kind of an ego thing and I think that is what was embarrassing.
