Reality Shift.

Years ago, while I was working in a development team for a computer hardware company, I got my first taste on how to change reality. The politics in that company were somewhere between “Office Space” and “Animal House”. It was one of those start-up companies where you mostly just lived at work and fun and bizarre things tended to happen. It was the one place I managed to get an actual Dilbert Comic out of. We were going to be interviewing a new product manager but there was a pre-meeting meeting to discuss his interview. Thinking that this concept was stupid I sent off an email Scott Adams of Dilbert and he responded:

Return-Path: <ScottAdams@aol.com>

Date: Thu, 15 Feb 1996 20:58:00 -0500

Message-ID: <960215205759_223316614@emout06.mail.aol.com>

From: ScottAdams@aol.com

To: grue@gnu.ai.mit.edu

Subject: Re: Hi!

Thanks for the fodder. It’s always appreciated.

Scott Adams

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http://www.unitedmedia.com/comics/dilbert/

(Working through 282 messages today. Yes, I read them all.) —————————————————————————————————

Just 5 months later (7-5-1996) there was a Dilbert comic about pre-meeting meetings, I was extremely pleased with myself.

The man they were interviewing was your typical marketing type that would spend all day talking on his speaker phone about meeting for golf and shit. He was all paradigms, backgrounders and empowerment so of course they had to hire him. It would have been ok to have another loud marketing type at the company but putting him in an office next to programmers was just asking for trouble. During his first week I had to sneak into his office at night to cut the wires to the speaker in his phone.

“I see what you mean it does appear to be broken.” as I tapped on the speaker button, “Unfortunately, we don’t have any replacements so you will have to wait for a new one.” This was self-defense for our sanity and I still stand by that. We all had a good laugh about it that night while playing Sega Saturn on the boardroom video projector.

Loud speaker phone use was the least of our problems and just the beginning of a long war for control. He began meeting with each person in the department closing the door behind him and acting all buddy-buddy. It was the sort of meeting where he would start off with “We are a family around here.” And would follow it up with “But this meeting shouldn’t leave this room.” Within the month he managed to redefine many of our job titles. He was a product manager and shouldn’t be able to do that. Somehow I was now in beta testing - this was not right and something had to be done.

I admit my job title was always vague and ripe to be re-defined like this. Was this payback from the phone prank? Did he know? Was this just part of his plan for world domination? I wasn’t the only one who suddenly found themselves in beta testing. This was the point when we started throwing ideas around on how to fix the problem without spilling actual blood.

We came to the conclusion that what was defining us as “beta testing” was the phone list. Our positions were right there in black and white. It was that moment I realized just how much power those secretaries had. The head secretary recently left the company and new secretary wouldn’t be as familiar with the contents of the list so this would be our best time to strike.

That night I searched every machine on the network for the phone list. This network was mostly all Macintoshes and was used for email and general word-processing. None of the machines were secured like you would find today so searching them wasn’t all that hard. After a few hours I utterly failed to find he phone list. She must have known how powerful that document file was and kept it well hidden. Searching her machine directly had to be the answer so I sat down at her desk and pawed over the Mac and still failed to find anything. There was no way she rewrote it every time so it HAD to be here somewhere. Sitting back into her chair I reached over and opened the nearest drawer and noticed a floppy disk labeled “Documents”. This was the moment I learned secretaries tended to save everything on floppies and not networks, so much for hard drives.

I ran to my office with floppy in hand dumping its contents on my system hunting for that damn phone list. After a few minutes, SCORE! Found the bugger. I grabbed my coworker and we gave the list a going over. First thing was to modify it to move us back into development and then we discussed moving other people around for fun. No, It would be best not to push too hard on reality - it could push back. With the file modified, saved and backdated it to its original time I put it back in the exact same position in the desk.

The next day I went up to the new secretary and asked, “What is (Insert co-worker’s name) extension?” she told me and I wrote it down then wandered back to my office.

I repeated this process throughout the day until she said, “I better update the phone list.” I responded, “Probably a good idea given all the new hires we have.”

Later that day she distributed the new list and later that night we broke in to every office removing all the old phone lists we could get our hands on then destroyed them.

Nobody questioned our positions after that.