Nicholas Zakas' Personal Blog A deviation from my usual tech writing

Steve gets owned

My team at Yahoo! has a healthy, if not obsessive, interest in torturing each other. I've talked about this before in regards to our propensity for taking and hiding items when no one is looking. But we don't stop at that. Or perhaps I should say, I don't stop at that. This is the story of how my co-worker and cube mate, Steve, got completely owned.

It all began with the YUI birthday party earlier this year. One of the attendees was former Yahoo Dustin Diaz, who took what I considered to be a really cool pic of Steve. I found the pic on Flickr and showed it to Steve, who promptly responded with disgust, saying something along the lines of, "that's a terrible picture of me." He then left work to go home. Big mistake.

As soon as he left, I went to work. My goal was to get the picture in as many places as possible by the following morning. So I put it on the men's room door. On the vending machine. In the cafeteria. On his monitors. Then I made really small versions and put them in the "how I feel today" magnet and scattered some on his chair. I put them up all over campus in various buildings; some spots were obvious and others were not. I figured the obvious ones he'd find right away and possibly tear down, whereas the non-obvious ones he'd find somewhere down the road, maybe in months, and he'd realize the total extent of the prank. Psychological warfare is the best kind.

The next day, I also arranged for an hourly reminder of the photo. I got a bunch of people to agree to change their IM picture to that photo and send him an instant message at a designated time. Some were current Yahoos, some were former Yahoos, and the result was hilarious.

Perhaps the best part of this whole deal was when random people would stop Steve and ask him why his photo was up everywhere. Or when people would ask him why he looks familiar. Even now, months after most of the photos were taken down, there are some in obscure places still waiting to be discovered.

I setup a set on my Flickr account to document the occassion: Steve gets owned. Steve has sworn revenge, but so far, they've just been empty threats.