9 ways to spread panic in slack

This is a satirical article. Don't take it too seriously.

Let’s be honest, work is boring as hell and stirring shit up is an excellent way to make the clock run faster. Here are some innocent but terrifying ways to give your colleagues and management a little jolt of excitement on an otherwise monotonous day.

Remember, your coworkers are also Miserably Employed and maybe don't deserve continuous adrenal gland shocks. Except Brad, who keeps lobbying for more meetings to "increase productivity", fuck Brad.

1. Bad gateway

There are variations you could pull of this, between bad SSL certs, 502 bad gateways, or 404s. The gist of it is that you include a screenshot where you omit the URL bar (or include it, I mean… whatever works) and post it in a teamwide slack channel.

You then disappear for 5 minutes.

When you come bad, you casually message:

“Oh sorry, I had the wrong URL”.

If you want to really stretch the panic, instead of 5 minutes do this right before your lunch break.

2. Email blunders

There’s nothing worse than sending an email and realizing you’ve made a mistake.

Well, there’s plenty of worse things, but let’s not start a tangent.

Depending on whether you’re client facing or not, you can potentially squeeze some pain out of your team members with a:

“Is there a way to edit an email I sent to a client?”

When they ask why, skirt around the issue. “Ah, it’s nothing.”

If they really push, say it was typos you wanted to fix. They’ll never know you wrote Pood instead of Prod.

3. Where’s the servers?!

This will depend on which cloud service your team manages infrastructure, but it’s probably AWS so just stick with it.

“Hey, how come all of the EC2 instance are gone?”

Like most of these, the way to really sell the panic is disappearing after your message and then reappearing later with a mostly mundane response. Drag it out as much as you can.

“Oh, sorry I was in the wrong region”.

We’ve all been there. AWS made their product so convoluted you need a certification just to explore the dashboard.

Evil Laughs GIFs | Tenor

4. Expired git credential fiasco

Not many ways to fluster developers more than saying entire repos are gone. So let’s roll with that.

“Hey, how come <ENTER_REPO_HERE> is giving me fatal: unable to access , was the repo renamed?”

Now sit back, and enjoy knowing that every developer that just got that message has instantly dropped whatever they are doing and rushed to check the repository on GitHub.

The best part of this is that you don’t even need an explanation. You can just come back later and be like “Oh, it works now, weird.”

5. Is it down?

Riffing off of the last one (and coincidentally also a way to potentially award yourself some down time), you can send:

”Hey, is GitHub down for anyone else?”

Everyone once again will rush to tell you you’re wrong. Feel free to send fake screenshots of your browser window showing it’s down.

This also works for any tool you might need to rely on for work, like Jira. And if Jira is down, well hell, you can’t even work anymore. Go to the park. Read a book. Have a nice afternooon.

Now's probably a good time to tell you that our shirts never go down. And we'll hold your hand as you push to prod on Fridays.

6. Social media hack

Now, the important part here is that you insinuate, and never explicitly say something is wrong.

“Hey, what’s up with our social media accounts?”

Be as vague as possible. Don’t say “Was our twitter hacked?”, you don’t want to have to explain why you think that. That way, when people come back to you and ask you for what you mean, you have all kinds of answers at your disposal, like:

"Strange, it seems fine now. Maybe just a glitch?”
“Someone DM’d me asking if we got hacked, looks fine to me.”
“I thought the bio changed”
“The pinned post looks new. Or maybe I just never noticed it before?”

7. Test

This is pure evil. Be warned.

You want to set off the tinglies in the back of someone’s neck?

The slack ding is all it takes.

Every 10-15 seconds write “asdf” in a channel.

When people respond, just ignore it, and send it again. Make sure you copy paste and not just write it, it’s less characters for them to notice you’re typic.

After a good while (really let them have it), come back and say something like:

“Oh, sorry I was trying to integrate one of our workflows into slack”.