Touch Me

I know, the title has you somewhere between "What The" and "Pervert". I would have hoped to get the same reaction from some of the employees here at work, unfortunately, I did not.

I've been working on a new company/website that requires me to be able to control a printer from a networked computer. It doesn't sound all that difficult, but this all needs to happen without anyone touching a mouse. Just the computer and the printer working together in autonomous harmony.

If you need to talk to someone, or something, you first need to learn their language. Hand gestures only go so far. I realize this from my sad attempts to talk to the lady that cleans my office each day.

After feeling confident in my newly acquired language skills,... I had to put them to the test. I wrote a program that hacks into the laser printers here at work and changes the message on the LCD displays. This happens each day at 10:00 am and randomly picks a message like: TOUCH ME, SET TO STUN, GO AWAY, POUR ME A DRINK, NICE SHIRT, NO PRINT FOR YOU, RADIATION LEAK, TAKE ME HOME, INSERT DISK, COME CLOSER, INSERT COIN, etc.

I guess this could serve as a social experiment as to how many people actually pay attention to things at work. After two weeks of no response what so ever, I had to start making comments like "have you noticed the printers are acting a little strange lately?" A few people are now aware of it, but don't seem to think it's as funny as I do.