April Fool's Day 1997: Govassic Park

Dr. Dennis Govoni is the Sun Microsystems Computer Company (SMCC) Southern Area's senior network engineer and one of the most satisfying people in the world to torture.

So we did.

Dave Edstrom, Southern Area systems engineer, Neil Pierson, Federal Region systems engineer and multimedia ambassador, and yours truly, John Meyer, Federal Region systems engineer and technical systems ambassador, hatched a plan for April Fool's Day 1997 when we found out Dennis would be in California for two weeks starting March 31st.

Dennis has his PhD. in botany and our first thought was to turn his office into a miniature rain forest, complete with flora, fauna, waterfalls, and so forth. But the expense and difficulty in locating appropriate materials for the goof ruled this out. Then we hit on the idea: let's use a Jurassic Park theme. This was just what we wanted. It was cheap, easy, and fun. Dave and Neil have five boys under the age of eight between them, so stocking the office with dinosaurs, Jurassic Park paraphernalia, and toys was certainly no problem.

I spent most of Easter Sunday preparing a ``Govassic Park'' logo and web page, while Dave collected toy dinosaurs and Neil set up two live video feeds on Sun's world-wide internal network that would tie into our web page. This meant that anyone in Sun could see a real-time picture of Dennis' office and anyone who walked into it for two whole weeks and there was nothing Dennis could do about it.

When all was in place around 9 AM on the 1st, we sent out an e-mail to just about every Sun employee in the world, inviting each and every one of them to visit our web page. Meanwhile, Neil collected some very interesting statistics on who visited, when they saw the page, and where they were from.

Here are some shots from our Govassic Park scrapbook:

Dennis is, by heritage, Italian, and his first e-mail to us after he saw all of this was that he doesn't get mad, he gets even. It was nice knowing all of you ...

And speaking of torture, see what we've done to our own top executives over the past on April Fool's Day. No one, regardless of rank or position, is safe!