You just have to make it worth their while

Programmer pilot fish working at a local government office is writing a not-very-exciting application.

"Being young and having a little evil streak in me, I linked the application to some code lifted from a computer game, which put a picture of a crack on the computer screen," fish says.

"I added the code into the application at a certain point, then wrote in the manual that users should not press a certain key combination at that point.

"If the user pressed those obscure keys at that point, the program flashed the message 'I told you not to do that!' and five seconds later put the crack on the screen. After 10 seconds the screen went back to normal like nothing has happened.

"Then no matter what the user did or how many times he tried pressing those keys, nothing would happen until one week was up.

"Within a week after the application went live, the users had found that feature and proceeded to use it on new trainees in their department to panic them.

"It just goes to show that sometimes the users do read the manual."

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