An employee in a cubicle, furiously beating his keyboard. The keyboard turned into a baseball bat, the monitor flying off the desk, and a colleague peering in from the background to see what happened. Who was that employee? Whose office was it? What made him so angry? The video known as BadDay.mpg took the Web by storm long before the concept of going viral existed. The folks at Wired tracked down its origins, and the original suspicions have essentially been confirmed…
The Video Was a Fake
…in other words, the video is fake. Several details point to that: First, the keyboard is unplugged. Second, so is the monitor when it falls to the floor. Finally, the angry employee appears to smile at the camera. So what's going on?
The Real Story Behind BadDay.mpg
The article published by Wired takes us to a Colorado company called Loronix. The man in the video, Vinny Licciardi, didn't learn about the media explosion until a copy appeared on television, but the short is nothing more than a demo of the DVR technology that Loronix had started selling in the '90s.
At first, Licciardi was filmed using an ATM and "stealing" something from the deposit by his boss Peter Jankowski. Later, Licciardi decided to become an "angry employee", and his boss came up with the idea of using parts of computers that had stopped working to set up the scene.
The video ended up on a promotional CD (converted to MPEG-1 at 352 x 240, ensuring compatibility with Windows Media Player), and within a year, virtually every email server had problems due to the huge number of people sharing it (sending 5 MB by email was a nightmare back then).
Over time, fan sites emerged, but mostly conspiracies. Even if the video is fake, at this point it doesn't matter that much. There is a certain strange pleasure associated with playing the video, a deep desire to release our inner Luddite and do exactly the same thing to every machine we come across. Perhaps that's the detail that keeps it relevant, 24 years later.
