google ticker

Today being Friday, it's time for more workplace stories...

One of the developers that I work with had once been tasked with implementing a "Google ticker" - a way to see all the queries used in intranet search. The project was a success, and the management even decided to prominently show the ticker on a large display close to the cafeteria. People walking by would see a stream of words come scrolling through the screen, and leave with the impression that lots of very important work is taking place within the company.

Now, it's time to introduce an important character in the story - one of our project managers, who happens to be a very nice, proper, and extremely soft-spoken lady. One day, she happened to notice "something wrong" with the ticker, as she put it, and rushed to tell the developer.

Unfortunately, she couldn't quite bring herself to tell the developer what she saw, so she had to resort to IM. It turns out, somebody started running a barrage of searches with very, very dirty words in them, so dirty that she couldn't even say them out loud.

Later, the culprit was found. He claimed that he was researching the use of profanities in intranet documents, and that was the end of that. The ticker didn't last for much longer.