The April Fools joke that might have got me fired

Summary

Everyone should pull one great practical joke in their lifetimes. This one was mine, and I think it's past the statute of limitations. The story is true. Only the names are redacted to protect the guilty. My first job out of college was a database programmer, even though my undergraduate degree had nothing to do with computers and my current profession still mostly doesn't. The reason was that the University I worked for couldn't afford competitive wages, but they did offer various fringe benefits, and they were willing to train someone who at least had decent working knowledge. I, as a newly minted graduate of the august University of California system, had decent working knowledge at least of BSD/386 and SunOS, but more importantly also had the glowing recommendation of my predecessor who was being promoted into a new position. I was hired, which was their first mistake. The system I was hired to work on was an HP 9000 K250, one of Hewlett-Packard's big PA-RISC servers. I wish I had a photograph of it, but all I have are a couple bad scans of some bad Polaroids of my office and none of the server room. The server room was downstairs from my office back in the days when server rooms were on-premises, complete with a swipe card lock and a halon system that would give you a few seconds of grace before it flooded everything. The K250 hulked in there where it had recently replaced what I think was an Encore mini of some sort (probably a Multimax, since it was a few years old and the 88K Encores would have been too new for the University), along with the AIX RS/6000s that provided student and faculty shell accounts and E-mail, the bonded T1 lines, some of the terminal servers, the massive Cabletron routers and a lot of the telco stuff. One of the tape reels from the Encore hangs on my wall today as a memento. The K250 and the Encore it replaced (as well as the L-Class that later replaced the K250 when I was a consultant) ran an all-singing, all-dancing student informati...