JABbering Stooge

A future Ben Buchwald at work…

Okay, I know this news is pretty stale, but I felt like commenting on it anyway. Besides, it makes for a good April Fool’s post, so humor me. Somebody managed to hack into one of PennDOT’s portable road construction signs to make it read “LIVE NUDES: EXIT 45.”

I have to admit, my first reaction to this was: “Where was Ben Buchwald when this happened?” For those who don’t know (and that would be just about everybody who wasn’t a Carnegie Mellon student in the spring of 2002), there is a tradition at CMU of painting “The Fence” — a concrete structure replicating the original wooden fence that dated back to the early days of Carnegie Mellon’s existence when The Cut was quite literally a “cut.” I’ll let the wikipedia entry explain the tradition:

Tradition dictates that the Fence only be painted after midnight and before sunrise, and only in its entirety. It must be painted by hand using brushes. If it is painted with spray paint, the painters would be cited for vandalism. A group wishing to paint the Fence must station two representatives on the small gravel region surrounding it; so long as two guards remain within the boundary, no other group may “take” the Fence. This sometimes leads to fraternities or other groups setting up a tent or campsite just inside the boundary so that they may keep control of the Fence for extended periods of time.

At this point, you may be asking, “What does a CMU tradition and an obscure CMU alumnus have to do with the recent prank played on PennDOT?” Well, the Purnell Center for the Arts was completed during my time at CMU, and somebody in the administration got the bright idea that what the new building really needed most was a big ugly-ass electronic marquee to announce to the world (or at least, Forbes Ave.) what was going on at the university at any given time.

So along comes Ben Buchwald, who — apparently on a bet from his friend Mike — hacks the marquee to read “MIKE, YOU OWE ME $5″ along with the message “WHY PAINT THE FENCE WHEN YOU CAN HACK THE SIGN?”

Indeed.

Sidebar: Obviously, based on my description of the marquee as “ugly-ass,” I approved of the hacking. Trust me, that marquee needed to be hacked just on general principle. And you know, when you put up some technological monstrosity like that in a school full of computer nerds, that’s just asking — nay, begging, for mischief.