They filmed Licciardi using an ATM and pretended to catch him robbing the company’s warehouse. Licciardi decided he wanted to be a “disgruntled employee,” which gave his boss an idea. “It was pretty ad hoc,” Jankowski says. “We had some computers that had died and monitors and keyboards that weren’t working, so we basically set that up in a cubicle on a desk.”

Jankowski directed the shoot, as Licciardi went to town on a broken monitor and an empty computer case. It took two attempts. “The first take, people were laughing so hard we had to do a second one,” Licciardi says.

They converted the video to MPEG-1, so that it’d work best on Windows Media Player and reach the largest amount of people. (“Great resolution—352 x 240,” Jankowski adds, laughing.) They put them on promo CDs and handed them out at trade shows with a company brochure; then they forgot about them.

Over the next year, badday.mpg began to circulate through various companies. The large file caused some problems. “Loronix would get calls from these companies saying, ‘Hey you know this video of yours is getting passed around, and it’s crashing email servers,’” Licciardi says.

While he wasn’t getting noticed on the street, Licciardi did experience the bizarre partial fame of other viral video stars. “I was traveling on a plane, talking to the guy next to me, telling him about my video,” he says. “And he’s like, ‘I’ve seen that.’ And the guy behind me is like, ‘I’ve seen that too!’ and the stewardess was talking, ‘Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, I’ve seen that!’ It’s amazing how many people have seen it.”

The BadDay.mpg Conspiracy

Today, the spread of badday.mpg seems almost impossible. There was no YouTube, no nearly infinite email storage space, no video sites like eBaum’s World, and there wasn’t really an infrastructure in place to easily handle the mass distribution of video content. Hosting a video cost money; downloading it took time. And after downloading it, you’d have to open it in one of only a few media players, like Real Player Plus or Windows Media Player. It’s impressive that any content at the time could go viral.

But something about badday.mpg transfixed people. Like most people, web developer Benoit Rigaut first saw the video in 1998, after a friend emailed it to him. The attachment was a short, low-quality version of the original. He was captivated and sought out a higher-quality version. It took awhile to download—he estimates 20 minutes. “There was definitely something special in this video,” Rigaut recalls. “A real catharsis to the always somehow frustrating computing experience.”

So on a rainy weekend, Rigaut made a fan site for it, mostly so he could share the huge file without blowing up his friends’ inboxes. He had previously worked at CERN and still had full access to its web hosting: “I placed the 5-MB file on Europe’s largest internet node, without any traffic quota.”

The site had the look of an old Geocities page. Black background, ASCII art, novelty GIFs, visitor counters. There’s a link to the “badday webring” and an audio-only file of the video. At the top there’s a GIF to give visitors a preview, before they took the time to download it. Rigaut wrote a semi-tongue-in-cheek conspiracy narrative, pointing out badday’s inconsistencies. He included screengrabs with red circles drawn around the unplugged cables and the man’s smile.

“There is no doubt on this point,” the site said. “Wintel is creating a catharsis because they fear the day of the revolution. The day when workers sitting in front of their buggy products won't laugh. The day we will stand up together to fetch for the people in charge of this disastrous hardware/software association!”