Office Prank - Fake Question Answering

I'm about to take a 2 month vacation. For me, there's always a certain amount of guilt and worry associated with taking a vacation. Is my team going to make their deadlines? Did I manage to meet all of my commitments? Are people going to hate me while I'm gone? A few weeks ago, I came up with the idea of writing a Deep Question Answering System to replace me while I'm on vacation. Kind of like Watson.

I would train it off of all the unstructured text of my email, skype, jabber, salesforce, conversations. Maybe even throw in our dev wiki. I wanted to try doing this with the new IBM Watson API's. It was going to be amazing! 

With a 2 month backpacking trip coming up, there was no time to build something like this. So, saner heads prevailed. I decided to write a simple web app that just gave canned deflecting answers, and just tell everyone that I wrote a super awesome system. So I wrote a page that just gives these answers randomly:

• "Yeah. I don't know."
• "Brian might know."
• "Object reference not set to instance of an object"
• "I'm busy."
• "Have you tried Googling it?"
• "What are you talking about?"
• "I don't remember..."
• "I'm in a meeting. I'll come grab you after.

I sent everyone this email:

Then gave everyone a link to the actual site: http://aaronmyster.github.io/laughing-shame/

It got a pretty good laugh. The interesting part was that people believed me! Not interesting in a "haha you're stupid for believing me" kind of way. More of a "It's crazy that this is possible" kind of way. It's amazing that we live in a time where something like this is even feasible. 

Honestly, it's not a bad idea for a project...