[Editor’s Note: This is one of our featured April Fools articles.]
According to employees in the Facilities Operation and Management (“Facilities”) and the Office of Technology Services (OTS), the recent water outages were part of a fishing operation gone wrong.
On Pi Day (March 14), Facilities sent out a notification email that legionella bacteria was found within pipes in Perlstein Hall; no updates have been provided since. About two weeks later, on March 27, an “IIT Alert” went out that several floors were shut down temporarily in Galvin Tower, due to lack of flowing water.
In response to requests for comment, Al Ias of Facilities and Fa Ken Ame of OTS said that this was a phishing exercise gone wrong. According to Ame, “We had wanted to send out a phishing test email. Our plan was to coordinate with Facilities, letting them know we would be sending out a phishing test that purported some of campus was shut down, but this was false. We wanted them to be aware that it wasn’t true.”
Ias corroborated this: “I think it was about a week earlier that they reached out to us about this plan? We were fine with it.”
Unfortunately, it seemed that there was a slight miscommunication in planning. Ame said that there was a meeting to coordinate the test, but “when we said we wanted to organize a ‘phishing’ exercise, they heard ‘fishing exercise’. ‘Fishing’. With an ‘f’, not a ‘ph’.” By the time anyone realized, the water outages had already been announced.
Ias explained that “we had proposed water-based plans because, you know, they said they wanted to do a fishing exercise. Finding fish in school pipes might make the emails a little too unbelievable, but finding a waterborne bacteria seemed close enough. Looking back, we probably should’ve realized that we didn’t get what was meant by ‘fishing’.”
No word yet on when this will be resolved.