anyone else try to put humor into their programs?

I always try to make the next guy laugh.

Many years ago I was working with an ICOM software interface from Allen Bradley's DH485 (Data Highway) to a Windows Visual Basic control. I noticed in the documentation for the interface they sarcastically referred to the Allen Bradley communication protocol as "Data Sidewalk"

I love to see some humor.

In FT View Studio Symbol Library if you looked in the "Ducts" category, one of the results is a white duck. Also, under "Safety" was a sign that read "Longhaired freaky people need not apply".

Always got a kick out of those.

OG

I have left a lot of humorous comments in programs where I have inherited undocumented RSLogix 5/500 programs written by others.

I have one HMI out there somewhere that will play "Boomer Sooner" with RTTTL rang tone codes conditionally on startup if (Random(1000)<10).

I saw a system with a pushbutton on it that had a professionally engraved legend that said "DO NOT PRESS THIS BUTTON". If you pushed the button, a message appeared on the HMI that said "AWWW YOU REALLY F**KED UP NOW!" and the alarm horn would sound for 30 seconds. We heard that horn sound almost every time they had a new operator back there.

Here's one that made my partner laugh really hard when he was on site troubleshooting. I have made many a rung comment with much better humor than that though.

Many years ago I did an S5 system with WF470 graphics card (sort of HMI) I put a CHAD that popped up from the vessel with a caption "What No Soup" when it was empty.
At first they were not amused, but they got to like it & if it is still running I bet it's still there.
I have also seen quite a few amazing comments in programs some funny i.e. "if it has got here we are in trouble" & so on, however, I have also come across some comments where it was obvious the programmer was frustrated.

All of my S7 OB1 routines are named Kenobi
I have an ASCII R2 Unit as the Routine Comment

I have put hidden popups on HMI's Christmas. Halloween, July 4th. the owners birthday, and random popups notifying all the mothership in en-route to Earth


One machine had a fully functioning self-destruct sequence, a few had mothership beacons.


For fault codes to display there usually is something like "You can't do that" or "You better talk to your supervisor about that first"


One machine I upgraded for a friend there is a cycle step display. but every 13th cycle step #1 is "OMG! WTF Did You DO???" (Actually took him 3 years to notice it)

Back in the days when variable names were limited to seven characters, jam detection switches on the sheeters I programmed were always named WEBJAMN.

We did a temporary upgrade to a small water plant to get them through a few summers until a new plant was built. Part of that was re-using an old control panel for a filter valve cluster. Had an extra push button not used for anything. After a few long days of commissioning when everything starts seeming funny, that spare button got labeled "Launch the Nukes". I just put a counter on it to see how many times it was pushed.

Let's just say there were a lot of curious people with no regard for avoiding nuclear warfare, when i looked back at it after a few months. It basically got pressed once a day.

I had a millwright that would kid me about any alarms as my "everything is ok" alarm. I had to modify the HMI for our forging hammer and included an alarm that would set if there were no faults at 8:00 AM Mondays (We usually started our forging run at 7:00AM Monday and maintenance was hanging around)that read "Everything is OK Justin", for good measure since the HMI was English and German I had the alternate text read "Alles ist gut Justin"

We had an older machine with a SLC get upgraded to a CompactLogix. An local engineer for hire did the project. I found this instruction comment entertaining.

Found some humor...

I performed an upload off an HMI, graphic updates were needed.
Restored application.

Click the cheese on the main page, Brett Farve appears.
I chuckled, but I'm a Packer fan.

I tend to put something fun or easter eggs in bigger projects. Just to kill time whilst babysitting after commissioning.

Santa appearing on screen for a few seconds at Christmas. Messages with quotes from HAL3000 or the matrix.

"It's dead Jim" with a description of the error has been used a few times for machine failure.

Oh, I got in trouble for being clever once.

I had a PanelView Plus with a big multi-state text indicator that essentially functioned as a Help window: depending on the fault or condition, a large block of text would show up.

These also have an error condition: if the display value doesn't match one of the State values, or if there's a comms error, it shows the Error state text.

Instead of leaving it blank, I wrote out the text of Lewis Carroll's nonsense poem, JABBERWOCKY. Hey, you memorize something in 6th grade, it's not going away.

Until one day the Ethernet switch in the system failed, and the HMI was filled with asterisks and wireframes. The only thing that showed anything but a blank was the poem.

The customer panicked, concluding that a JABBERWOCKY virus had infected the PanelView. They isolated the whole production line and called their IT incident group.

There is in fact a virus with that name; it's literally a 812-byte Visual Basic script from 1992 with just one line of text and a shout-out to a British virus researcher.

By this time I had long forgotten about what I'd left in the PanelView, and the messages of alarm from the customer were unclear. I went onsite and got thoroughly chewed out by their IT and production managers, and my protestations that they should be more conversant with modern English poetry were unconvincing.

I once put a BSOD image in a PanelView Plus application. When you delete a recipe that would show full screen for 5 or so seconds. I forgot about it. It was funny until someone found it at a trade show.