Bad Day (viral Video)

Bad Day (also known as Computer rage or Office rage) is the name of a 25-second viral video that has circulated online since 1997.

The video contains footage of a man in his office cubicle, increasingly irritated with the lack of response from his computer. First he slaps the monitor, generating some concern from a person in a neighbouring cubicle. Then he punches the keyboard, picks it up and uses it like a bat to smash the monitor off the desk and out of the cubicle. He then gets up from his chair and, as his worried neighbor observes, delivers a final kick to the downed screen.

The video clip was part of a marketing campaign by Loronix Information Systems (as of 2008 a subsidiary of Verint Systems) and stars Vinny Licciardi, the company's shipping manager. Licciardi appeared in a series of promotional videos extolling the benefits of Loronix's special brand of digital video recording systems. Loronix was the first company to develop a digital video surveillance system to replace video tape recorders. "Bad Day" was originally created and released to Loronix's manufacturer representatives. However, "Bad Day" made the largest impression and was easily distributed via e-mail thanks to its reasonable size (416KB). The origin was revealed in 1998 originally by CNN and later in print by Security Distribution Magazine.

According to user interaction expert Frank Thissen, though fictional, it provides an example of how user expectations from longstanding social conventions can be frustrated through poor programming. In the Bad Day scenario, "The expectations of the user are obviously badly neglected", and the computer's lack of reaction or poor reaction is understood in the context of a human social situation, such as someone walking away in the middle of a conversation.

Follow-ups to the video were featured on TechTV promos, where the same man is videotaped throwing the computer down a flight of stairs, and later running it over with his car.

A 2005 spoof was produced by GoViral for the network security firm Netop, showing a computer fighting back.