The former IT staff at Billboard magazine went out with a bang this week by pranking their former employers with a National Lampoon’s Animal House reference after getting laid off. Valence Media, the corporate owner of Billboard and The Hollywood Reporter, made some serious staff cuts as a result of coronavirus on Tuesday, which included letting go of several writers, editors, and the entire IT department. While this news was likely devastating for these workers, it looks like some of them went so far as to seek revenge by hacking onto the Billboard website to make a few changes. Some former members of the IT staff at Billboard still had access to the platform for a short period of time after they’d been laid off, and they decided to use it to publish an article titled, “Billboard/Hollywood Reporter Lays Off Entire IT Staff Due to Covid19″ directly onto the Billboard website.
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The body of the article, which was credited to “devops,” read, “In the wake of Covid19 pandemic, Valence Media has decided to lay off their entire web IT staff. Effective today. The online Billboard Charts are essentially perfect, so IT staff are no longer needed.” The post went on to reference the 1978 comedy, Animal House: “Fat drunk and stupid is no way to go through life… #SavingABuckAtYourExpense.”
In the film, Stephen Furst’s character, Kent “Flounder” Dorfman, whose photo appears as the header image of the article, possesses a measly 0.2 GPA in the film, and is told that “Fat, drunk and stupid is no way to go through life.” This quote was clearly a message that the former employees at Billboard wanted to get across to some folks in particular. The post has since been removed from the website, but not before it was immortalized by the blog Gizmodo screenshot.
