It was a joke at first but it’s pretty obvious now that the timeline changed when Harambe died in May of 2016.
I worked for TVA up here in Chattanooga for a spell. I started right at the end of 2016. Come spring of 2017, it was time for the yearly town hall. Now at the time TVA did
most of it's IT hiring (be they infrastructure/networking/help desk types, or actual devs like myself) as contractors on year long contracts that more or less automatically rolled over (with occasional exceptions, like the dude who watched porn at work or "Doug". We still don't know what happened to Doug). So this was basically a room largely filled with employees-but-not-really, our "babysitters" (all project groups had an assigned permanent employee to them, as was the practice then), middle management (permanent employees, all), and the relevant folks above the middle management, and the relevant C-levels.
The Town Hall was, strictly speaking, off site (in a hotel conference room about a block or two from the bizzaro TVA complex in downtown Chattanooga). So off we went, intrepid whatevers, to go do our town hall.
The first couple of hours proceeded with a bunch of fluffy nonsense, then lunch. And then the floor was opened for questions.
But, they were happy to announce, they would be adding a new wrinkle this year. People could anonymously (confirmed, later) send in questions and comments through an app on their phone. A rather large sign with a QR code on it provided the download link.
For about 15+ minutes, everything went as the executives expected. People asked legitimate questions. The executives talked, often in that sort of hollow executive-ese that they speak. More and more questions proceeded to get asked, scrolling by on the large screens set up so that all attendees could see them.
And then it happened.
The scrolling had slowed for a bit when "What if Harambe still alive?" appeared on screen. The manager who was on the mike seemed rather stunned by hundreds of people breaking out in laughter that bordered on hysterics. The person had no idea what was going on, looking around weirdly. And then the memes started flying. It was basically exactly like when Poseidon released the Kraken in Clash of the Titans. Some of the memes might not have been work appropriate (which was ballsy to do, but I suspect there were people who had familiarity with the app and recognized it).
It took 10 minutes to restore order. I could credit the managers and C-levels for having a good sense of humor about it at the time.
In 2018, the time for the Town Hall came again. Questions for the town hall were solicited ahead of time, and clearly screened, and rotely read out and answered during a portion of the town hall.
So I don't credit the managers and C-levels with having a good sense of humor. To be fair, like half of them were different at that point. A slow year at TVA is two regime changes and a re-org.
Nobody ever copped, to me or mine, to having asked the question that changed all of our lives. I do know it wasn't Doug, though.
And as for Harambe, I like to imagine him running free in the fields of Elysium.
