Bad Day, is a video clip showing an angry and irritated office worker hitting his computer in his cubicle. He slammed the monitor, punches the keyboard before using it like a bat to knock the monitor off his desk.
He then kicked the monitor on his way out of the cubicle.
The video first circulated in 1997, before being uploaded to YouTube where it was also known as Computer Rage or Office Rage.
Since then, the viral video became the source of many parodies and ad campaigns.
The video was in fact staged.
It was produced by a Colorado-based tech company called Loronix. The video was shot at the company's work space, with the computer also belonging to the company. At the time, Loronix was developing DVR technology for security-camera systems, and the video was made to demonstrate the benefits of a video surveillance camera to potential clients.
The angry man was Vinny Licciardi, the company's employee who worked as the shipping manager. He made the video with his boss, Loronix CTO Peter Jankowski.
“It was pretty ad hoc," recalled Jankowski. "We had some computers that had died and monitors and keyboards that weren’t working, so we basically set that up in a cubicle on a desk."
With Jankowski directing, Licciardi took two attempts to create the video.
The final footage was converted to MPEG-1 format so it can work on most people's computers using Real Player or Windows Media Player. They copied the video which was about 5MB in size, to the company's product promo CDs and handed them out at trade shows with a company brochure.
The next year in 1998, the computer-bashing clip was edited into a more manageable 352 x 240 resolution and 416KB file size with the name badday.mpg. The clip began circulating through various companies, crashing their email servers.
Bad Day is one of the earliest viral video. It was capable in spreading without video-streaming websites, and at the time when internet was pretty slow, quotas were expensive and email has small storage.