The Bigfoot Incident  🫈

There was a product owner at a bank I worked with for a few years. We talked constantly. They were one of the primary admin users of the system we built for them, so whenever something weird happened in production, odds were good that I’d hear about it quickly.

Our relationship was solid, but not friendly in the casual sense. It was very professional. Sometimes a little tense. The kind of relationship that develops when two people work closely on a system that has real consequences and a lot of institutional caution around it.

Which is why this particular decision was… probably predictable if you know me.

At some point while working on the admin panel, I decided to hide a tiny Easter egg in the UI.

Nothing disruptive. No alerts. No sounds. No changes to the workflow.

Just a small animation.

If a very specific set of conditions happened during login, a PNG of Bigfoot would appear on the page and slowly walk across the screen.

That alone would have been too easy to notice, so I layered the conditions.

First, the login counter had to hit a modulus of some large number. I think I used something like 420 or something similarly juvenile. That meant the window was already extremely rare.

Then there was a time constraint. It only triggered if the login happened late at night in the user's timezone. Well outside normal business hours.

Finally, it only ran for admin users.

If all those conditions aligned, Bigfoot would quietly walk across the screen. The animation was slow enough that if you were looking directly at the UI you would definitely notice it in your peripheral vision. It also passed behind some of the page cards so it looked like it was walking through the interface.

When it reached the other side of the screen, the script removed itself from the DOM and that was it.

No record. No repeat.

I committed the code, deployed it, and completely forgot it existed.

More than a year passed.

One night I got a panicked call.

The product owner from the bank sounded genuinely stressed. The tone was not joking around.

They said something like:

“I think we might have been hacked.”

That gets your attention pretty quickly when you're responsible for production systems tied to a bank.

They explained that something strange happened when they logged into the admin panel. They tried to show a colleague but couldn’t reproduce it.

Then came the part where they hesitated a bit before saying it.

“I swear I saw Bigfoot walk across the screen.”

And suddenly the memory came back.

The ridiculous modulus condition. The late-night time gate. The hidden animation quietly crossing the admin UI.

Eventually I explained what it was and why it happened. Once the initial panic passed, they thought it was funny too.

Just not that evening.

Looking back, I still like Easter eggs in software. Small ones. Rare ones. The kind that don’t disrupt anything and don’t show up in normal workflows.

The trick is restraint.

If everyone sees it, it becomes noise. If almost no one sees it, it becomes folklore.

And every once in a while, someone calls you late at night convinced they just saw Bigfoot in the admin panel.

For the record, Unicode recently announced a “hairy creature” emoji. So maybe one day the title of this post will render properly everywhere.