Classical SAS

Seeing Pramod R’s post reminded me of something I pulled off a number of years ago after seeing this SAS-L post.

I implemented a sas program which played the first few bars of Bethoveen’s Fifth Symphony.

That alone was neat and all, but I felt the real joy was %includeing it in the site autoexec file. Simply adding it to execute every time a client started SAS would have been an overkill, so instead, I had the tune play only on Monday mornings and only if the client started up SAS before 9 AM.

if weekday("&SYSDATE9"d) = 2 and "&SYSTIME"t < '09:00't;

After a few months, i’d forgotten about adding the Fifth to the autoexec until my manager asked that I look at a co-worker’s installation. Apparently, the co-worker was at her wit’s end with an elusive sas ‘trouble’. In corporate world running PCs, the kneejerk reaction is ‘virus?’ and, with that, the IT department was called up a number of times.

After laughing for a few minutes, I quickly commented out the include statement, but kept the code.