Boss key game: flip before your manager walks in

How Boss Key scores

Every second Snake is on your screen counts as slacked. Flip to work with under half a second to spare and the close call adds 5 points. Your score is the two added up, so 31 seconds and two close calls make 41.

The day ends at 5 pm, which arrives after 90 seconds. It ends early if your manager opens the door on Snake, or if you flip back while they’re still reading your spreadsheet.

The three warnings

Your manager always arrives the same way. First footsteps in the corridor, then a shadow on the door’s glass, then the handle turning. The handle turns 0.55 to 0.85 seconds before the door opens, enough time to react if you’re watching the handle and not the snake.

Each visit gives about 14% less warning than the one before, down to between 1.4 and 1.8 seconds from footsteps to door. From the third visit on, one set of footsteps in four keeps walking past. Flip at every sound and you lose slack to people on their way to the printer.

Unlike the daily quiz among our work games, Boss Key draws its visits at random every time you press Start. Yesterday’s timing tells you nothing about today’s.

Why games need a boss key and books don’t

Reading at your desk gets a pass that a game never will. Nobody walks in on a paperback and books a meeting about it, since a book might be professional development. A game on a work screen is the one hobby with no cover story, so it needs a key that swaps it for work.

The key only fixes the screen. Walking past the same desk twice, or hiding in the stockroom, still gets noticed the old way. How to look busy at work ranks those moves by what each one costs.

The first boss key game

The first boss key was in Bezare, an Apple II game. Roger Wagner proposed the idea in March 1981, on a hang-gliding trip in Mexico, a long way from any manager. On the IBM PC, Asylum (1981) wiped the screen when you pressed F9.

In the first Leisure Suit Larry games, the boss key, usually Ctrl+B, quit the game on the spot. Saving your place took too long, and the boss was already at the door.

The boss key taken out of Solitaire

Wes Cherry, who wrote the original Microsoft Solitaire, built in a boss key that put up a fake spreadsheet or random C code. His superiors had him take it out before release, so Solitaire shipped with nothing to flip to.

Boss Key puts the spreadsheet back. It flips to what the team’s meetings cost, the tickets or the team chat from our fake work screen, shrunk to fit.

Boss buttons on websites

The NCAA’s men’s tournament site has carried a boss button for March Madness since 2005. The Car Talk site kept one from April 1997 to March 2017, almost 20 years of hiding Car Talk from people’s managers.