Days Since Last Incident
A workplace safety sign that everyone on the internet shares — wait too long, someone snipes you; reset too early, you wasted your patience for 47 seconds of glory.
What Is "Days Since Last Incident"?
You've seen the sign. The yellow-and-black workplace safety board nailed to a breakroom wall, somewhere between the fire-extinguisher diagram and the laminated OSHA poster nobody reads. IT HAS BEEN [N] DAYS SINCE OUR LAST INCIDENT. The number is whiteboard-marker, written in by someone in HR every Monday morning. Sometimes it's a custom digital scoreboard from a vendor like Rise Vision or J.J. Keller, three feet tall, glowing red LEDs visible from across the warehouse floor. Sometimes its just a printed PDF held to the wall with a single thumbtack at a slightly crooked angle. The number always means the same thing: nobody got hurt yet, please dont be the one.
This is that sign. Except its on the internet, and everyone — every single person who clicks through to /days-since-incident/ right now — is staring at the same number tick up. The clock counts seconds. Every second the number gets bigger. Below the sign sits a 3-letter initials field and a big red RESET button. The button says CLAIM N SECS, where N is whatever the running total is at the exact moment you read it. If you click it, the seconds you've claimed land on the global leaderboard under your initials, and the sign zeros out for everyone else who happens to be watching at the same moment. They see your three letters appear on the status line: "BRO just reset the sign and took 4,732 seconds." Then their clock snaps to 0 and starts again.
You can press it the second the page loads. You can wait an hour. You can wait twelve. You can sit there with the tab open while you do laundry, while you make dinner, while your bus inches through traffic. The longer you wait, the more seconds you can claim — but you're not the only one waiting. There are other people on the page right now. Someone in Auckland. Someone in São Paulo. Someone at a help desk in Sheffield who's pretending to write a ticket. Any of them can press the button before you. If they do, you get nothing.
That's the whole game. There's no win condition. There's no end. The clock will never reach an actual day, because somebody — usually somebody whose initials read like a forklift driver in a warehouse you've never been to — will press it. And then it starts again. The sign exists in perpetuity. The only thing that ever changes is whose three letters are at the top of the All-Time leaderboard, and how many seconds they had the audacity to claim.
The cultural ancestor is XKCD comic #363, "Reset," from 2007. Randall Munroe drew the sign with a single instruction: RESET TIMER WHEN SIGN IS RESET. Readers spent 13+ years arguing in the explainxkcd wiki about whether this is a logical paradox or, alternately, "a kind of resource dilemma game, where there is prestige or infamy in resetting the sign when it reads a high number, but waiting too long will mean that someone else will take the reward." We have built that game. The wiki commenters were right. It is exactly that.
How It Works
You load the page. The sign is showing whatever it currently shows — could be 47 seconds, could be 14 hours, depends on who pressed it last and how long ago. The clock ticks up by 1 each second. Below the sign there's an input field for your initials (3 characters, A-Z and 0-9, your choice — you can be ABE or 808 or LOL, doesn't matter, this is anonymous). Below that is the RESET button. It's red. It says CLAIM whatever-the-current-number-is SECS. The number on the button updates as the clock ticks, so if you watch it for a minute the button counter ticks up alongside the sign.
You can press RESET any time. The moment you do, the seconds are stamped to the global leaderboard under your initials, the sign goes to zero, and a small status line appears for everyone else watching: "[YOUR INITIALS] just reset the sign and took N seconds." Their clock snaps to 0. They've now lost whatever wait they had accumulated. So have you, technically — you're back to zero too — but you got the seconds, which is the prize. They got nothing, which is the lesson.
The backend is real, not theatre. Every reset is recorded server-side via Supabase, gated by Cloudflare Turnstile (so bots can't farm the leaderboard), and broadcast in realtime to every connected browser via a Supabase broadcast channel. The leaderboard you see — top 10 today, top 10 all-time, lifetime totals — is read from a Postgres view that aggregates real submissions. There's a household-aware rate limit: any one person can reset up to 50 times per day, with an IP-level ceiling of 250/day to allow a household of five to each play independently. Burst rate-limit caps at 20 resets per minute per IP. If you try to brute-force it the function returns 429 and you don't get on the board. We launched with a 23,000-reset baseline so the counter wasn't lonely on day one. Every reset since then is a real human pressing a real button.
Who Plays This
Days Since Last Incident pulls a different audience than the rest of the Mini-Games tier — people drawn to the global-vs-solo dynamic, the patience economy, and the moment of public commitment. Below are the four most common player archetypes we've seen.
"Opens the tab at 8:00am Tuesday and doesn't press. Makes coffee. Reads three news articles. Goes to a meeting. Comes back. Sign reads 11:42:07 and counting. Calculates: in 18 more minutes someone else will probably press it, but I think I can hold longer. I wait. At 11:58:33, ABE in São Paulo presses it. My clock snaps to zero. I stare at the screen for 40 seconds. I open a new tab and go back to work. I do not tell anyone what happened. I will be back tomorrow."
— KUS, has not won, will be back
"Opens the tab. Sees the number is at 4,712 seconds. Thinks 'I'll just press it, what's the worst that happens.' Types BRO into the initials box. Presses RESET. The leaderboard shows BRO at rank 847 with 4,712 seconds. Then sees the previous reset, by KUS, claimed 47,000 seconds and is at rank 12. Realizes I have been on the page for 11 seconds total. Closes the tab. Opens it again. The clock reads 4 seconds. I do not press it this time. I am learning."
— BRO, currently at rank 847
"Arrives via a link a friend shared. Does not type initials. Watches the clock tick. Watches a reset happen — someone called FED took 8,200 seconds. Watches the new clock tick from zero. Stays on the page for 14 minutes. Does not press the button. Does not type initials. Closes the tab and opens it again two hours later, just to see what happened. Does this for three weeks. Has never reset the sign. Has watched it reset 47 times. Considers themselves above the game. Is wrong about this in a way they haven't quite worked out yet."
— GRY, observer, allegedly
"Resets the sign every 90 seconds. Does this for an entire afternoon. Hits the per-session 50-reset cap and is locked out for the day. Opens a different browser. Resets it 50 more times. Hits the IP-level 250 ceiling. Goes to bed. Comes back the next day. After two weeks of this, MEG has appeared on the recent-resets feed approximately 700 times. MEG's all-time leaderboard rank is 4,847 because the resets are tiny, but MEG has been seen by everyone who has loaded the page in those two weeks. Considers this a victory. The leaderboard does not."
— MEG, brand strategist, technically
Best Captions for Sharing This
Send the link with one of these. Hook the click — never describe the prank. The recipient should find out themselves.
i waited 11 hours and 42 minutes for the perfect moment. KUS reset the sign at 11:43. i'm not okay.
someone called BRO just took 18,400 seconds off the global Days Since Last Incident clock. eighteen thousand. four hundred. seconds.
i opened a tab during my lunch break, told myself "i'll wait 30 seconds." it has been 4 hours. i have not eaten.
there is a global counter on the internet that counts seconds since the last button-press. i pressed it. there is now a button-press.
you and i and 800 other people are all staring at the same number right now. one of us is going to flinch first. statistically it'll be me.
waited four hours. clicked RESET. claimed 14,400 seconds. immediately felt nothing. would do it again.
did you know there is a leaderboard for "people who waited the longest before clicking a button on a website." i'm rank 47.
i typed my initials into a website at 3:47am, pressed reset, watched my three letters appear on a global leaderboard, and now i am the version of myself who has done that.
Days Since Last Incident vs The Alternatives
The reset-the-sign mechanic has cultural roots in XKCD #363 (2007), where Randall Munroe articulated the resource-dilemma framing. Mabuhay Net's reset-the-sign is the closest playable predecessor — single-player, no leaderboard. Here's how this version compares against siblings on frustrated.io and the genre-adjacent originals.
| Feature | Hold The Button (sibling #95) | Reset The Sign (Mabuhay Net, original) | An Actual Workplace Safety Board | Days Since Last Incident (#97) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Reset commitment level | Hold a button as long as you can | Click a button | Whiteboard marker, twice a week | Click a button |
| Multiplayer dynamic | No — single-player, leaderboard only | Single-player, no leaderboard | Local — one workplace, ~50 colleagues | Yes — global, realtime, 800+ concurrent |
| Time to first satisfaction | ~5 seconds | ~3 seconds | ~365 days (the safety dinner) | ~3 seconds (the click feels good) |
| Risk of wasting your wait | None — your hold is your hold | None — you're alone | High — Karen in shipping just dropped a pallet | High — anyone can snipe you |
| Whether the leaderboard hates you | Yes, but only if you hold for under 5 seconds | N/A — no leaderboard | N/A — only HR | Yes, specifically by name (your initials) |
| Anti-cheat | Same backbone | None visible | The supervisor | Server-computed seconds, Turnstile, IP-hash, household-aware rate limits |
| Signup required | No | No | Yes (your job) | No (3-letter initials, anonymous) |
| Mobile-friendly | Yes | Yes | The board is bolted to a wall, so | Yes |
| Spoiler-free share format | Initials + duration held | Just a screenshot of the counter | You are not allowed to share this | Initials + seconds claimed |
| Brand parody axis | Endurance theatre, the dignity of waiting | Same axis as us, less elaborate | The actual thing being parodied | Workplace safety theatre, OSHA recordables, fluorescent breakroom dread |
| Real-world consequence of failing | None — your finger lifts, that's it | None | Workers' comp paperwork, mandatory toolbox talk | None — clock resets, you try again tomorrow |
| Will it still be running in 5 years | Yes | Yes (since at least 2014) | Probably — but they'll have rebranded "incident" to "opportunity for learning" | Yes (the sign exists in perpetuity) |
Specifications
| Tier | Mini-Games (#FFB347) |
| Number | #97 |
| Slug | /days-since-incident/ |
| Catalogue slug | /catalogue/days-since-incident-game/ |
| Dependencies | None — pure browser, no install, no signup, no email capture |
| Browser support | Any modern browser (Chrome, Safari, Firefox, Edge, Brave, Opera). Realtime updates may degrade on older browsers; the page still functions on a manual refresh |
| Mobile fit | Yes — touch-target sized, sign legible at portrait widths, no hover-state-dependent UI |
| Accessibility | Keyboard-controllable (TAB through initials → RESET, ENTER to fire), ARIA-labelled status line announces resets to screen readers |
| Backend | Supabase Path A — singleton state table (dsi_state), every-reset audit table (dsi_resets), public views for leaderboard reads. RLS-locked. Anon SELECT via views only. |
| Anti-cheat | Cloudflare Turnstile gates every reset. IP-hash + UA-hash recorded for forensic review. Server-computed seconds-claimed (the client doesn't get to decide). Suspicious top-tier resets auto-flagged. |
| Realtime | Supabase broadcast channel dsi_state_events, sanitized payload (initials + seconds + timestamp only) |
| Rate limits | 50 resets per session per day; 250 resets per IP per day (household-of-5 model); 20 resets per minute per IP burst cap |
| Initials | 3-char [A-Z0-9], soft-locked via shared frustrated_initials localStorage key (one identity across all frustrated.io games) |
| Working back button | Yes, always |
| Tracks any data | Standard page-level Google Analytics + Google AdSense run on every frustrated.io page (see /privacy/). No additional third-party scripts beyond those, no per-action trackers, no fingerprinting, no email capture |
| Real-world consequence of pressing the button | None. The sign is fictional. Frustrated Industries is fictional. The OSHA recordable is also fictional. |
Reviews
"Reset the sign at 4,732 seconds. Got rank 47 on the all-time board. My wife asked what I was so happy about. I tried to explain. She is now considering separation. I would do it again, with more conviction this time. The status line that says 'KUS just reset the sign and took 4,732 seconds' is the closest thing to public recognition I have received since I won employee of the month at a job I left in 2018. 5 stars."
"Lost a star because I pressed it too early. Wanted to wait 30 minutes. Made it 14 seconds. Pressed it. Got 14 seconds. Saw on the leaderboard that the rank-1 entry has 891,000 seconds and I felt something I cannot describe. I am back tomorrow, and the day after that, and the day after that. I will not be pressing it early again. I will be pressing it later. Eventually I will be the one who took 891,000. This is now my retirement plan."
"Saw the link in a group chat. Was sceptical. Pressed it within 90 seconds at 3,400 secs claimed. Friend then opened the tab and saw 'FED just reset the sign and took 3,400 seconds' appear in real time. Friend texted me with no words, just '????'. Worth the entire 3,400 seconds. Will do again. Probably tonight. Possibly now."
Frequently Asked Questions
Real questions from search. Real answers from us.
What is a "Days Since Last Incident" sign?+
It's a workplace safety scoreboard. Companies in manufacturing, construction, logistics and other high-injury industries hang them in breakrooms or near production floors to display the number of consecutive days the workplace has gone without a recordable injury. The sign zeroes out whenever someone gets hurt — a cut requiring stitches, a fall, anything that triggers an OSHA recordable in the U.S. or a RIDDOR notification in the UK. The visible counter is meant to motivate a 'safety culture': if everyone can see the number going up, the theory says, everyone has a stake in keeping it climbing. Whether that theory holds up is a separate, more uncomfortable question — see the FAQ below on real workplaces.
How does the reset game work?+
You load the page. A workplace-style sign in the middle of the screen counts up by one second every second. Below the sign is a 3-letter initials field and a big red RESET button. Anyone with the page open right now — possibly hundreds of people simultaneously — can press the button at any moment. Whoever presses first claims all the accumulated seconds for their initials, the seconds land on the global leaderboard, and the sign snaps back to zero for everyone else. Then it starts ticking again. The longer you wait, the bigger the prize, but the higher the chance someone else gets there first.
Who can reset the sign?+
Anyone with the page open. There's no login, no account, no signup. You type three letters into the initials field (any combination of A-Z and 0-9) and press the red button. Your three letters become your identity for this game. Everyone uses the same shared frustrated_initials identity across the rest of frustrated.io's catalogue — so if you're SAM on Hold The Button, you'll be SAM here too. You can change them by editing the field. Anonymity is the point.
Is the leaderboard real?+
Yes. Every reset row is a real submission from a real browser, recorded in a real Supabase database with real timestamps. We launched with a baseline of 23,000 historical rows so the counter wasn't visibly empty on launch day, but every reset since launch is genuine. The 'Today's Top 10' card resets at 00:00 UTC every day. The 'All-Time Top 10' is the lifetime record. There's no mechanism for inflating your own ranking — the server computes the seconds-claimed at submission, the client doesn't get to lie about it.
Can I cheat by clicking RESET 1,000 times?+
No, although a few people have tried. We rate-limit at three layers: 20 resets per minute per IP (the burst cap, designed to stop scripted attacks), 50 resets per session per day (a single browser tab can't dominate the recent-activity feed), and 250 resets per IP per day (the household-of-five ceiling that lets a real family share a router without locking each other out). Beyond those caps the Edge Function returns a 429 'Too Many Requests' and the row never lands in the database. Top-tier resets — anything over a 24-hour wait, for example — auto-flag for manual review. Suspicious entries get hidden from public boards while their submissions stay in the audit log.
Why does the timer say "Days" if no one ever waits that long?+
The sign uses the workplace-board format faithfully because the format is the joke. Real Days Since Last Incident boards in real workplaces show DAYS:HRS:MIN:SEC because in a functioning safety culture the headline number is meant to climb into the high hundreds. Three-figure days. Eventually a year. We kept the days field because the parody depends on the format — the joke would land worse if the leftmost column were 'minutes.' In practice, the days counter on our sign rarely reads anything but zero, because the realtime leaderboard makes 24-hour waits structurally rare. Someone on the page right now is going to press it before tomorrow.
Is this based on a real workplace?+
No. 'Frustrated Industries' is fictional. The sign template is real — variants of it sell from Rise Vision, J.J. Keller, Creative Safety Supply, Cousign, and a long tail of Amazon listings — but Frustrated Industries doesn't exist as a company, employer, or real building. We are not making fun of any specific workplace. We are making fun of the format itself, which is the lagging-indicator metric that safety professionals on a UK forum once described as 'vanity signs that drive incident reporting underground.' Their words. Not ours.
What's the highest score ever?+
It varies. As of writing, the all-time top entry is somewhere in the high six figures of seconds — equivalent to roughly 8 to 12 days of continuous waiting before someone pressed the button. The top spot turns over a few times a week because the game is structured to make ultra-long waits eventually impossible: with a global player pool, the probability that nobody on the page presses the button in a given 24-hour window approaches zero. Whoever currently holds the top spot got lucky with timing — quiet hours, low concurrent player count, and the discipline not to press it themselves. Live current leaderboard is on the experience page.
Does the sign reset at midnight?+
No. The sign only resets when somebody presses the button. It can run for any length of time — seconds, minutes, hours, in rare cases days. The 'Today's Top 10' leaderboard partition resets at 00:00 UTC, which is a separate thing — that's the daily-best ranking, not the sign itself. The sign continues counting through the daily reset; only the leaderboard view changes.
What happens if I refresh the page mid-reset?+
Nothing bad. The sign's state is server-side, not browser-side. Refresh and you'll see the same number you saw before refresh, plus or minus however many seconds passed during the reload. Your initials persist via localStorage so you don't have to retype them. The only thing you lose by refreshing is your live realtime broadcast subscription for the brief moment the page reloads — meaning if someone else presses the button during your refresh, you'll see the new clock state but miss the live status-line announcement. Functionally you've lost nothing.
Can I play on mobile?+
Yes. The sign and button are touch-target sized for portrait phones. The keypad-style initials input works the same on iOS Safari, Android Chrome, Brave Mobile, and Firefox Mobile. Realtime broadcasts work on mobile browsers exactly as they do on desktop — your phone receives the same status-line announcements when KUS in São Paulo presses the button. Battery cost is minimal; the page mostly idles between events.
Is there a winner?+
No. There is no win condition, no end state, no final reset. The sign exists in perpetuity. The all-time top-10 is the closest thing to a hall of fame, but the rankings churn — someone who held #1 last week probably isn't there now, and certainly won't be in three months. The point of the game isn't to win. The point is the moment between deciding to press the button and pressing it. That moment is the same moment a real worker at a real workplace has when they realise they're about to make a choice that ends their company's safety streak. The button doesn't care which moment you chose. The leaderboard records it either way.
What's the catch?+
There isn't one. The sign is real (running on Supabase backend, RLS-locked tables, Cloudflare Turnstile gating). The leaderboard is real (server-computed, anti-cheat protected). The realtime broadcast that announces other players' resets is real (Supabase broadcast channel, view-shaped sanitized payload, no ip_hash leakage). The 23,000-reset baseline at launch was theatre, but every reset since launch is a real human pressing a real button. Frustrated Industries is fictional. The OSHA recordable that triggers a reset is fictional. The vending machine in the breakroom that nobody ever cleans is implied but not currently part of the experience. Standard page-level Google Analytics + Google AdSense run on every frustrated.io page (see /privacy/). No additional third-party scripts beyond those, no per-action trackers, no fingerprinting, no email capture.