I think it&#x27;s a combination of the era and of the specific context. I would suppose that your experience potentially had other extenuating factors that caused you to give the threat more weight. Either way, I don&#x27;t fault you at all for treating it as serious if you felt it was. It&#x27;s not exactly a socially acceptable thing to threaten anyone—but at the time, and in this context, I think recipient would have recognized the ridiculousness of the &quot;threat&quot; (killing someone over the change of a command&#x27;s behavior?) as an attempt at a joke.<p>No longer.