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Practical Jokes on Co-Workers?
leprasmurf asks: "Here I sit with Administrative rights to a public computer at work, and I'm trying to think of how I can have fun with my co-worker's profiles. I'm running low on ideas. I've done the 'copy 50 million folder shortcuts to their desktop' one and if he forgets to lock his terminal one of these times I'm going to do the print screen and hide all his icons one, but what else is there? Surely there are some harmless pranks an administrator can do without resorting to downloading programs for assistance. Any suggestions?"
...install Windows.
Blarf.
...downloading heaps of kiddie porn onto their hard drives always gets a laugh. I could barely keep a straight face when they were dragged off roughly by the police. Hilarious!
Reliable, Great Value Hosting: $7.95/mo 2.4G/120G
Install VNC as a service and connect from your machine. Move his mouse around once in a while. You could even lock out his local controls when you're connected and make him visit any website you want. :)
The one I really like doing is run a Perl script that send an email every minute, or sends an ICQ, telling them what time it is. To make it REALLY exciting, send some random text with it.
You have enemies? Good. That means you've stood up for something, sometime in your life. --Winston Churchill
I ran a USB mouse from his workstation, under the cube wall to under my desk. Every once and a while I would kick the mouse with my foot and would hear him scream "What the hell?!". What was great was to do it when he was talking to someone and hear him scream "did you see it move?! did you see it? I didn't touch it and it moved I swear!".
-----BEGIN GEEK CODE BLOCK----- Version: 3.12 GIT d? s: a-- C++++ UL++++ P++ L+++ E- W++ N o-- K- w--- O- M+ V PS+ P
Schedule system maintenance like defrag, virus scans and other annoying interuptions every hour or so.
Someone hates these cans.
Ask your supervisor for some more work because you obviously have too much damn time on your hands.
I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate.
Imagine your a stupid computer user and it does crazy shit to you. It would scare you. You'd get stressed out and panic. That isn't good for office morale. What about when they find out it's you? What may be a joke to you might not be to another person. What if an error occurs and they feel it's your doing and so they don't report it. Do you want to keep your job? If so, leave the luddites alone and let them do their little monkey work. If not, see if oyu can get me a position, I'd love to have a job in computers. It beats being fucking unemployed.
-------
Support Indy Music. Buy
At one of my former jobs (a security company) whenever we would find a computer unlocked, we would send a "baggy pants" email to the entire office distro list. Something along the lines of "Hey, come check out my ultra-fly baggy pants today!" Everyone in the office knew right away that the person had left their pc unlocked and would get harassed for the rest of the day... Over time the emails sent grew pretty outragous:
- I am bringing in donuts to the office tomorrow, please email me your favorite kind (turn on read rcpt and delivery rcpt)
- Looking for a roomate (lotsa possibilities here)
- I am proud to anounce the birth of my son... (include an ugly baby pic, or a dog jpg)
and so on.
Over time, people rarely left their pc's unlocked because they didn't want the ridicule of the office. It was great fun, actually improved morale, and kept the pcs locked tight.
very mean. I love it 8)
You don't need to monkey with their machine to mess with them. I used to have a cron job setup to page one of my co-workers with things like:
Her name was Lola
She was a showgirl
and the ever popular:
Same as it ever was
Then there was the time that I had the "Computer Boy Polka" (from the Matrix parody "Computer Boy") play on a machine in the lab every ten minutes for a week straight. The way the lab was setup, no one could figure out what machine was doing it.
You could always pretend that there's something wrong with his cube too. Like everytime you walk by shake your head and say something like "how can you work with that like that?" After a couple of days he'll tear his cube apart trying to figure out what you're talking about.
My favorite was sending on call messages to the oncall person about outages on hardware/markets we dont support. Pretending or asking a NOC person to call the on-call person. Normally right around the time the guy is getting ready to hit the bar. :)
I heard one where engineers would ask the new guy to get a flux capacitor from the electronic store. Or the new guy on a construction crew if he wanted to have Honey Pot duty.
This one take a little work, but is worth it. This assumes Windows of course, but it's not impossible to do with another OS.
r rentVersion\
Make a new shortcut for everything they use, either on the desktop or in the Start menu, or Quicklaunch too. Change the name to be the name of a different program, and set the icon to use for the one for the original shortcut. The idea here is to have Excel open up when they click on Word, Internet Explorer when they try to run Excel, an MS-DOS prompt when they want to run Access. If they don't have admin rights, they'll have to learn by experiment where each program is located.
Guaranteed to stun the clueless. Since desktop icons will show the little shortcut arrow, go to [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\Cu
Explorer\Shell Icons] and set the "29" key to equal the path and filename of a blank icon. Or get TweakUI to do it.
...
Eh, I'm divided about whether this one is lame or not. Thank goodness for moderators to decide. Here goes. It is realitvely harmless, but I've seen it drive folks nuts.
(BTW, tends to work better on Macs...)
1. Take screen shot of desktop
2. Open the shot in Photoshop or similar gfx app.
3. Rotate 180 degrees so image of desktop is upside down.
4. Enlarge image to 100% and hide menu bar (this is where it works best with Photoshop), palettes and toolbars.
5. Act confused when brought over to see "whacked icons." 5a. mention virus or "sign that hard drive is in process of erasing itself."
All the machines in our office run Photoshop as do the laptops, so it's a trick to pull when things get slow on off-site gigs.
the future is here, it is just not evenly distributed - w. gibson
Assuming their using Windows, edit each entry in their Start Menu to launch the application underneath it.
For example, say their Start>Programs menu listed Dos Prompt, Word, Excel, Windows Explorer. Change each link so that they launch Word, Excel, Windows Explorer, and Dos Prompt respectively.
At first, they'll think they're clicking wrong somehow. Then maybe they'll replace their mouse. Good for some cheap laughs.
Some people have a way with words, and some people, um, thingy.
It's not just friendly, it can be great for team building and morale too.
Playing a practical joke once in a while isn't a sign of not enough work -- it's a sign of a good group of workers who like each other, and have a good sense of each other. The team that plays together stays together, you know?
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
Change his language settings. Even better if you can figur out how to do the translations yourself. I changed a friends machine to have a "y2k" fix: Mondak the First of Januark 2000. If you can't figure out how to write your own translations, then just change it to something like Hebrew. It'll keep them guessing for hours how to turn it back and what exactly that important looking message said.
:)
Remap the keyboard to dvorak and then log them out (Try typing your password in in dvorak...)
change the hosts file to change websites they commonly frequent to websites they wouldn't commonly frequent on company time.
Set their machine to use your machine as a proxy with a nice proxy that rewrites URLs for a extended version of the above.
Change the "auto fix" from doing things like "teh" -> "the", to be more imaginative. (eg wifes name => "The ol' hag").
There is lots of fun to be had, just go ahead and do it
Well, I don't want to sound like I'm bragging, but I've pulled a coupla good ones:
- record someone's cellphone ring on your PC, then install it as their new-mail-received sound. (when I did this, I didn't realize the guy had had 3-4 cellphones over the past year, all of which were stowed in his desk; I presumed he'd catch on after a couple hours, but apparently it was a 3-day ordeal for him and his neighbors...)
- there was a young girl who was (un-justifyably) a little scared of her boss: I had him record his voice saying her name, then added a trace of an echo, and waited until a day when he was out of town and I knew she'd be working late... I set her Windows shutdown sound to that sample, so she'd hear him calling her after everyone else had gone home. From what others on that floor told me, she ran screaming down the hallway...
- put up a phony form someplace, like a "Microwave Usage Tracking Form" in the break room... have lines for what's been heated, how long it took, etc... (when I did this, the only person who fell for the prank and actually filled out a line was the office manager - the very person who'd have been in charge of putting up such a form, if it were real!)
- others I forget
The easiest office pranks are those which involve people who leave their terminals unattended in a situation where security is assumed to be tight; I have dozens of stories about those cases, but they're not as funny to me 'cos, well, the more tight-assed the environment, the easier it is to spoof (and you have an unfair advantage if you're the IT guy)... I prefer to pull stuff in a relaxed, casual environment, where people aren't expecting anything.
Perfectly Normal Industries
I totally forget where windows stores that .wav file. The one that gets played every fucking time you click on a link in IE.
Well, replace that with something obscene.
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
There is no need to mess with other people's machines, you'll just gain an enemy for life.
There is plenty that you can do to demonstrate your 1337 hax0r skillz and sense of humour on your own machine.
Try squashing your head and hands into in a colour scanner, use the resulting picture as a screensaver, with a piece of audio of you saying "help I'm trapped in the monitor!" set to that play every 5 minutes and go to lunch.
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
The best one I've seen doesn't scale well for the office, but could work. This was a dorm prank on an resident assistant: the RA had a stereo and decent set of speakers. Someone a few rooms down had a reasonably powerful system as well. A set of speaker wires was run out the "control room" and directly to the speakers in the RA's room through the window. At some ungodly hour the "control room" began playing some annoying, embarrassing song at full volume. Now, imagine trying to stumble out of a loft and turn off the stereo while mostly asleep...except that no matter what buttons you push, it won't turn off! A remarkable success.
I guess a similar thing could be done with a co-worker's computer and an audio cable, just run it to line-in and turn the volume way up. It'll take a few seconds before they find the volume control. Play something vile like Backstreet Boys or Britney.
...
Reverse the left and right mouse buttons.
Simple and most people have no clue how to fix it.
A speech...
this is for you boss really, send him a fake cv .. we take more drugs then a touring funk band .. sing it! - mclusky
of the perfect employee and then in the "other
activities" section put weird stuff like
collecting vintage donkey pornography and a
member of the rat watcher association of America.
-greg
my loves is bigger then your love
I was working, and had to stamp various things with our boss' signature. I also had official letterhead... so I drafted up a letter on the letterhead firing my friend, stamped with our boss' signature. Then I gave him the letter, and told him our boss had asked me to give it to him. Good times, good times.
Most of these are Windows-specific. Call it a hunch.
Take a screenshot and make it their desktop, then close all windows, hide the taskbar, and move some (only some) of the desktop contents to somewhere other than the desktop.
If you use VNC, then set up a full-screen vncviewer to a secondary victim's desktop. Watch them fight it out. (Be very careful; privacy issues crop up in this one.)
Download the original hampster dance. (Note: website makes sound.) Use the ActiveDesktop feature to make a copy of that as the victim's desktop. Turn the volume to max, and immediately shut down or suspend. For maximum effect, do this on a laptop just before the victim leaves for a flight.
Depending on the OS version, add about eighty folders at the top and bottom of the "Programs" menu. Doesn't matter what you name them; some versions of Windows make it a pain to open a folder in the middle.
Set their Internet connection to, instead of using the LAN, auto-dial their phone.
If you can get an X server running on their box, then run greasymouse against their display. (You mentioned not downloading anything, but since it's on the X contrib tape, you may already have it on a local Unix box.) I find a factor of 1.8 or so works well. The good news is, this works on some rootless X servers for Windows. Of course, if your victim runs Unix, no such need.
Fun with fonts. Set the fonts and colors to something terribly garish, and just barely useable. Then export the relevant parts of the registry, and set things up to merge that in every boot.
Setting sounds is a good one, and there's a lot of ideas already posted to get you started.
All this is assuming your friend isn't a coder. There's much better ways to get at coders, such as #define struct union or other ideas from here for more ideas.
And the number one way to ensure to drive them mad at the office computer:
Force the victim to use Windows.
Go into the Control Panel (assuming Windows) and set their mouse speed to the lowest setting. Set the mouse acceleration to the lowest as well. Then go to the appearance sheet and set their colors to the high-contrast large font.
That'll teach 'em to leave their workstation unlocked...
Write a perl script which randomly swaps the filenames of the mp3s throughout the HDD, then for the second pass randomizes the ID3 tags.
Second option would be to install KDE XPde on the target box. Should be a riot watching someone trying to install a windows executable on Linux or searching for the Internet Explorer.
My company was demo happy. Any time a new feature made it into our software, our hyper-active sales guy would go demo happy. As a result, I had to make a LOT of demos, many of them web based. One day, inspired by a book I read, I created a web page with a fake error message that came up on top of it.
"The radiation shielding on your monitor has failed, please do not sit directly in front of your monitor."
I uploaded the page to our websever, sent out a company-wide email to try out the new demo, and went home. I got a frantic call at 7am in the morning. The first victim of my joke was the type to wash her hands in anti-bacterial soap if somebody dirty just looked at her. I had to keep from laughing, it wasn't easy. She eventually figured out it was a joke, but found it amusing, so she didn't tell anybody else.
I fired off a note to the sysadmin to let him in on the joke, but I wasn't sure if he got it in time. Unfortunately, he was the guy who everybody ran to first. When I got to his office, the dead-weight woman who was always calling in sick all the time was there explaining what she had seen. I intercepted the conversation and asked her what happened. She told me that her computer had radiated her. So I asked if she felt okay, and she put her hand on her stomach and with worried eyes she non-commitally said "I think so..." I glanced over at the sys-admin whose head suddenly disappeared behind his monitor. I found out later that he had read my email and was trying to keep from laughing.
I decided to carry this joke a little further. You all know Front Page, right? That WYSIWYG HTML editor that everybody here hates? Well it has a kick ass feature. It'll download a web page and you can just type right into it. Then, it'll maintain all the links for you. So I downloaded one of CNN's health pages and wrote up a 3 paragraph news alert about the "Microwave Virus". The basic gist of the article was that a virus took control of your monitor and amplified the ultra violet gun to burn out the shielding. Symptoms included fatigue, irritability, and a couple of other things you normally feel at the office. In about 15 minutes, I had a fake web page and I had set up Microsoft's 'Personal Web Server' to serve it up from my computer. I had then renamed my computer to www.cnn-news.com, and hosted the page. A new 'FYI' email was sent out, and I went to lunch.
When I came back, the woman that was in on the joke told me "all hell had broken loose, you better get to the dead-weight girl's office." When I got there, two of my coworkers were having a discussion about whether they should go home or go see their doc. From there, I lost, I couldn't keep a straight face anymore. I told them of the joke. They took it in stride, but they didn't think it was so funny. You see, they didn't realize I had faked the web-page. They thought I read it on CNN's site and I had faked the message. They were more amused when they found out I had faked the site too, but I think they were paranoid for weeks any time I sent out an FYI email. Heh.
On a side note, the sysadmin there didn't really like me until that day. He was impressed at how I had set that up. We were actually friends after that. Heh.
"Derp de derp."
Then came in the team this idiot, a moron who only had the pc from a year past, and the intarweb from six month past... he became using someone's account (including mine) to sell his fscking moped or to send or ask for evening job's resumes. He was asked to leave after two weeks since he showed that he was so bored at work to find night ones.
+ + + + /net send domain "I am momently away from the pc to do important work, so please don't send me stuff" are the best thing you can do :)
The good old "To:everyone@company, Subject:I should not leave my workstation unlocked", or on old shitty nt networks the
"I am slashbot, hear me roar!"
Screengrab SETI running, photoshop in a dialogue box that says "alien life found, please contact NASA immediately", and set it as target's wallpaper.
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
Inverting stuff is anyways fun...
;)
Invert their screens very briefly at random times.
Also do this with their print jobs.
Spooky Sounds..
Get a wave file playing at random times with a very, very low volume. If you can get it working have the mic for one PC playing on another PC across from it a bit.
Mess with their keyboards...
If they aren't "touch" typists then physically move some keys around. Use a program to hook their keystrokes and to delay them about 2 seconds.
Mess with their email...
Keep them from emptying their trash mailbox and make spam appear at the top of the list.
Fake BSOD screensavers
Mess with their bookmarks...
Ensure that no never bookmarks ever get saved.
Or change them to a slighlty embrassing URL.
The trick is to make sure that things aren't logical and that when they call you over for help the problems aren't evident.
If you happen to be running macs, the cruelest, most evil thing you can do to a mac user is find a folder with about a billion itmes in it, select all of them and drag 'em into the dock.
They'll be there for hours removing each, one-by-one.
Step 1: Record a voice sample of you saying (disguising voice, of course) "I'M DOWNLOADING PORN!."
:-P
Step 2: Wait until (male?) victim leaves his computer unattended.
Step 3: Replace victim's sound alerts (yes, all of them) with aforementioned sound sample.
Step 4: Turn volume ALL the way up.
Step 5: Wear a diaper, there'll be a long line getting to the bathroom
Of all the Universal Constants, here's one I know: Nice guys finish last
oh, and go away
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
lighten up.
I was working a small chain of computer store in the Houston area. A completely relaxed enviroment. The manager of the store where I headed up the tech shop at would check out his tribes game and wwf websites every morning with breakfast. Well I called the owner ahead of time and let him know what I was planning. When my manager wasn't at his pc I changed out his hosts file so that those certain websites would resolve to a server I had setup on our lan. I grabbed a copy of the company logo and hacked together a page that said something along the lines of "This site has be filtered and is not work related. Please contact CEO's Name if you have any questions." I just "happened" to be in his office to see his reaction; It was nothing short of glorious! He actually called the CEO and started screaming that he works his @$$ off normally and that if he wanted to read up on WWF during breakfast that it was his God given right. Even better was that he keep hitting refresh in disbelief so I just had to change out the site to tell him what a moron he was. About 1 minute after I walked back into his office he hit refresh. He quietly told the CEO he'd call him back and I believe it was a stapler he thru at me.
My Hello World is 512 bytes. But it's also a valid Fat12 boot sector, Fat12 file reader, and Pmode routine.
At my first job after college I was working in the data center of a major bank. A colleague and I had gotten in the habit of changing each others Windows color schemes (this was in the 3.1 days) to something garish and annoying like Hotdog Stand when the other was away from his desk. One day I decided to expand the joke to include our manager, who was nice enough and would understand the need to blow off steam when you are working dawn-to-dusk in a basement and never see the sun (not that impressive in Minnesota in the winter). I wasn't wrong, but what I didn't realize was that in changing her color scheme to "High Contrast for the Visually Impaired" or whatever it was called, I inadvertently made the color of some text the same as the background color of her Excel cells. So the next morning she came in and found that two-thirds of her spreadsheet data was gone, immediately freaked, and called the senior tech manager over, who spent upwards of an hour trying to figure out how her data had been lost before I "helpfully" suggested that perhaps the text color was the same as the background . . . I know a lot of people will find this funny but I just felt badly for wasting a lot of people's time, and I have not indulged in this kind of pranksterism again . . . except for the time I set my girlfriend's machine to yell "kah'PLAH!!!!" every time it shut down (found a great sample on the Klingon Language CD). I guess what I am saying is, don't play practical jokes, but if you must, "kah'PLAH!!!" (Success!!!)
Journey onward.
Back in the days of ancient desktop systems, my school had a few TRaSh-80's. One "feature" of these machines (Model III's with built-in displays) was a choice between 64- and 32-character lines. Thanks to some research and bribery, I found out which I/O port controlled this, and it just happened to be the same port that controlled the motor on/off on the cassette storage.
I hacked up a quick test in TRS-80 BASIC to toggle the 64/32 bit, and it ran fast enough to create four scrolling bands on the display. Cool. If I toggled the entire byte, it also flipped the cassette motor on and off rapidly, causing the internal relay to click loudly. Double-cool.
So, thanks to a Z-80 programmer's guide (also from Radio Slack), I turned the whole thing into assembly, hand-assembled it, turned the hex codes into decimal bytes, and then punched it in with a rudimentary program. (It gave me a great appreciation for Altair programmers and their bootstrap process.) This program did something simple: present a totally faked boot-up screen, wait for a keypress, then go into an infinite loop, doing the same toggle. But, in machine code, it ran at CPU speed (1 MHz), not BASIC interpreter speed. The toggle in this mode was fast enough to cause the CRT circuitry to lose horizontal sync, resulting in nothing but lots of "static" on the screen. Beautiful.
I got everything into place, ran my code, and went to another machine to watch. Lo and behold, my first and only "victim" was the instructor. She sat down at the machine, looked at it, pressed the correct key (Enter), and jumped a little bit as the screen went haywire, while the cassette motor relay started snapping wildly. She looked at me, saw that I was watching, then reached down and pressed the orange reset button.
I was kicked out of the lab for the rest of the day. I suppose she had to do something, but it was worth it.
...but when we wrote the company intranet, I was one of the people who did interface design, and having alot of time and little work, I added a layer to the intranet webpages where, after a certain period of inactivity, puffy (the OpenBSD blowfish) started swimming around the site saying "So long and thanks for all the passwords"...
I got many a confused reaction from that one.
Not sure if it's still there, I left the company a while ago.
Move sig!
As a prank to people to who don't care much about locking their terminals or keeping correct permissions on their files, you can add .profile .profile. That way, each login will take a second more. This requires a bit of patience, though, since most people won't realize that something's wrong for about a month. Personally, I like pranks like this, that penalize stupidity.
echo 'sleep 1' >>
to their
I'm not so sure that baiting someone who has an underdeveloped humour gland is particularly attractive. In some countries it's regarded as harassment, and consequently frowned upon.
It's much more fun to play the trick on someone who can see the joke...
If any of your co-workes is going on a business travel to some faraway part of the world say:
"Remeber to put your bed in a doorway, because the month that you are travelling in is earthquake season!"
I have always liked doing the following things.
r olSet\Servi ces\kbdclass\]t ControlSet\Servi ces\mouclass\]
1. Use Sysinternals psexec tool to remotely pop open a browser to a predetermined webpage.
2. If they have Wav file sounding for each of the various sytem events, I copy them to my machine and strench them out with Recorder until they are around 60 seconds long. Or Shorten them if they have long wav files. (This freaks them out)
3. Lock their mouse and keyboard via the registry.
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentCont
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\Curren
Set the Start Value to 4 to stop, 1 to start.
Now when they reboot, No mouse, No Keyboard. (Be careful with this one, if they lose network connectivety, you may not be able to re-enable these easily)
4. Editing their Host file. If you know that they like to go to certain sites, Put that site in their Host file with an IP of a completely different site of your choice.
I highly recommend that you only do this to a good friend and be sure to not do it in a manner that would get you or the victim in trouble (Like violating company computer/network usage policies and stuff)
SuperGLue
One former colleague of mine, while he could be a nice guy sometimes, was often overly anal and aggressive about minor details. His main bugbear was people misspelling his first name, which was "Phillip"; woe betide anyone who only used one "L" (or even worse, called him "Phil"). On more than one occassion I witnessed him lodge formal complaints with managers when one of their staff denied him his L RDA.
Obviously this obsession became something of an office joke, and led to a few pranks. One colleague made up a name plaque for him that just read "twolls" and another, in a move I can only describe as childish, put an anchovy on the CPU heat sink in his PC.
I've never admitted my contribution to the campaign of mischief until now, but I feel the time has come to unburden my conscience. I waited until he was out of the office one day and added a new rule to the autocorrect function of Word that changed any instance of "Phillip" to "Philip". He was a mainframe admin, and his Office skills were not especially well-rounded. I don't think he ever figured out what was wrong or how to fix it.
Anyway, Phil, if you're reading this, it was me. Whoever I may be.
"Are you being weird, or sarcastic?" said Emma. I said I didn't know because I get the two feelings mixed up.
My favorite was to change the colour schemes of X/CDE/Winders to all white.
I had a floppy I kept in my toolkit, and would pop into the drive while folks were on break. Execute the script/reg file, and Voila! everything is white/black/blue/yellow/colour of your choice.
total PITA.... I ended up with a script to back-up the existing settings....
Invert their mouse settings. Pick left-handed if they're right, etc. That little tool that helps calibrate the mouse to your movement? Mess with that. Change the buttom mapping.
Makes is a real !@#$ to fix if you don't know how to use your keyboard.
My
Limekiller
...if they had my desktop they'd be relegated to a mere 300 or so games, not counting the 4000 MAME options, 300 or so different Solitaires under PySol, or on-line stuff.
If you want a real hoot, take a screenshot of his machine, pull the disk, install any modern Linux distro (Mandrake is easiest, SuSE a close second) and then set it up with XPDE and put all of his icons back from the screenshot. If he's running Win2k now, leave a note saying you've upgraded (hah!) his workstation to XP. Then run a sweepstake on how many minutes it takes him to realise that he "isn't in Windows any more, Dorothy". (-:
I've had MS-Windows users sit down in front of KDE, and if there are OpenOffice.org icons on the desktop, walk away after doing a few hours' work on the machine having never noticed that it's not MS-Windows or MS-Office. Now admittedly these aren't the sharpest bowling-balls on the rails, but still...
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Trojans always provide some good fun. Back in the day I'd play pranks on people with NetBus...not sure what new stuff is out now.
Cron is your friend. Give someone a seasonal greetings.
Set up a script to run every 5 minutes or so as root. Get a random number and use it so that each invocation has a 1% chance of running xsnow.
Other possibilities include using xv to display a full screen jack'o'lantern and play a horror movie screeching violins sound. For extra fun, set it to only run after most people have gone home, and to kill xv after the sound finishes playing.
Change their browser homepage to goats.cx
"Eve of Destruction", it's not just for old hippies anymore...
until I showed someone how to fake the origin of an email, at which point the entire office began firing one another through eamails from the boss.
Remember to send \r\n instead of just \n, you don't want outlook to get bitchy about the format.
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
Embed a mildly embarrassing image in a user's Outlook signature. The kicker is to only have it display for a select few users.
.REG file that the user can enter himself in a login script or something).
s et/harmless_filename.asp" border="0">
0 000000046\001e0360\Blank
Step1 - Create a folder on a webserver with ASP or PHP support that will host the script.
Set the folder permissions such that the only authorized users are the people you want to be in on the joke when it happens.
Step2 - Create an ASP script (PHP is even easier) that will host the embarrassing image and place it in the folder from Step1.
Here are some examples of ASP/PHP scripts (please note that Slashdot will add spaces in anything appearing like a URL)..
<%
embarrassing_image = "embarrassing_image.png"
fake_image = "white_one_pixel_square.png"
userfull = Request.ServerVariables("LOGON_USER")
look = inStr (1, userfull, "user_to_goof",1)
If 1 > look Then _
Response.Redirect (embarrassing_image) _
else _
Response.Redirect (fake_image) _
end if
%>
<?php
$embarrassing_image = "embarrassing_image.png";
$fake_image = "white_one_pixel_square.png";
$userfull = $_SERVER["LOGON_USER"];
if (eregi ("user_to_goof", $userfull))
{
header ("Location: " . $embarrassing_image);
}
else
{
header ("Location: " . $fake_image);
}
?>
Step3 - Set the Outlook editor to HTML
HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Office\<Office Version (9 is 2K)>\Outlook\Options\Mail\EditorPreference
10000 = Plain Text
20000 = HTML
30001 = Microsoft Word
30002 = Microsoft Rich Text
This step may or may not work.
Also, you'll need to find the user's hive under
HKEY_USERS (there are typically only a couple) while he's logged in since you can't access HKCU remotely (unless you use a
Step4 - Edit the stationery and reference the ASP/PHP script as an image within the body.
<img src="http://webserver/directory_with_permissions_
Copy the stationery over..
C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Stationery
If the last step didn't work (like in my situation) and the user has Word setup as the email editor, you'll need to edit his "document.dot" file instead of an HTML stationery file.
Step5 - Set the stationery..
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Windows Messaging
Subsystem\Profiles\JBrewer\0a0d020000000000c00000
Sit back and wait for the user to send out an email to the group.
NOTE:
I still have not overcome the "Anonymous" problem.. If an unauthorized user gets the email, he will be prompted for a login.
With PHP, there's a possibility of doing this without using NT permissions at all (look at the "Accepted Answer"). I'm sure there's a way to use this technique with ASP, too.
Here's one I heard from my co-workers about one gag they did many years ago.
The office building had two long rooms of cubicles on either side of a hallway. One day, one room took a bunch of people (close to everyone who worked there, about 30-40), a hat was filled with the various extensions from across the hall, each picked one, and everyone dialed the last digit at the precise same instant. The clatter of simultaneous rings from across the hall (I'm told) was hilarious. They all hung up after one ring.
Of course, this from the days of older-style desk phones that use an actual bell as the ringer. This may not work quite so well today, our phones are now digital and have caller ID. Then again, I'm surprised it worked back whenever they did that, not blowing a circuit from all the calls being made at once.
The One Rule Of Chess You'll Ever Need: Don't play someone who carries a kit in their bookbag.
My mate did this at work once: changed the windows startup sound to a wav of Prodigy's Smack My Bitch Up, then left it at full volume for a nice surprise in the morning. hehe
Assuming the victim has one of those laser mice (which almost everyone does these days), put some tape across the sensor. Make sure to test this beforehand, some tape works better than others. I've found that the Magic tape works wonders. If you use a small enough piece it will look like nothing is there at all, leading to even more confusion.
Children in the backseats don't cause accidents. Accidents in the back seats cause children.
The annoyance of having to do this and the fact that they have to admit to you that they messed up every time might make them to remember to lock the machine from now on.
I remember an admin at one place I worked would send e-mails from that person's account. Bizzare things, like "I'd like to meet you for lunch so we can discuss your choice of attire." Or messages asking other people out on dates. Or offers to buy them coffee, etc. As the number of unlocked incidents increased, the messages would go up the office chain of management so higher and higher-ups would realise what's going on.
One of perhaps my all time favorite jokes to pull on cow-orkers using Windows is a little used and little known boot.ini switch called maxmem.
o ws 2000" /MAXMEM=32
Just append it to the ARC path like this:
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\winnt="Wind
On Windows 2000 it says to not go below 64mb, but I usually set maxmem to 32.
This forces Windows to use no more then what the maxmem switch says, ignoring anything else. Have a cocky cow-orker that loves to tell you how leet his new workstation is? maxmem it! That guy will go nuts trying to figure out what happened - especially if there's a gig+ of ram in the machine.
For added fun, turn OFF his swap file.
Looking for hardware (Currently need: Large Etch-a-Sketch) Have one? See my journal!
you're going to get exponential sleepage doing that, so you're possibly looking at less than a month before they notice.
depending, of course.
Keep your packets off my GNU/Girlfriend!
... if a sysadmin used his privs to play a "prank" on my PC, I'd have his sorry ass fired. It's as bad as slashing a co-workers tyres for a "joke". PCs are not toys, they are tools for getting work done.
Damn, where are my mod points today?
If anyone tried any of the things you describe in a sane office, it would be a serious disciplinary matter. There's having a laugh -- a good thing -- and then there's abuse of privilege, harrassment and bullying -- all bad things.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
My personal favourite was the day that I brought in a box of donuts from Tim Horton's. Of course, I came in extra early when nobody was there yet so I had time to "enhance" the donuts. What I did was add a nice dosage of Frank's Red Hot to all the jelly donuts.
The best way to do it was to squeeze a small amount of the jelly onto a spoon, and then fill the donut with Frank's. I could then cover the hole with the Jelly that I removed. A little sprinkle of white sugar (from the coffee packages) covered up any evidence of tampering.
What made the prank even funnier is that all 10 of the donuts were eaten. People would bite into them, make really funny faces but still keep on eating. I actually had to leave the office for about half an hour. I was laughing so much I was crying, and I did't want to expose myself. (even though I was probably on a short list of suspects)
A few more that I have done:
-Flat cola poured into the coffee pot.
-Water the office plants with rubbing alcohol
-10 packs of sweetener in the coffee pot.
-black pepper over top of a box of Timbits.
-break all the pencils in the office
-call co-workers from the fax machine
Is that a real poncho? I mean, is that a Mexican poncho or is that a Sears poncho?
At a past job, we had a trouble ticketing system that would generate email reports to each person watcching a ticket whenever there was a mail or web driven transaction on that ticket. For test purposes, we had an "acme" queue that sent mail traffic just to the developers & a couple of good-humored people in other departments. One ticket in the acme queue, which refused to die over the course of a year, was a rude demand for one of the web monkeys to bring in pastries for everyone. Whenever someone was testing something with the request tracking system, they'd more often than not attach their test to the coffee rolls ticket, and this guy would be reminded AGAIN that he hadn't brought in snacks for everyone yet.
Then fun part was when it was realized that the ticket could go not just to person@company, but person+coffeerolls@company, person+cake@company, person+cookies@company, person+coffee@company, person+cappucino@company... etc. We got it so that whenever someone replied to the ticket, this guy would get about a hundred copies of the message -- and since the system had a tendency to allow duplicate or triplicate messages under some circumstances (e.g. a person hit "reply to all" instead of just "reply to sender"), this guy would sometimes get two hundred copies of each message.
That was fun.
Other pranks involved using mpg123 on a server sitting under a someone's desk in a different room so that, out of the blue, his computer would start playing "The Muppet Show" theme song. For more fun, because mpg123 instances can run concurrently, we'd have 20 instances of the song running simultaneously, out of sync with one another.
For fun with people using OSX, you can use osascript to get the machine to use Macintalk to speak arbitrary text out loud. This worked well with a long running shell script that would speak out a random quotation from the fortune command, sleep from five to thirty minutes, then start over again.
And of course, VNC is a barrel of laughs in & of itself.
Other obvious ones include removing the ball from someone's standard mouse, removing the receiver for someone's wireless mouse, or the batteries, swapping the mouse & keyboard plugs on the back of a computer, scrambling what order wires are going into the back of a KVM switch, hooking up a wireless mouse to a computer where the person usually uses USB, and randomly move the mouse from a nearby cubicle, etc.
And of course, VNC just makes all the pranks in the last paragraph that much funnier.
---
It's easy to argue that wasting time with such stuff kills productivity, and maybe that's true. But it also did wonders for morale, as long as the target for the pranks would rotate around in a more or less fair way. Plus, the ingenuity that went into some of these pranks spilled over into coming up with novel approaches to things that people were supposed to be doing. People learn by playing from a very early age, and -- within limits -- I think that having a playful workplace can lead to a creative workplace, and ultimately can lead to more innovative work.
The trick is to be mindful of the line between being creatively playful, and wasting time in a destructive way. If someone thinks the pranks are going too far, they have to stop. If a deadline is approaching, the work has to get done. Know your [collective] limits, but that said, have fun too :-)
DO NOT LEAVE IT IS NOT REAL
I once wrote an X11 program (or was it X10 - it was a *long* time ago) that would open their display and then randomly warp their mouse position - it would jiggle for a few seconds, then stop for a while, then start again, etc. Everybody would pick up their mouse and look at the bottom. What were they expecting to see, a bug stuck in the wheel or something? You could emulate a lot of hardware malfunctions... Make keys randomly repeat, play disturbing grinding noises from the speakers, etc.
At my high school, a LONG time ago, we had a Computer Science teacher who barely knew how to turn the PCs on and came to my geeky friends and me for help all the time.
One day we were especially fed up with him, we took a stock animation from Autodesk Animator for DOS (it was a really old one, and the animation were a couple of lines that morphed into hands), altered it to read "Picasso Virus" in big, red, bold letters, and stuck the player .exe with the animation in AUTOEXEC.BAT. We did this for a couple of computers in the lab
Half an hour later, he stormed into my friends' classroom, interruting the whole class, shouting "PLEASE HELP ME! I've got a virus!". He was that clueless, but when he was fired a couple of years later (after I had graduated) I felt a little sad for him. He was a good person, even if he was a complete luddite.
No
Get 2 sheets of black construction paper, and a bottle of white-out. Draw a big smiley face in whiteout on the paper, then tape them together so they're one long sheet. Feed this halfway through the fax machine (works best on older faxes), then tape the two ends together so they're in a loop.
Then choose an enemy.
Back in '95 or so, a friend of mine broke up with his girlfriend. He was afraid she'd sabotage his computer, so he asked me if I could store it for a few days.
At the time, he had a BRAND SPANKING NEW pentium 166, and I was stuck with a lowly 486. He was constantly making fun of my old, slow box. I told him "sure you can keep it here - but one of these days I may get ambitious and swap motherboards on ya..."
I then proceeded to write a program that EXACTLY imitated my 486 POST test - right down to the little clicking sound as it SLOWLY counted up to grand total of 8M RAM installed. I put my program at the top of his autoexec.bat
I went into his BIOS and disabled his POST display, and disabled his external cache. This effectively cut his speed to about 1/4 and showed my fake POST screen on bootup.
I gave it back to him and watched as he powered it on. I've NEVER seen someone turn so red in my life -- I could have sworn I saw smoke coming out his ears, and that little vein in his forehead was pulsing so hard I thought he was gonna have a stroke! He laughs about it now, but he didn't see the humor in it at all that day!
The practical joker in our office started calling our kind-hearted, but not-so-fluent-in-English co-worker with a short, mechanical voice:
A: Hello, this is the Internet. Is the Internet safe?
B: What?
A: Hello, this is the Internet. Is the Internet safe?
B: Who is this?
A: Is it safe?
B: Ah, ah,
A: But, is it safe?
-click-
This was repeated at random intervals for several days. Of course, he told us about it and asked if we got the calls too. We said yes, but we didn't know what it was either.
In short order he was answering "the Internet". "No, the Internet is not safe", "It depends on how you define 'safe'", etc.
All the phones had call id, but in typical beauracratic idiocy, always showed the phone number of the building receptionist. We knew this, so when he asked us again if we got the calls too, we asked back "was there a number on caller id?" Oh yes there was; he's happy. So he calls *that* number and asks why they are asking if the Internet was safe. Of course the receptionist has no clue about computers and even less clue about this.
Then it was the web server and database servers that called him. Forturnately, they were "safe". This happened enough times that our coworker then called the help desk. The help desk probably thought he was insane, but being a Windows shop, it took a while (half a dozen logged calls) for that conclusion to be reached.
Then we stuck the idea in his head that it must be one of those new-fangled VoiceXML systems that can call out. Maybe somebody misconfigurated one. Well, that took on a life of its own. He was eventually convinced that this was the case and was actively trying to convince others too!
Finally our manager realized what we were doing and said to him:
"You know that's just 'A' calling and messing with you, don't you?"
"Oh no. 'A' is my good friend. He wouldn't do that."
"No really it is 'A'."
"Ahhhh, nooo, it VoiceXML calling me". (big grin)
"Ooookay".
We finally laid off when it became too easy, and when we found a better mark: "Tie Man"! But that's another story.
If V and K are reading this, I hope I told it right! :-)
try something like this. gosh that was fun.
We have an application kicking around the office. Whenever a new guy starts, we install it on his computer. What does it do?
Well, every 60 seconds or so, it locks up keyboard and mouse input for a half a second. It makes it seem like your computer is locking up and swapping and what have you.
Oh man, do people go nuts. They start shutting down services and killing applications while everyone laughs at them..
-- DrZaius - Minister of Sciences and Protector of the Faith
A sales guy at our company was insanely proud of his new cell phone (this was in 1999 -- the things were still somewhat new). He'd leave it at his desk with the annoying ringer turned all the way up, distracting our half of the office a few times each afternoon.
A friend had a dead cell phone of around the same color. We smashed the dead phone into unrecognizable pieces and took them into work. The next time the sales guy's phone went off and he wasn't at his desk, we quickly replaced his phone with the pieces, turned it off mid-ring, and banged hard on his desk a few times.
When he heard his ring cut off and the WHAM! WHAM! WHAM!, he came running. The look on his face when he saw the pieces was priceless.
And, bonus, he never left the phone at his desk any more.
I didn't see anybody post this yet so here goes:
1. Open a file manager or browser window (maybe to that hampster site or something) and place it to take up about a 5th of the screen, slightly off-center.
2. Take a screenshot
3. Edit away anything that subtracts from your background size (ie. menu bar (Mac), start bar (Win))
4. Set the picture as the background.
5. Hang out somewhere within earshot
The victim will see a "window that won't close or move" and get pretty frustrated. I never get tired of this one. Just don't stand so close they can hear you giggle.
Check on a popular web site that somebody looks everyday (i.e. slashdot, news, software company), add a "hosts" entry on his machine to point to an internal server that says something like
"you have been caught browsing illegal sites during work hours. Please report to [boss name] to explain this ilicit behavior, before other actions are taken".
You can do this with popular music sites, and general slacker sites. Don't attempt to do this with the company's main DNS server, or you can get into serious trouble.
One way one of my co-workers played a similar prank on me was to change my mouse settings. They reversed my mouse buttons and turned sticky keys on, so that when i clicked the mouse it would act like i was dragging.
Guidelines:
1st - do no real harm. No screwing up ppl's email, files etc. No wasting more than a few minutes of time - must be undone easily.
2nd - even if it's targeted at your colleague, your boss must be able to laugh at it. Coz if the joke doesn't go as well as planned your boss may get to know about it.
3rd - the target has got to be able to laugh at it soon after.
Otherwise it's not joking/horseplay, it's just being an arsehole.
So pick your targets well, pick what you are going to do carefully, and pick the RIGHT time to do it (messing about with autocorrect when someone is trying to do a tender submission is NOT funny, other times they may laugh).
It does reflect on your judgement and competence. Get it all right and people will remember with a grin on their face. Get it badly wrong and maybe you should start looking for a job elsewhere, or go for counselling/advice on social skills.
You don't go around trying to tickle a stranger on the bus, or even an acquaintance, and then say you're just trying to make them laugh.
If you're the administrator, you are in a position of greater power. Unbalanced power between joker and target = harder to maintain funniness. Target has to feel a degree of safeness in order to properly laugh afterwards (not nervous laugh). You need to be even more careful. If you muck around the wrong way it's just like having The Boss saying "You're all fired"... "Just joking". Haha. NOT. Or the CFO making your salary slip show funny numbers. Haha NOT. Or the security guard pretending to shoot you with a shotgun. Haha, NOT.
Remember the tickle concept- the ticklee only laughs if they feel safe, comfortable with you tickling them. Otherwise it's _harassment_.
Last but not least it's safer (and usually funnier) to not use the power you are granted by your job/position in order to play a joke on someone. Otherwise people may feel you shouldn't be entrusted with that power. Your superiors may not want to give you more power either. So you want to get promoted? Higher pay? Haha. Not.
On Linux, change it to 0, on Solaris, 5 (other Unices should be similar). The system will come all the way up, and go all the way back down EVERY time. Will only work once they have shutdown the box, so it may take a while, but eventually it will hit them.
Clinton made me a Republican. Bush made me a Libertarian. Trump is making me question reality.
That was me you insesnitive clod!
-------
Support Indy Music. Buy
Not office related, but still pretty good, and this is one you could probably pull in any University or College. A couple of years ago, we were in our senior Comp. Sci. computer lab, and we were just killing time rather than do our OS assignment. So we fired up cmd.exe on NT 4.0, and started playing with net send. First net send to the guy sitting beside you, then the girl behind you, and then to the entire workgroup. The problem was that once we figured out the workgroup one, we found it was being sent all over campus on the novell network. Whoops :-).
So to finish it off for fun, we fired off one last message to the general computer lab down the hall. "The computers are shutting down in 5 minutes for maintenance. Please save your work and log out." That was the funniest mass exodus we ever saw. Good times.
I can't spell ripburger
I'm not normally one for pulling these kinds of things but my sis-in-law got one of these WebTV things and I thought it'd be a good idea to wind her up with a 'fake email'. Well, it wasn't that fake, I had my own domain (just purchased!), so an appropriate email from "MSN Postmaster" ('postmaster@....'). I can't remember what I wrote exactly but it went along the lines of we've been watching you download porn and smut and if you continue to do so we will terminate your service. Oh, and if she felt it had been sent in error she was to write back. She fell for it hook line and sinker... and even replied! I couldn't stop laughing :) My wife told me her sis had got this email and she's in a real panic about it... and I went to her room and kinda asked her 'who is the mail from? what's the email address?' and I asked her if she recognised the address and then reality dawned that it was the name of the new website i had put up!
A co-worker of mine left his workstation unlocked over his day off one time. We picked half a dozen of his .mp3s at random, backed them up to somewhere he wasn't likely to stumble across them, and replaced them all with "Who Let the Dogs Out", named to the same name as the original files.
There's nothing funnier than a week or two later, after we had pretty much forgotten about it, hearing that song blaring out in the middle of his Bob Marley playlist.
We also do the standard send-email-to-the-office-mailing-list prank, but we expand that to typing in their IRC and AIM windows as well. Telling peoples' friends "Tell me you love me" is always good for a laugh.
I like my women like my coffee... pale and bitter.
I did this while working for a company to do the exact same thing. However, at the time there was no fix for the flaw on windows update at the time. You know, the REAL sysadmins that play in their spare time at home or even research at work remote buffer overflows/bsod stuff.
It's not that hard really to do the same thing to any newer xp installation even with sp1 and all the updates. But I suspect that windows update won't have teh fix for some time.
it's a shame.
J. went on vacation, we filled his cabinet with biodegradable "plastic peanuts" (dissolve one in a coke, nasty). We expected him to open it on Monday, but he returned on Saturday after a maddening personal experience. Yes, he opened it and yes, they all spilled onto his desk. Monday he was in the blackest mood we'd ever seen.
Some practical jokes just ain't worth it.
He laughed later. Much later.
But you just gotta have another sigarette
At a software company, a co-worker and I wrote a new mouse driver for a cube neighbor's development machine, and slipped it on when he wasn't around. It simply added +1 to the y value, so that as you moved around it would slowly sink to the bottom of the screen. With a little effort you could get it back to the top of the screen, but then it would slowly work its way down again. It was still usable, just very confusing.
:-)
Nothing so blatant as a screenshot of the desktop or changing people's 'new mail' or shutdown sounds. Sheesh.
But keep in mind that as much fun as a good prank can be, don't get carried away. If you disrupt people's work too badly, you may find yourself on the receiving end of the "pink slip" prank or the "reprimand" trick.
The chewing out we got for the above prank convinced not to do the next one we'd planned, a new, only sometimes remapped keyboard driver...
assistant: ok doctor... it appears that the phallic growth in the anal cavity must be removed immediatly. its affecting this persons sence of humor.
doctor: good point. i'll remove the phallic growth and cool the wound it with a witch hazel wipe.
anyway... what im trying to say is.. for the love of sanity.. eat a dick.. a pratical joke is not supposed to be cruel or hurt anyone. its uptight people like yourself that cause good people with light hearts and a sence of humor to loose their jobs... dont kid yourself into thinking that communism is still cool...
if an irs employee fucked my taxes it would be a federal offence... if my light hearted supervisor changed my colorscheme to all white... it would make my office a much more enjoyable and fun place to be. after all, im friends with my supervisor... most (honest) people arent too friendly with irs employees. in fact.. most honest people dont usually have that much interaction with the irs employees.. they submit their forms.. pay their taxes and continue their day.
'nuf said!
VNC is too easy to figure out it's running. Load up CygWin's SSH Daemon.
SSH in.
Move files in and out of his Desktop folder (C:\Documents and Settings\%username%\Desktop)
mkdir and rmdir directories with long and alarming names. They'll show up instantly on his desktop.
Start up Random programs.
Add and remove entries in his hosts file. www.cnn.com becomes www.spankmedaddy.com.
The company intranet site becomes www.russianbrides.com
"shutdown -h now"
Much fun spread over many days can be had.
I realize that this has nothing to do with administrator privileges, but Post-Its on the bottoms of all the optical mice in the lab worked well for me on April Fool's....
If it was an X windows system; Xroach &.
Ah, that brings back memories of the Good Old Days of DOS and Netware. Our accountant decided he was a manly enough geek to take on the network admin (me) and the head of R&D in a Prank Deathmatch. He was at an extreme disadvantage, though: all of us could lock down our computers while we were away, but I could tweak the Netware login script to load stuff despite his security measures.
I think the one that made him cry "Uncle!" was Cascade, a program that sat idle for a few minutes and then caused characters to fall to a pile at the bottom of the screen. Priceless.
It's about attitude.
The goober who's fucking up the computer has already done enough to prove a point, or play a joke, he's put a wad of shortcuts on the desktop.
At this point, the original poster is simply being
a malicious dickwad. IMHO.
The trouble with computing is that now everyone can do it. So even those mildly sociopathic kids who would normally just be planning to hose their school down with bullets are dicking around with my computers.
I garduated from high school, god damn it, I shouldn't have to deal with these people any more!
You can't fire someone because you intentionally crashed his computer! What if he restarted it, worked for an hour and it hung again before you saw him?
Either you actually did this, and exposed your company to a lawsuit, or you're a 13-year-old who hasn't got any idea how to send a ping-o-death.
Either way, YOU ARE SO SUED!
I long for the heady days of the dot-com era, when every meal was catered, we could bring our dogs to the office, and we could afford a cow-orker or two.
In my college days, I would share UNIX accounts with fellow CS students who I was working on projects with (friends, mind you). One night when finishing up some coding, I decided to leave something behind for a buddy I knew would be looking at my work in the morning...
$ cd cs250/
$ ls
Makefile
parser.c
main.c
fuck.you
Naturally, when it was my turn to log in later that day, I would find something equally creative...
$ ls
Makefile
parser.c
main.c
eat.me
Be certain to read how to remotely control your^H^H^H^Hsomeone's Mac. ;)
And yes, this is some shameless self-promo
Karma: Bizzare (mostly affected by varying internal caffeine levels.)
You could create an Outlook VB script to generate letters of resignation from all the people who will likely recommend your termination for all the other shit you're pulling.
Better yet, you could create one to send various and sundry emails complaining about you being a handicapped jewish black lesbian so you can sue for discrimination when you are invariably fired for being a complete pain in the ass.
OR, several coworkers had wireless mice, so I swapped them around. OR, disconnect their keyboard. Change their backdrop. Add a sound to their startup file/folder. while they're working, do a remote shutdown of their workstation. even better, do it during a brutal video game match. change their video resolution. once, I set the "tilt" on a shared dept. computer's monitor, and they sent it in for repair. repeatedly login as them with a bad password so their account locks.
One of the fun ones I would pull (only on people that could fix it) was to set the default windows shell to sol.exe (solitaire).
.
It involves editing the registry, so all the standard warnings here about you could seriously hose the box . .
So, under the winlogon (look under HKLM_Local_Machine\software\microsoft\windows nt\currentversion\winlogon) branch, there should be a text entry of 'shell' set to explorer.exe. Just change the explorer.exe to sol.exe, reboot, and the next time they logon it should give a nice game of solitaire and nothing else.
To fix, ctrl-shift-esc to bring up the task manager and just run regedit from there, correct, then reboot. Make sure you are there when they logon though to get the full enjoyment (and more importantly to fix it)
From the dotcom era: Wrote a http proxy that left everything on a web
page alone, but substituted all text with "All work and no play makes
Jack a dull boy." (Slashdot looks pretty strange that way.)
Redirected a few browsers to point to it. Interesting to see who
figured it out and who didn't.
From the Mesozoic era: You used to have to type up your source on
punch cards, using a huge, clanking IBM 029 cardpunch. Most were
beige with a color strip along the top, pink, green or yellow. A few
were blue. Whatever. Great keyboards, and each key press gave a very
satisfying KUH-LUNK. Editing was bizarre. If you make a mistake, you
could load a second card, duplicate until the error, and then type
your correction, (and don't forget to remove the card with the typo).
This was a painful way to program. Run your deck through the card
reader, then go to the huge line printer to get your output,
consisting of source, output and error messages, and accounting
information, (e.g. $0.37 to run your program, debited from your $50.00
funny money account). Turnaround could be horribly slow, 1/2 hour on
a bad night. Standard practice was to write source code by hand, and
desk-check everything very carefully. Anyway, newbie runs his first
program, gets the inevitable compiler errors, and is completely
stumped. He goes to the poor schmuck on duty whose job it is to unjam
the card reader and printer. "Oh, you've got a color code error. You
typed your program on the wrong color cards. You have to use the green
ones."
i was doing some remote maintainance on my buddies production equipment.. i was ssh'd into a gentoo machine that was connected to his cisco devices. out of no where it dawned on me to make his box beep and take it from there. so i emerged a package called beep and ran it with the example flags in the manpage.. about 8 or 9 times when he messages me on irc asking whats up. my reply to him was 'oh, thats what a kernel panic looks like' before i could tell him it was a joke he had already hit the reset button. oops! i think that box had the best uptime of all his servers, heh.
Our VP was a bright guy, but a tad gullible, and sometimes too much of
a micromanager. We were running a multi-day stress test and had a
little fun with him. We rigged the server so that we could slow it
down or speed it back up from a console. We called him in and said,
(name changed to protect everyone), "Hey, Bill, we noticed that the
server would slow down once in a while, and we finally noticed that it
was because Kevin was kinking the ethernet cable with his chair."
Bill was absolutely incredulous. He had to see it for himself. So one
of us kinked the ethernet cable to the server, the guy on the console
did his bit, and the server slowed down. We unkinked the cable,
console guy did his thing, and the server speeds back up. Bill tries
it himself a few times and sputters. "This can't be happening! How can
this be?!".
It was a great credit to all involved that they kept a straight face
until the VP was positive he was being zoomed.
You can find upside down fonts in most formats on the Internet. Get one, and replace their system font with it. Convince them the earth's magnetic field has 'reversed polarity', and that they need to turn their monitor upside down.
Web Hosting Reviews
We had one annoying coworker with a Mac and a love of some sci-fi movie (it's been a while, I forgot which one). Well, he changed all his event sounds to quotes from this sci-fi movie, and not just any quotes, but long, loud, annoying ones. You know, whenever he got mail, it would be 20 seconds of some dialogue from this movie. Every IM sound was some more dialogue. Booting up of shutting down would be the opening credits and closing credits. Every. Time. So while he was away, we changed every sound on his Mac to some soft "klunk" sound we found on the Internet.
U TF -8&q=orgasm+wav&btnG=Google+Search
Admittely, not the "Prank-o-the-week," but I am sure you could find a way to make this a lot more nefarious...
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&oe=
where i work, we had a mean boss who made us :)))) rotflmao.
fill weather ballons with hydrogen from mobile
fermenters. so we told ahmed chilabi that they
were actually portable biological weapon labs,
hehehe. you should have seen his face when
the americans killed his children
-I like my women like I like my tea: green-
This one time, at Initech, I set the building on fire.
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
Be careful with net send. We used to fire those back and forth at an old job when they decided banning IM software was a good idea. Accidental domain-wide (meaning company-wide in our case) net sends are hilarious, until you send a particularly humiliating one yourself.
Game... blouses.
A long time ago, the company I worked for had a training room with 15 identical SparcStations in it. One of those machines was named "bovine", so I installed a cron job that every 15 minutes it had a one in four chance of doing a "cat moo.au > /dev/audio".
The funny thing is that even though one of the machines was named bovine, nobody ever figured out which machine it was that was mooing. But they knew it had to be me right away.
The next Cmdr Taco duplicate will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and see it early!
net send "Press OK to format drive C:"
enjoy!
Back in college (in the 95/98 days) we had o ne homophobe in your suite. Imagine his disgust when he found the gay theme on his computer.... Imagine his gisdust after changing it back and rebooting to fond that it had -re-installed itself!
Another ding I did, since we were all procifient in dos, was to replace his command.com with my own that would show him an empty harddrive - no dirs, files, and all his drive space was free!
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
I thought, what better way is there to annoy this individual than to confront him with her picture? I found the registry key that controlled desktop wallpaper in windows and devised a little script that would pull in the photo from our corporate intranet and turn the desktop into a tiled background of this woman's photograph.
Then changed Netscape on his desktop so that the icon remained the same, but whenever he clicked on it, it was really running the script to set the wallpaper silently and then launching netscape.exe.
To make things even more interesting, there was an outcome I didn't anticipate. The wallpaper settings would not take place visually until after a reboot. This poor guy couldn't figure out why, every time his machine rebooted, he had this ultra annoying and frightening wallpaper. He eventually gave up and reinstalled his OS!
The two practical jokers responsible for this annoying behavior are still laughing.
Revolutions are never about freedom or justice. They're about who's going to be top dog. -- Kilgore Trout
Before I worked at my first "tech" company, one of the three co-owners was on vacation and came back to find a cubicle in his office with one of the tech support guys in it, phone, computer, and all.
A coworker at my current job goes to Haiti once a year to perform volunteer work. When he came back this year, I had switched my test machine with his development machine. Did I mention I ghosted that machine to French Win2K (I don't think there's a Creole Win2K, so that's as close as I could get it)? The best part was that we switched Windows domains the week he was out, so he and our site lead (who I swear I told I was going to do this) spent an hour troubleshooting why his machine had turned French, even going to the lengths of downloading a French keyboard map so they could type correctly before he realized that "his" machine didn't have the piece of paper taped to its side that should have been there.
We had a Dutch (windowze) support guy who's left friday early to home leaving his Windows XP PC running. I downloaded a NetBSD evaluation CD-rom, and rebooted his machine with this CD-rom. Next monday, he went out of the roof, thinking I formatted his PC.
1 reboot later everything was okay again!
I once used a web site that altered the from account for an email to whoever you wanted it to be from. We were working on a project that was way late, So I sent an email to the Project Manager from the CIO, demanding to know what her problem was and to send a complete explanation to him, and that the project was cancelled. After she turned white from reading it, I told her before she actually sent anything back to him...
Some years ago, one of the guys in the office played the best joke I have seen.
He rewrote the interrupt routine for the keyboard, then changed the keys around a bit.
The best one was changing every third w to be a q. So easy to forgive as a typo, but also very frustrating.
I am not sure if it can still be done with winNT/2K, etc as this was win 95.
But if anyone has done it I would like to know where to download the software.
One of my coworkers pulled this off on another.
Joel (his real name) made a comment about the printer not always liking his documents- as if it were in a bad mood. So Dave and John (real names!) decided to have some fun. They would add some pages in the printout tray as it would dump his documents, swipe others, etc.
Eventually they spoofed an email or two from the same IP as the printer asking why Joel wasn't printing as much as he used to- the 'printer' wanted to know if he was being sexed away by the newer inkjets.
Realize this had been going on for months.
Finally I suggested changing his print server with a simple script to add random pages inside the documents by triggering on the user name.
I don't know if he ever found out, to be honest.
At sth like 1995 I worked in the large office divided into cubicles (almost 100 people in one large room). We got 8 new Digital Unix workstations which happened to be distributed around the whole room. Most of the users did not know Unix too well (they were mainly Win programmers migrated to Unix and learning it slowly while doing the job). I got one of the workstations and I found that for some reason:
- all those workstations were in the single NIS domain, so having account on the one of them allowed to login everywhere
- all workstations were equipped with soundcard and the embedded speaker (people didn't know about it)
- there were a couple of music files containing recordings of voices of different animals
Having a lazy day I wrote small script which selected random machine, rsh-ed to it, selected random file and played it - and then repeated it after a few seconds. The effect was fantastic: random animal voices raising from the different places in the office, in the way absolutely strange for the users of the computers playing the sounds...
I must say that later the event caused educating people what does it mean that X-server is a server a bit easier....
BTW: I think most jokes harm at least people productivity and one should better consider whether something is really funny and harmless....
- you own up to what you did immediately
- apologize
- fix whatever you broke
- swear to never do it again, and finally
- help your victim find somebody else to do it to.
I swore off using my powers for personal amusement sometime in 1986, when I wrote a small program in QuickBasic that mimicked a DOS prompt, captured every keystroke the user entered, and substituted the follwing string, a character at a time: DEL C:\*.* Tiny little program would pop back with this: Are you sure (Y/N)? The victim would VERY CAREFULLY hit the N key-- --and of course it would show up as Y-plus-carriage-return, and the victim's hard drive would light up and start grinding. Quite a lot of shouting and swearing and unplugging things and similar merriment would ensueOr Hi-ho hi-ho.
Add it to your screensaver, make it loud enough for your neighbors to hear and see how many people are humming/whistling it by home time.
Indiana Jones is pretty effective, as is Mission Impossible.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
I work in a Power control room for a large power utility. I snuck in early one day and copied a way file that said " sta puff " in a high pitched voice onto the south desk's computers and changed the substation breaker trip alarm to the new sound.A couple hours later a storm rolled in and the breakers started operating. So here sat the guy we nicknamed Sta Puff ( marshmellow man in Ghostbusters ) trying to act like it was not bothering him as 5 or 6 supervisers and fellow workers stood by his desk and it kept saying his nickname over and over.
Being originally a hardware geek, these are my favorites: - Remove the top row of keys from victims keyboard (the numbers & punctuation marks), then put them back on, shifted once to the right. The average user doesn't really remember, without looking, whether the = key is on the right or left. - Improvise a VGA dongle, or take apart the VGA plug from victims monitor. Swap the R,G & B wires. Play around with Windows color preferences until desktop background, etc., are back to their original colors. White & black will be unchanged, but colors will all show up as something different.
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
Gee slashdot is just full of juvenile deliquents, I mean the nerv of some of these pranks...
;)
Well here's some of mine
- We wrote a small app that uses the windows media plugin. It sits hidden in the background until it detects a file c:\playme.avi. Then it becomes visible, goes full screen and doesn't respond to any keyboard or mouse input. When finished it deletes the avi. Then any time you like copy any video onto their machine...
- Some people were using bizarre colour schemes on their desktops, so we wrote an app to change each system colour one increment closer to the default colour every second, slowly restoring them all back to the defaults. unfortunately changing the colours forces a repaint which flickers a bit.
- I wrote another app which enumerates all the volume controls and sets them all to 100%, unmuted, then plays a wav file from the command line and restores the settings, using psexec from sysinternals to push the exe over to the victims machine, and "Haha" (nelson from the simpsons).
- not sure where it came from but I got a stress ball chaped like a mouse, hide their real mouse behind their pc, and replace with the stress ball, the instant of "ewww whats that, thats not my mouse" is quite funny to watch. similar results could be achieved with vaseline, but that could be a bit messy.
I'm sure there have been others but thats all I can remember at the moment...
09F91102 no, 455FE104 nope, F190A1E8 uh-uh, 7A5F8A09 that's not it, C87294CE no. Ah! 452F6E403CDF10714E41DFAA257D313F.
Back in the 1980's the MIT Lisp Machines had a generalized time parser calle time:date. When a date was needed, it parsed a generaldate.
I set the INQUIR database for a co-worker to say his birthday was the string "today"so every time he logged in, it said, "Happy Birthday, Ed." It took him three years to find it.
Around October '99, there was a tiring spate of Y2K messages of increasing stridency. After one particularly annoying message about Microsoft Offfice, I sent a message purportedly from the updates office to my local group, stating that "it has come to our attention that many of you have Office Calendars that are not Y2KCompliant, and expire on December 31, 1999. Please take steps to upgrade your Office Calendar to one that is Y2K compliant. Office Calendars are available in the office supplies room, or at local stationery and supply stores." I had some other text about failure to comply, inspections, etc. The only person who caught the hoax was a guy who authored many IETF RFC's on mail. The other people just assumed it was more hysteria.
goat sex
I had a supervisor who was not only dishonest, but inbred. To relieve stress in our department we'd use one of the free internet phone services to dial his cell phone. Since our computers didn't have microphones, he never heard any sound. Here's how the first call went:
"Ring Ring" (schmuck answers the phone)
---bzz bzz (static)
(schmuck) I can't hear you, speak up!
---bzz bzz (static)
(schmuck) I still can't hear you. Call me desk phone at 867-5309
So we break the connection, and dial his landline with the same service.
"Ring Ring"
(schmuck) Hello?
---bzz bzz (static)
(schmuck) I can't hear you, speak up.
---bzz bzz (static)
(schmuck now yelling as he slowly spoke) I CAN'T HEAR YOU.
Eventually our supervisor would hang up, muttering about stupid callers. We'd wait 5 or 10 minutes, then repeat the same process all over again. Imagine the fun!
He would eventually tire of this, and turn off his cellphone. So then we'd just call his desk phone. After a while, it would get hard to keep a straight face in front of him. We'd periodically call his cell while one of our staff was standing next to him. Then we'd rotate through the entire staff so he wouldn't suspect us.
Then (as that fscker Emeril says) we'd kick it up a notch. We'd wait until he went to the can. He was the type who could spend an hour on the throne. After giving him a few moments to drop his drawers, we'd dial his cell. The sound of him bellowing "I can't hear you." in the restroom would reverberate throughout our small company.
He tried changing his cell number, but since it was listed in the company directory, it only took us a few minutes to show him the error of his ways.
And best of all? We were paid for this.
The cursor moving 'by it's self' does seem to freak people.
I used to do software support of a product that was installed in control rooms and ran 24/7. One time I got a complaint as some guy sitting in a control room by himself at about 4am his time was playing card games on the computer we had recently installed (a no-no anyway). I had dialed in and started to check and clear logs, back up software before installing an update. I kept getting dropped which I thought was strange, but it turned out that the guy had freaked out when the cursor started moving and files opening 'all by themselves'. Having about 20 years of working in a old-style hird-wired control room, he keep rebooting the machine (via the hardware reset!) and trying to call his supervisor at home about somebody 'hacking the system'.
Still have a strong mental picture of the guy franticly trying to moving the mouse back to soltaire while I was trying to navigate via explorer..
I don't need your sense of humour when I've got already enough patches, upgrades, pushed software, and idiotic morons answering the phone with "Have you rebooted, suhir?"
Get off your 'joke' ideas and do your job and leave us 'user lusers' alone. We've got enough shit to do with layoffs without your idea of a 'good time'.
And no matter how well you know us, or me personally, you'd have to be a very damn good friend before I looked your name up in the company list, hit orgtree, orgtree (to get to your bosses boss) and gave him a heads up as to which employee jobs could be shipped over to a slightly more harmless continent in the middle of two seas.
There's enough jokes in management that you can just keep your own to your own 'private' friends.
What a waste of bandwidth, time, intelligence, and resources.
I just use a USB trackball, and shove it in my pocket. The victim would always call me over, but it just refused to misbehave when I was watching. However, it seemed to start as soon as I went around the corner...
Dependable, Reliable Furnishings
Indians don't do practical jokes at work. As a whole, they seem to be humorless, efficient workers -- exactly the kind upper management likes.
While you were playing jokes on one another, screwing up computer settings and inflicting real pain and aggravation on the unsuspecting people who were your victims, you were making enemies -- and upper management was getting ready to outsource you.
When the axe finally fell, those people were much relieved! No longer would they be a victim of your sick sense of humor. Your ass is out on the street, and the company is better off for it.
I think it is sick that anybody would choose innocent people to play practical jokes upon. You deserved to be fired! I would gladly support the firing of anybody who played a damaging practical joke at work. I am glad that nobody played a joke on me when I was working during the boom.
(Submitted as AC for obvious reasons)
You can have a Klingon Language CD. You can have a girlfriend. But you can't possibly have BOTH.
And you sir are an idiot. You can tell when the computer crashed by looking at the time displayed.
I have a little extension called "High Sierra File Access", a name that sounds just like a real extension, that when put in the Extensions folder in MacOS 8-9 will reverse ALL THE TEXT ON SCREEN. All menus, folder/file names, window names, even text boxes will have reversed text. It's really impressive and confusing.
Now, that guy who's not too computer-savvy was changing office and coming down near to us technicians. So after his iMac had been brought to his new desk and before he came in that morning, I put that little extension, then restarted so that it would load, and removed it to the trash.
Now when he came in, at first he couldn't quite understand what was going on. He managed to start up a few apps from the icons by habit, but couldn't do anything. I stayed close and he asked for help, so I looked at it carefully and said:
"Well, I've seen this problem before, it's because they moved it, and the letters got all mixed up in it. But I can cure it, all I need to do is to shake it up a bit."
I proceeded to shut down the system, and picked up the iMac and shook it every way. Put it back down, and started it up. The extension not being there anymore, it didn't load and everything was fine. He was looking at me with those BIG incredulous eyes, and he just couldn't believe I'd solved the problem this way. We all started laughing helplessly and explained it to him after a few minutes.
If he explores all forms and substances Straight homeward to their symbol-essences; He shall not die.
"Ah, we deliberately crashed his computer and came in an hour later. He hadn't reset it."
Okay, so you can look at the time on the PC, which cannot be doctored to tell when the computer went down. Again, he may have been busy since the computer crashed and not noticed. In any case, my point is, that's not the way to fire someone. Just because the computer in front of them and not responding, with a time of about an hour ago on the desktop clock, well, would you want to be fired on those grounds? Idiot remark right back at you.
Add Shutdown.exe to the startup group. Compy starts up, and immediately shuts down.
When I used to work at a mac shop ('88) we had this guy downstairs in dispatch who wore glasses. One day when he took time off to go to the optometrists we opened his Mac SE and turned the magnets on the back of the CRT. When he came back and switched on his machine everything was rotated 45 degrees. Span him right out.
My current boss also wears glasses. We got one of those battery free torches (from thinkgeek) and held it near the screen. It puts a pretty rainbow oil pattern over everything. Span him out too.
"Don't forget the prunes." L. Francis Herreshoff
It's not worth fighting in court, in fact the guy was awarded unemployment for a short time, but if you're paying someone to do work that *HAS* to be done on the computer, and he hasn't touched the computer for an hour, you fire him. This was a low-level data-entry person, and we had suspected it for a while, but the exploit (which there was no patch for for about another week) allowed us to prove to ourselves that our assumptions were correct. When the employee tells you he has used his computer to do X, Y, and Z in the last hour, and his computer hasn't worked (and X, Y, and Z weren't done), you get rid of him, and find someone else. So you pay unemployment if he fights it, no big deal, at least you don't expect a return on your money, whereas if you have him working for you, you expect him to do something, and it costs you more when it later has to be done by someone else, who doesn't have time to do it, because they're actually busy.
Point is, consequences and morale be damned, why let employees get away with that? If anything, at least you keep the other employees from following the example set by the lazy, lying employee.
Sure, the time can be doctored, but it wasn't, and the machine might have survived the ping (I checked after sending the ping, while the employee was in the break room getting coffee, it was locked), but if you're at the point where senior staff believes that the guy is unproductive, and you need to prove it, it's the perfect way to do it. Sure, it's not a good documentation trail for unemployment, but why waste a $100k+/yr supervisor's time to do all the paperwork for a $6/hr data-entry clerk. Sometimes it's just not worth taking the time to cover your ass, especially if your in-house attorneys are having a slow month.
--That's the point of being root, you can do anything you want, even if it's stupid.
My Mother is not a co-worker but still this was the best joke I ever thought up. (April fools too!)
...and she got to take about 37 back home with her. haha. [Lynn had not noticed her pies were missing]
... I said "I'm at Lynn's. You never told me you were going to Ottawa! Here's Lynn.. Then Lynn talks for a bit and eventually says: Here's Lisa. [my daughter] haha."
So...
I live in Calgary and one of my brothers lives in Ottawa. My folks live in Saskatchewan in a quaint little town that is no longer on the maps AFAIK.
Several years ago my folks planned a trip to Ottawa to visit my brother at Easter - and they didn't tell me. I forget how I found out - maybe from one of my sisters...
Anyway my mother's best friend is Lynn and I recruited her to help me. Now - Lynn is a really nice woman and she's a farmer's wife (As is my Mother) and some may have concluded that farmer's wives are sometimes idolized for the good things they cook up. Lynn was no exception and I pulled a good joke on her when I stole over 40 pies from her deep freeze and gave them to my mum - who promptly stored them in her deep freeze and then invited the Duncer's over for Sunday Dinner and fed Lynn and Albert and everyone else Lynn's great pies. haha. Lynn raved about the pie - about how good they were.
[BTW - off topic. If anyone is interested in making say 40 pies or so - most pizza places will part with perfect pie boxes for a couple bux. I bought few dozen a few years back - its a good investment and you can put a lot of say "pumpkin" pies in a 23 cubic foot deep freeze]
Back to the story... Lynn I guess had a score to settle with mum.
Now Mum was in Ottawa and it was April 1. I set up a 3 way call to Lynn in Saskatchewan and then called Ottawa and complained that I'd just spent over 8 hours with the kids driving out to visit her and where was she?
I'm a single dad (my wife died at 36) and the kids were small so a trip like this was an undertaking... The kids were _perfect_. LOL
Well - we did fess up. But my mum was just beside herself and she was saying things like "I can't understand how you could do this? Are you really in Calgary? Lynn - are you in Calgary? haha"
This was the best joke IMHO that I ever pulled off and Dad and Roger saw immediately what I'd done. I'm sure they all had a really good laugh and Lynn and Mum probably still talk about it!
haha!
I wasn't personally responsible for this one but it impressed me with it's ingenuity.
A coupla work mates got together to pick on a socially chalenged member of the company and their idea basically ran along the lines that the victims computer would forever be "chickenized". i.e. the wall paper was chickens, all the sounds were of chickens, the cursors were chickens, the icons were chickens and so on.
However it wasn't enough that this happened once, oh no it had to happen over and over and over.
So they wrote a "Chickenizer" that ran on ALL the machines in the office, that:
a) checked that Chickenizer was running on ALL the machines in the office and install it if it wasn't.
b) check that the victims machine was Chickenized and re-Chickenize it if necessary.
It worked!
The victim, being quite computer literate (using a Next I believe) went batty trying to de-Chickenize his machine. He worked out they he could clean the machine but at some future point it would be Chickenized again. So looking around the office he discovered the "Chickenizer" process running on another machine. But to remove all the Chickenizer processes was a very long and tedious job. Unplug a machine, de Chickenizer it, shut it down. Repeat until all machines are done.
But that of course doesn't take into account someone firing up a single copy of Chickenizer again somewhere.... sometime....
Oh the agony!
Yes yes before the days of permissions...
Cheers,
Costyn.
The Official Steve Ballmer Webpage
At an early high-tech company someone found a personal workstation unlocked and sent the email to a departmental list saying "I'm wearing a really pretty new dress today, come by and give me a compliment."
Happenend several times. Never found out who.
very very funny.
very infamous.
Back when alladvantage and those pay to surf programs were big, I wrote a cursor mover. Every random time between 1-5 minutes, it would move the cursor to a random location on the screen. Now, I knew what it was, and when I forgot to turn it off when I got back on my computer, it was annoying as hell.
Imagine the guy in the cubicle next to you...I can already see him trying to take apart his optical mouse to get the wheels clean.
Now, what about the auto-web page changer which jumped to random website searchs and such every 1--5 minutes...that could be annoying too.
Btw...why did those companies all go bankrupt?
[I can picture a world without war, without hate. I can picture us attacking that world, because they'd never expect it]
I used to work at a print shop as a graphic designer on a Macintosh. In the whole company, there we only 2 Macs: mine and "Jim's" (not his real name). Because I had more experience, I was the unofficial Mac expert, and Jim would ask me when he had a problem (the System Administrator was clueless about Macs).
...so, Jim went ahead and "removed it, and continued working. But I wasn't done yet. I grabbed the Applescript and changed a few things, and replaced the version in Jim's startup folder, and waited for him to reboot.
Anyway, we had a week where the design department was quiet. There were 4 of us in the department, all in one room, including my suporvisor. Because I was the one to troubleshoot problems on the Macs, I had a login on Jim's Mac, and I could browse his hard drive.
I was bored one day, so I wrote a little AppleScript program and inserted into Jim's startup folder, and waited for him to reboot. Because of the way that the room was set up, I would usually have my back to Jim, and would anser his questions without turning around.
Here's how things played out:
Jim: Hey Ed, my computer is acting funny.
Me: Really? Maybe you need to reboot.
Jim: Ok...Hey, I just got a message that I have a virus!
Me: Really? What's it say?
Jim: "A virus has been detected on this system. Press "Ok" to remove it."
Me: (trying not to smile) Go ahead and remove it.
Later...
Jim: Hey, it says I have another virus!
Me: Well, didn't you tell it to remove it before?
Jim: Yeah, I did.
Me: Hmmm, maybe it's a different virus. What's the message say?
Jim: "Jim, a virus has been detected on your computer...uh.."
Me: How's the computer know your name?
Jim: Uh...
At which point I couldn't keep from laughing, and filled him in on what I had done (my supervisor was there, so I told him too). Both of them thought it was a good joke, and Jim couldn't beleive he didn't realize it when the popup called him by name!
Ed Wedig
Graphic design services
docbrown.net
-For Windows 9x and ME you could place a file called logo.sys in the C:\ dir and it would replace the "Windows is now starting screen". You can make all sorts of error screens to replace it, but my favorite was copying logos.sys from c:\windows\system which is the screen that says "It is Now Safe To Turn Off Your Computer".
-I wrote a program which would detect that the mouse had been sitting in one place for about 30 seconds, and then would make it slowly drift to the side of the screen.
-Replace someone's shell with a differnet application, like NotePad or Calculator.
-Rename some icons with very similar names. It will be a long time before they notice.
-Make a fake HTML page with says "Thank you [their name] for placing your order with [some porn web site]. Open it in the browser, change the URL in the location, but don't press enter so it goes to the site.
-Write a GUI that looks just like Nortons or Mcafee but always says every file is a positive for some random virus. Send out a notice that everyone scan their hard drives.
-Schedule a meeting using their ID with yourself, and ask them what it's about.
-Set their minimum password length to 128 characters and make them change it every time they log in. (OK, I've never done it).
-Put a Netware "Send" command in their startup notifying the entire office (or a small group of people) they have arrived.
-Wedge something between two rarely used keys on the keyboard to make them stick down, causing a BIOS error when they boot up.
-In the Mouse icon in the Control Panel, swap the left and right mouse buttons.
-Add a few random items to their startup.
-Change their password every day.
-Make their desktop wallpaper/screensaver a picture of their manger, and edit the Windows policy so they can't change it.
-- Re-arrange the office furniture.
-- Print screen and post it to the windows desktop, with the start bar hidden and the desktop icons off
--Bags and bags of the little plastic army men all over the office.
--Bag of plastic ants in trails all over the office.
--Dvorak for the keyboard settings.
--Slow the mouse down or really speed it up, also make it a left handed mouse if they are right handed.
--rubber bands on drawers to have them automatically close when opened
--box of confetti over the door
--a very quiet but annoying noise played over the speakers, at just loud enough to be heard
-- Tim
TKrabec Pahh
yeah... attitude, your right... it sounds like you too have used a phallace wrench to adjust the attitude knob in your anus.
seriously, if i came in and found a 100 shortcuts on my desktop (which wouldnt take up that much space... my screen is set to 2048 x 1536) id laugh it off and do something HARMLESS to him..
which is actually not malicious... here...
1. buy a dictionary and
2. then by a thesarus...
3. realize that malicious is a word that would apply to someone who per se, deleted all of your work docs and forced you to be late for a deadline...
4. malicious does not apply to office buddies playing harmless pranks which cause
4.a no loss of business
4.b no loss of productivity
4.c no hard feelings.
seriously.. grow the fuck up.. THEN.. lighen the fuck up. its only life and your going to die just like me. make your time here on earth useful... if you cant be usefull at least have fun and make it enjoyable... if you cant do that then do us a favor and kill yourself.
and who, prey tell, would be doing the beating? perhaps the "silly office hijinks gestapo"? you know... the ones who come in wearing pin stripe suits and fedoras... the ones that use two guys to hold you and the third takes slugs at your body for enjoying a practical joke with buddies?
... i only hope he doesnt send the gestapo on me to kick my ass..
heres a perfect example... i was out of work sick all last week.. i came in this week to find that my office phone was missing and my drawers filled with packing peanuts... the only one with a key to my office is the owner of the company... hes 80 years old... i guess someone better send the mafia to kick his ass... or i could laugh it off (as i already have)... spread the packing peanuts around his office (as i already have - and because i come in to work 45 minutes early i didnt waste any precious company time...) and go search for my missing phone... (as i was doing till i remembered about this thread and had to come back)...
maybe one day... ill get back the other engineer down the hall by plugging my cappacino mini pc in behind his tower and have it boot up to red hat... GOD FORBID I be labeled a cracker with mal-intent
its dumbfucks like yourself that have to resort to violence because they were beat up too much in highschool and feel its the only way to FORCE their views upon the weak majority.. i pray to god that you dont have the chance to fuck up the lives of our youth by actually making some of your own... and if you do.. my only recourse is to pray that they have enough common sense to know when these things are appropriate and that you are an arrogant asshole....
bye now =)
You pretty much have to move to a new job in a new city to pull this off, but if you can it is worth it.
Develope religion. Seriously develop religion. If you are jewish do the full nazerine vow (Never cut your hair), other religions have similear. Dress in scrict going to church clothes all the time. Carry a bible with your everywhere, and be seen reading it - got 30 seconds before a meeting starts, read it. Reject holidays that are not in your religion. (Halloween, and christmass - the latter is a good one for christians to reject because everyone belives it is a christian holiday, but historicly it is not, obviously pagans would celibrate some form of them) Don't be annoying, but invite everyone to church with you. Don't let this get in the way of real work.
Make sure you take jokes in stride. So long as the joke isn't out of hand laugh with everyone else. You may need this part of your reputation latter if any setup requires some help.
After you have established a reputation of being nearly perfect you can pull off a lot of complex setups that require some gulability because you are not suspected. "It sounds strange, but Joe would never ..."
Remember you have to restrain yourself, the reputation of a religous person who is always perfectly serious can be lost. There is nothing wrong with a religious person who is always playing jokes, but you can't pull off the really good ones.
I'm still working on this one. Might be able to do it by intercepting calls to cards.dll. I'm dying to push the patch out to the whole organization via SMS and see how long it takes before people start grumbling about how they NEVER win at solitaire anymore.
Why pick a random website. Even a non-random one can be annoying as hell, if the boss happens to be watching...
Windows in a mission-critical control room? While the operators on duty play card games? Lemme guess: August 14th, 2003?
While browsing Slashdot, at least you notice when your computer freezes up!
http://www.computerpranks.com -- They've got everything you could ever want to play gags on your co-workers and friends.
turn the double click speed to fast.
turn the acceleration all the way up or down.
my favorite, switch the orientation around so when you move up it goes down.
and if you want to be really annoying remove the mouse applet from the control panel.
I like using Xroaches and Xbabies and Xmelt or whatever. Screwing with people in Xwindows is ALOT more fun!!
Can my brother-in-law please have your tech job when your pranks get you fired?
Oh darn, but I suppose a lot of your co-workers have their own out-of-work relatives in mind...
Making trouble today for a better tomorrow...
When the startup I worked for got excessively bureaucratic back in the day, I put a "Soft Drink Request Form" in the break room. (Drinks not listed on this form require VP approval.) People filled it out!
I did this to a co-worker on april fools. Altered his hosts file so pr0n came up instead of google. He yelled, "someone hacked google for april fools, this is crazy!"
That type of goofing around with administrator rights should not be tolerated.
Regards,
Ryan Pritchard
Fun Extends All Basic Life Expectancies
Simple,
/usr/local/bin/sudo rm -rf /* to his profile. Once they log in KAPLOW!
Modify the user's profile and setup sudo for
rm. add
Okay, we are all admittedly nerds of sorts, but we don't have to go all anal about shit. Practical jokes are good fun as long as there's no permanent damage and we pick our subjects with mercy (no paranoid-schizophrenics that we torture over the edge). I say do whatever you wish that doesn't fuck over your co-workers,but remember turn about is fair play.
I set a job on a coworkers machine to open mulletsgalore.com up every hour. It was funny, especially when he called the IT people over to fix it.
Another good idea, which requires no password to the machine is if he has an optical mouse, put a piece of semi-translucent tape over it. It will slowly degrade performance as it gets scratched up.
....she was new - VERY NEW - to computers. he got her set up with a PC and AOL. apparently she was cutting her teeth nicely when he logged on one day to find her on one of his IM lists. (he set her AOL IM up) Well - knowing that she'd have no clue what IM was all about he typed, "Hey, stop hitting the keyboard so hard. It hurts." She didn't answer for a minute or two. Then she typed, "What??" He typed in a comment about the pain caused to the PC when she typed. Then the phone rang at my friend's house. Him mother was on the phone, nearly hysterical, thinking that she was "killing" her computer. Boy was he in a world of crap when he told her what had just transpired. Life is way to short to wear tight underwear. Enjoy!
A computer lets you make more mistakes faster than any invention in human history.
One of my friends/co-workers left for his first vacation quite paranoid (as well he should be) as we have a reputation for being the merry pranksters of the office (icy hot on the phone, fake phone calls, fish in the desk, etc.). With the mental anguish he was going through knowing that we were going to do something to him when he got back, he left us all explicit instuctions to not touch anything on his desk. So being the good friends that we are, a day before his return we saran wrapped each individual item on his desk (each book, each pencil, each photograph, we even went so far as to wrap each pushpin and the namplate on his cube wall). We finished off the whole thing by hermetically sealing his cube itself with industrial grade plastic wrap (you know, the HUGE rolls) and leaving a note..."Brad, we knew how worried you were about somone messing with your desk while you were gone so we took it upon ourselves to ensure nothing happened. We believe you will find it nice and secure, hope you had a nice trip!"
Be careful! Bears shouldn't consume large furry dogs.
1. While at a training session I pulled a prank on a guy who was being a jerk. He was annoying the rest of the class with his remarks reminding me of the comic store owner character from the simpsons.
/? and shutdown /? from your command prompt to check it out.
I scheduled shutdown commands with at from my pc to be run on his pc every few minutes. It was wonderful to interupt him while he was blessing us with his knowledge. It was pretty simple and I'm sure everyone could figure out how to do it just at
2. I once had a boss that everytime there was a system issue he would act like the place was burning down. We got our telecom guy to swap out his phone with a phone that had the reciever superglued to the set. Then, we got a user go over to his desk acting all irate and tell him that a system was down. His knee jerk reaction of course was to call someone even though we sat like 10 feet away.. it was funny to see him at a total loss for what to do.
Just passing it on...
We had this one jackass who always ripped pages out while they were still feeding. I waited until he did that and send "STOP THAT!" He stared at it, looked around, and looked again only to see "00 READY" staring back at him.
A secretary came over and it said "hi Wanda!" on it. When she got all her pages it said "bye Wanda" and she waved bye-bye at it.
Some of the secretaries decided the printer was haunted, so being a fan of The Shining I changed it to "666 REDRUM" one day, then got distracted, then went to lunch. When I came back, the network guys were all standing around the printer, poring over the manual, waiting to hear back from HP, fretting. They asked me if anything was wrong with the printer. "Why?" I asked. "It says something's wrong with the drum. Do we have an extra drum?"
I about fell over laughing, and they got a kick out of it.
This is not my sandwich.
Well.. this wasn't a "coworker" but still funny as hell nonetheless.
My friends and I used to host netgames at our houses every month or so, each time we'd go to a different place. Well this one time I was getting bored and my friend left to take care of something... of course leaving his computer unlocked.
We began with the stupid things: renaming "My Computer" to "My Computer Sucks", "Internet Exploder", etc... changing backgrounds, changing start page, you get the idea.
Now we used to do this everytime someone left their computer unlocked and it was all in good fun... However, one time I was annoyed at one of them (forgot why) so I decided to install back orifice on it (this was before NAV picked it up as a virus)... Hehehe.
Ever try playing Quake and getting constantly fragged because your computer decided to start up defrag in the background? Or perhaps the random message boxes coming up.. or maybe it just shutting down randomly. Yeah, that was fun. Ever since then, *no one* left their PC unlocked when they were afk.
# fuser -v
#
Eventually, the victim would come looking for you, for the cure :)
Make this pic their wallpaper goatse.cx
Doctors do Massage in Longview WA now, who knew?
One April Fool's day we proxied my co-worker so that /. stories all mentioned his name, something like "and a special shoutout to john doe!" at the bottom of every story. He was getting real worked up over it, then realised it was too good to be true and ended with "ok, i give up. what did you guys do?"
That same day we did the same thing to our bosses computer, but for google. We added something like "Google acknowledges [link for our company] for special technical acheivements on this very special day." to the top of every page and changed their logo to a mix between theirs and ours (like google does on special events). He was so excited but luckily we caught him before he ran off to the president's office to brag about it.
If you don't have complete control of your network, then the dsniff tools may come in handy. This year i have special plans for a network admin that involve arpspoof and a keylogger. He will learn through humiliation that i hate being lied to.
Take a small piece of clear tape and put it over the ball or optical peice on the bottom of their mouse. Usually makes for about 30 minutes of fun.
© 2004 The SCO Group, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
I took the sound our content filter makes upon a violation (kind of a whoop-whoop air raid sound) and made it the default sound for every action in windows. It was classic.
I can't believe that no-one's posted the most classic prank of all time -- the Key-Top Swap.
.inputrc for Bash, etc.)
Ingredients:
* OS or shell that supports key remapping (inluding Win2K / WinXP)
* Keyboard with removable keys (Apple Pro is a favorite)
* A willingness to do minor psychological harm to the 'prankstee'
Directions:
1. Pop the 'M' and 'N' keys off the keyboard and exchange them.
2. Remap 'N' to 'M' and vice-versa in software (reg. key in Windows,
This is actually a fascinating prank just to watch, as the increasingly disoriented user tries to figure out what is going on. Touch-typists especially will be terribly confused (or "comfused", in this case) by their sudden lapse in accuracy. Next, the poor victim will begin examining their keyboard closely as they type, only to confirm that yes, the 'N' key produces an 'N' and the 'M' key produces an 'M'. Anyone without the luxury of a second keyboard to compare to (and even those that do won't think to, at first) are liable to spend a couple of hours trying to adjust to the new keyboard layout before they work out what's happened.
Users who happen to have the keyboard layout memorized (fat chance -- you don't have to know where the keys are to type on them) will catch on fairly quick and begin shooting accusatory glances at their co-workers. What you really have to watch out for is persons using an 'N' or 'M' in their password on systems where the key remapping does not affect logons. It's far less amusing to just watch them stuggle with their password.
Unless, of course, scissors can't cut rock...
All this prank talk is amking me think of the SNL with Christopher walken on the "Pranked" show... "Yeah, I pranked him in the head with a shovel....are you being a stiffly stifferson? I hate stiffly stiffersons, I want to prank them for hours in my basement".... Ah, Christopher Walken.... the man can do no wrong...
Be careful! Bears shouldn't consume large furry dogs.
When your sysadmin leaves his console up as root and goes away to lunch, type:
/
rm -rf
then hit control-c (not return). The command stays on the screen, as if you had hit return. No damage, maybe teaches a lesson, probably causes a sweaty brow.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
One of the best free clients you could use is MUSHclient, it's free, simple and allows for all the hotkeying and little tricks you'd expect a MUD client to use.
WE just installed the Blaster Worm to see what it would do. and on unix systems issued the halt command.
...at the old Sickly's Pizza at the north gates of LSU on Highland Road. The manager at that time was a guy named Mohammed, if I remember right. He sent one of the new drivers to Pizza Hut in Tigerland for a dough repair kit. The new guy took it well; meanwhile we laughed our butts off.
Need a Linux consultant in New Orleans?
Something I would like to point out in this thread is the "office humor quotient". I have worked in a number of places and found that some places are very joke friendly and others are not. What would go over with great laughter in one place would go over like a pink slip in another.
I was the prankster, terrorizing my buddies in my stairwell (that dorm didn't have halls, but stairwells), but one of the guys (a gung-ho ROTC army guy, in the program, and who eventually joined up regular army to drive tanks when he flunked out of school during his senior year) never made the first move to get even with me. This went on for a couple of months. I'd put BBs in his boots, a brick under his pillow, etc., but no retaliation. It never dawned on me that he was saving up for a blowout of a prank to get me back.
I went to take a shower late one afternoon, and he proceeded to dump a wastebasket full of cold water from the water fountain over the top of the shower stall, freezing me quite well. No biggie, though, as I managed to dodge most of the water. I finished my shower, stepped out of the stall, and found that my bathrobe had been taken. I exited the bathroom to find him and a couple of our neighbors leaning up against the wall, grinning at me. I walked to my door and found it locked. He then informed me that my keys were duct taped to the ceiling of the landing (remember, this is a stairwell). I climbed up on the water fountain and pulled myself up to the ceiling via the exposed water pipe, and hand-walked the pipe to the center of the ceiling and grabbed my keys.
At some point my towel fell from around my waist, so I'm hanging from a 9-foot ceiling buck naked. Also during my climb, a guy from the third floor started coming down the stairs, girlfriend in tow. She turned around and went back up the stairs when she saw me and Ralph dangling from the ceiling. At any rate, once I snatched my keys, I let go of the pipe and dropped to the floor, landing on my feet. I unlocked my door, grabbed my robe, and began apologizing furiously to my buddy for all the pranks I pulled on him all semester. Needless to say, that cured me of pulling pranks on him, but good.
Need a Linux consultant in New Orleans?
My favorite April Fools was to leave one of those pink Message slips - in the days before pc's - saying to please call Mr. Lyon, with the zoo's phone number (must live in a city with a zoo).
The victim would then call the zoo, and ask for Mr. Lyon. Most of the zoo people are/were familiar with this, and would say something like "Mr Lion isn't available, he's playing with Mr. Bear right now." or some such.
"Would it kill you to put down the toilet seat?" -- Maya Angelou
this isn't really a technical thing... but it's good. I know this topic is old by now, but if you're reading it regardless- hi! Ok, so duct tape the lever on the adjustible height chair so that it lets the seat all the way up and will sink when weight is applied. Now hide where you can watch your co-worker starts to sink as s/he takes a seat.
Esoteric reference.
Oh, but I did this! After replacing a guy's keyboard with a rather "spartan" model, I got asked if monochrome monitors were next. So on his last day, I installed DOS 6.22 and WfW 3.11 configured in black and white on a spare hard drive. I conveniently had a meeting first thing and saw him hovering near the door ;-)
Oh, I laughed quite heartily.
-Pete
What u can do is pry off the g and f keys and switch em around, its subtle, but itll dirve him nuts... Also, try changing his keyboard layout from qwerty to dvorak, thats another good one. Switching mouse buttons, assigning hotkeys to normal alpha keys will make random stuff popup on his machine. Pick and choose!
I've been known to remove people's mouse balls, and tape them directly on top of their monitor. I've gotten minutes of humor out of watching people slam their mice down repeatidly, then ask me why their mouse isn't working anymore.
I just pull the ball off of the top of their monitor, put it in their mouse, and walk off without saying a word.
--Xan
"Congratulations, Boots. Your robot has become self-aware. You're a daddy now." -- Dr. Rho Bowman
We did this in college. "Fairy.exe has finished installing. Do you wish to view Faries now?"
Then watch them run
Or a message telling them that their files have become corrupted since they booted thier machines that morning. Press Esc to prevent erasure, OK to erase. I did this to a joker in our class just before the exam. I'd never heard someone speak through clenched teeth before. "Erasing Files?"
I had a coworker who told me that on a previous job, an employee got fired because he thought it would be funny to mount two double-edged razor blades to the output path of the punch card reader so that it shredded every deck it read.
-- stream of did I lock the front door consciousness
This was a long time ago, but it was funny. We had telephones with the round mouthpiece and earpiece that would unscrew. I borrowed a couple of pounds of lead shot from my father's shotgun shell reloading setup. Every morning before my boss arrived I would unscrew the mouthpiece on his phone and add a little more lead to a plastic bag stuffed inside. After about a week he tells me "Man! This job is really getting to me! It seems like even picking up the phone is getting harder and harder" I thought I was going to choke trying not to laugh.
-- Programming with boost is like building a house with lego. It's a cool but I wouldn't want to live in it
Funniest one I've heard of -- have their mem driver occasionally, rarely, set errno.
Got a magazine distribution list ? Photocopy it and attach it to the current issue of the Tellytubbies/some arbitrary kids magazine, and send it round the office.
Some video cards allow you to rotate the display 90, 180 or 270 degrees. Turn the monitor on it's side, rotate display and wait.
Anyone still using a monochrome monitor ? Do they usually have a static data entry page displayed ? Add some variety to their day by using permanent markers to colour in the window borders and title bar.
Gateway released a keyboard that allows you to remap keys. If you have one, try swapping the 1 and l keys around on an unsuspecting victim.
Create a boot floppy disk that loads an image of the user's desktop and then does nothing. Do it in DOS so it loads really fast. Leave the floppy disk in their drive and set the BIOS to boot from floppy first if it doesn't already.
The old ones are the best. If two co-workers have phones sufficiently close to each other, swapping the handsets across produces some deeply satisfying confusion - ring one of the phones to start the ball rolling.
When I was a repair tech I remember we rewired the yoke connections on someone's screen to reverse the picture then turned the screen upside down so when he came in he logged on and started using his PC then about 5 mins later he suddenly did a double-take - right side up picture, wrong side up monitor!.
Finally I can recall creating a word processing macro that ran every time the user started word. It would change a typed character every 200 keystrokes or so, and each successive replacement was part of a message. Took months before the user discovered what was going on; he accidentally leant on the space bar and got the message then panicked and rushed off to tell IT he had a virus.
Hook up his monitor to somebody else's computer, and vice versa.
I love NetHack.
laptop:/home# man drinking
No manual entry found for drinking
laptop:/home# apt-get install drinking
Reading Package Lists... Done
Building Dependency Tree... Done
E: Couldn't find package drinking
Hmmm... I could find that manpage... perhaps it's not yet included in stable?
One April Fool's day I decided to have some fun with my boss. He had a huge whiteboard (4'x6') that he keep lots of notes on, and never erased. He even had some pictures taped to it. Coincidently, *his* boss also had the same size/style whiteboard that was similarly covered with un-erased notes. So I stayed late the night before ... and carefully unscrewed each of the whiteboard's from the wall, and mounted the other one in its place.
When I came in the next day, I stuck my head in his office and said "hi" to see if he'd noticed, which he hadn't ... yet. Then I had a quick chat with some of my cow-orkers [sic], and suggested that they have a look at his whiteboard. Pretty soon everyone in the group was having a private chuckle, while he was stewing "... because someone had used his office for a meeting, and written new stuff all over his whiteboard."
Eventually I took pity on him and switched the boards back again...
We call it art because we have names for the things we understand.
When you're on a solaris box, create a script to periodically:
"rsh friendsMachine eject"
...if that methylene blue trick really works... a little bit of 'personal contact' where she gets to, uh, see your 'evidence' should lead to a quite entertaining reaction!
I'm not much of a pranker, but I DID pull a neat one on my computerphobic stepmother. She was forever bothering me to fix her (Windows) machine or help her with simple stuff, and I was forever telling her she should use a bit of initiative, play around, and find out things for herself.
Finally, I went to my room, recorded a really fruity burp, and uploaded it to her machine. Then I set EVERY SINGLE SOUND EVENT in Windows to that burp...
The really funny thing was, three weeks later, she STILL hadn't fixed the machine - nearly every possible action made the damn thing burp.
Uni residences are a good place for pranks too - while we didn't pull TOO many pranks, there are a couple of notable exceptions that spring to mind. We had a residence elevator - every so often, someone would fill it with all the sofa cusions from the common rooms. Or, someone would drag a common room chair into the elevator and set up with some drinks and a book, and peer owlishly at the people waiting for the lift at each floor...
We also _filled_ one guy's room with chairs from the common room while he was out. And on at least one occasion, someone's door got unscrewed and physically removed.
Showing my age here - did anybody else rlogin to their coworker's workstations running sunview and run "decay", which caused the screen to start averageing pixels with adjacent ones, ultimately causing the image to melt?
Dunstan
The last scintilla of doubt just rode out of town
I had some spare resources in my team on the previous job, so we made the following practical joke: We put together a DCOM object that when activated played a random MP3 off a server at work. We installed it on every computer in our department (~40 people), and wrote a small program to activate all of them in a random order and delay at a click of a button. The voices we used were dogs barking, cats meowing, sheep, cows, chickens etc. in a low volume. You can imagine the project manager's face when I clicked a small button on my laptop during a meeting and his computer, and other present laptops started sounding like a barn yard. We kept this up for about two days (with 10-20 minute interval), until someone finally got how this worked. And this was a software shop....
Those who can, do. Those who can't, consult.