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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.
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
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.
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
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
"Install VNC as a service and connect from your machine."
One of the engineers where I worked pulled a stunt like that on a naieve PR lady. He had a computer set up on a table on the opposite end of his office. He was tinkering with it via VNC. She asked him what he was up to and he told her that he had written some voice recognition software.
"Go ahead, say something."
"What should I say?"
And when she said that he fired up Notepad and wrote "What should I say?" on it. We all thought it was pretty funny until we found ourselves stopping an announcement that we had a new product in development.
"Derp de derp."
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.
Practical jokes are ok, but admins should not be deliberately sabotaging their people's computers in order to get a laugh. First,it's your job to keep these computers running smoothly. Second, being an admin is about being in a position of trust. In a midsize company, you may have access to everything: browsing habits, email, internal software, customer transactions, financials, etc You have to be careful that what you do doesnot break that trust.
Just looking through some of the comments...
Using VNC to take over someone's computer seems popular. From a user's perspective, this says, my IT staffer can and will take over my computer at any time. He can spy on what I am doing without me even knowing it... and he will for his personal amusement. Ha Ha very funny.
Someone suggests recording a cellphone ring as the new mail sound and letting the prank go on for 3 days during which the victim would frantically search through the cell phones in his desk. Any prank that occurs witht he frequency of email and goes on for 3 days is just abusive.
Same guy as above pulled a prank on a girl who was afraid of her boss. He recorded the boss saying her name and added a reverb and made it her shutdown sound. When she was working late the last thing she heard was his voice quietly calling her name and this (according to the guy) sent her running. That is just not even remotely funny.
I think practical jokes do have a place in the office, but most IT jokes aren't funny for the victims even in retrospect. They are just abuses of the power granted to the IT staff. If you are going to play an IT joke on someone, you should make sure it is possible for the victim to play the same joke on you. That is the main difference between joking with someone and picking on them.
Man drinking is great.
Care to punctuate that? Or should we read it as is?