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Pranks for April Fool's Day 2004?
Nighttime asks: "April the First will soon be upon us and I'm looking for some subtle pranks to play around the office. There's the usual taking a screenshot and setting as background, placing a piece of tape across the mouse ball (use opaque tape for optical mice), setting the keyboard layout to Dvorak, swapping the 'M' and 'N' keys etc. The office empties quite quickly at the end of the day which leaves plenty of time for preparation."
Because the evil bit is funny. Dammit.
The guys who always try and ruin things are going to look like asses. "HA HA! You won't fool ME! Hey, everyone! Look at Darl and his can of... oh. Peanuts."
Plus I'll go around telling the GMTBers that their blogs' CSS doesn't render right in Safari and watch the precious panic.
setting word or whatever else you use to autocorrect words to their incorrect spelling
I'll give you a hint: I've been setting you all up for it since March of last year!
See you at Linux Refund Day.
~Darl
You're old school? I beta tested the motherf***ing abacus!
This is a GMTB. Darl broke his link. Slash inserts spaces, so shorten your URL asswad.
Add the following line to the HOSTS file on the windows PC your favorite linux geek is forced to use at work:
;)
slashdot.org 207.46.245.222
(nslookup the IP to get the joke...)
AutoCorrect.
Tools > AutoCorrect
Replace commonly used words with whatever you wish. Sit back and enjoy..
INTEROFFICE MEMO
TO: All employees
SUBJECT: Excessive Absenteeism
Due to the number of absences from the office, the following rules and
procedures wil be put into effect as of this date.
SICKNESS: No excuse. We will no longer accept your doctor's statement
as proof. If you are able to go to the doctor, you are able to
come to work.
LEAVE OF ABSENCE (For an operation): We are no longer allowing this
practice. As long as you are employed here you will need whatever
You should not consider having anything removed. We hired you as
you are and to have anything removed would make you less than we
bargained for.
DEATH (Other than your own): This is no excuse. There is nothing you
can do for them and we are sure that someone else with a lesser
position can take care of the arrangements. However, if the
funeral can be held in the late afternoon, we will be glad to let
you off one hour early providing that your share of work is ahead
enough to keep the job going in your absence.
DEATH (Your own): This will be accepted as an excuse, but we would like
a two-weeks notice as we feel it is your duty to teach someone else
your job.
RESTROOM: Entirely too much time is spent in the restroom. In the
future we will follow the practice of going in alphabetical order;
for instance, those whose names begin with (A) will go from 8:00
to 8:15, (B) 8:15 to 8:30, etc. If you are unable to go at your
appointed time it wil be necessary to wait until your turn comes
around again.
It's all fun and games until the guy who doesn't like fun and games goes and complains to management that their 'coworkers' are making fun of them.
Then it's back to business, paperwork for you to sign is the first to-do item.
Your girlfriends iBook is suddenly complaining about it playing the newest Justin Timberlake CD?
Find out how to do this on trusty old macosxhints.com!
I don't suggest trying this unless you are very good with electronics.
I shared an office with a guy who was heavily into electronics and used to fix TVs and monitors as a hobby. This was back in the time of Windows 3.1. He stayed back the night before April 1st and stripped a guys monitor down and rebuilt it so the picture was upside down. (please don't ask me how.) Then he installed some hack on the display driver so Windows also displayed upside down. Rebooted the machine and went home.
The victim used to spend a lot of time telneted into a Unix box and ran his login session full screen. Since the monitor was inverted and windows was inverted, everything looked fine. He started his telnet session, hit alt-enter to make it full screen and since it was no longer using the display driver, the display was now upside down.
Hmmm.
He spent a while trying to figure out what had happened and someone dropped a hint that maybe the display driver had been tampered with. He tracked down a clean display driver and installed it.
Ta-daaaa.
Now everything was upside down.
Bob.
I'll probably stick a few empty beer cans in there this year.
Whaddaya mean "it's not the playground?" Are we not geeks, those who get paid (or at least pretend to get paid) to play with high-tech toys for a living? The whole world is our playground, friend, and I, for one, intend to live in it as such until I reach 114 years old at least!
P.S. *thpppppft!*
Hire a dozen Indians. Have them show up before your colleagues get to work, and sit them in your colleagues' chairs.
Post a large message on the whiteboard/bulletin board: "Accelerated Personnel Replacement Instruction Lessons -- Followed-by Occupational Outsourcing Layoffs"
Opinions on the Twiddler2 hand-held keyboard?
Had a nice one last year. ;)
We have a surveilance system for the telephone links going abroad from Norway, with
some nice graphs showing the reacability of phone calls to foreign countries.
So on some of the high priority routes we manipulated the statistics
so they all showed 0% reacability.
Caused quite some panic
It's so hilarious to watch people who can't type try to peck type on a keyboard with switched keys. I switched my keys on my keyboard to the Dvorak layout, but left the keymap the same as the qwerty layout. People would come to my dorm-room, and ask to use my computer. I would always be glad enough to help out a fellow student, and let them do some work on my computer. Most of the time the person, just looked confused and said, "I think I will find another computer to work on." Eventually people just stopped bothering me about using the computer, after all, there was a 24 hr. library a block away with at least 50 computers available.
/^([Ss]ame [Bb]at (time, |channel.)){2}$/
Who can I contact about getting a position with your company after they fire you for playing such childish pranks?
I am going to tape a white piece of paper to all of the optical sensors on the office mice, and I'm going to stash all of the non-optical mice balls. People won't know what happened. I am likely to unplug the mice too just for a high one.
I don't feel the need to go comitting random acts of petty sabotage on office equipment on April 1st.
And I *hate* the way some people take it to extremes, say, for example a news site posting random garbage all day.
Far better to pull one prank really well, than 100 really badly.
No shit. It's also a lot more effective when it comes from someone you don't expect it from. Everyone knows that Slashdot will be loaded with fake stories on Thursday, so the prank loses its impact.
Now, something like the "Taco Liberty Bell" prank is the way it should be done... it comes out of left field, and it's just believable enough that you get all pissed off about it before realizing what the date is.
I know god exists. I read it on the internet, so it must be true.
All the developers on my project (7 in total) are "resigning", one at a time, in individual meetings with the PM. The project's been rough recently, so this won't be coming out of left-field and detected as a prank immediately.
I'm hoping we'll have a good laugh AND teach management how much they need us at the same time...
friend showed me a site with a large variety of these. Either way, my computer lab teacher's probably gonna be pissed at me. http://www.rjlsoftware.com
Live life to the fullest. It's not that life is short, but that you are dead for so long.
just make sure none of you bottles out it sounds like it could go awry if you are not careful
Electronic Music Made Using Linux http://soundcloud.com/polyp
... so that our customers could trick people with them. Hopefully me posting this link won't ruin that.
And here's to hoping that your resignations aren't treated as real resignations. This may be just the opportunity they've been looking for to prune a few of the people who aren't professional enough :)
The other prank idea involves Christopher Walken and a crowbar, but it's kind of hard to play that one off so everybody can have a good laugh.
I wrote a little C program called FauxDOS and had it run from the autoexec.bat file on a cow-orker's MS-DOS PC. The source is below.
#include "stdio.h"
void main()
{
while(1)
{
char p[256];
printf("C:\\>");
fflush(stdout);
gets(p);
if(p[0])
printf("Bad command or file name\n\n");
}
}
Unknown host pong.
Hear hear.
Pasting a screenshot in as a desktop background is a little bit clever, but mostly just annoying. Putting a piece of electrician's tape over the sensor on my mouse isn't funny at all. It would just be annoying.
Fill my cubicle with packing peanuts. That'd be a good prank. Don't bother with the petty stuff.
Try this! I've done it before, and it's funny...
-- Steve
Hint: any prank that intends to "teach a lesson" is bound to backfire.
I can tell you this much: if my team did this to me, and then even HINTED at how "valuable" they were, they'd be fired on the spot, project status be damned.
Actually, I wouldn't have to fire them - I'd just accept their resignations. Remember, once you "resign", you can't just take it back - it is in the employer's hands to decide.
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
old fashioned.
Try the french layout.
1 - Most of the keys match... I said most. Exceptions: QA , WZ, and you have to press shift to type the numbers...
2 - Symbols? Forget about it...
how long until
...because I'm expecting at least fifty fire alarms...
Yup, good thing verbal notice doesn't constitute a resignation.
One year in the dorms I made up an authentic looking fake departmental memo, complete with file path line at the bottom, that said that the Dorm showers would be out of service for a week while they were replaced by coin-op ones (at $.25/5 minutes). We printed em up and spread em around. Later that day there was much rumbling in the cafeteria. The best was my roommate, Mr. Clean, three drunken showers a day, who let out a yell of "Can you believe this!?!" He was even starting to calculate how much it would cost him...
"I want peace on earth and good will toward men." "We're the U.S. government. We don't do that sort of thing!!"
Configure the sitewide spamfilter to send thousands of emails for natural male enhancement to the one in the company that you think could most benefit.
From Top 100 April Fools pranks you may get some good ideas. For instance, #10 - Planetary Alignment Dcreases Gravity could well be worth recycling this year, due to the planet alignment of recent days. #15 might have possibilities for the more prurient among you.
Your friend and well-wisher
m0smithslash
http://www.ferociousflirting.com
I'm fond of taking the keyboard plug and pulling it out juuuuust enough to where it's no longer working, but it still LOOKS like it's plugged in.
Nighttime ax's, dig dis: "April de Fust will soon be upon us an' I'm lookin' fo' some subtle pranks t' play a'ound da damn office. What it is, Mama! Dere's de usual takin' some damn screenshot an' settin' as background, placin' some damn piece uh tape across de mouse ball (use opaque tape fo' optical mice), settin' de keyboa'd layout t' Dvo'ak, swappin' de 'M' an' 'N' keys etc. Word! De office empties quite quickly at da damn end uh de day which leaves plenty uh time fo' prepa'ation.
TANSTAAFI: There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free iPod.
--Keeping the flame wars alive, one post at a time
back in 1999 I was working for a growing company and we had lots of spare cubicle materials around. I came in the night before April 1st and removed the doors from many cubicles by simply removing the smooth ends and adding a new wall segment. Most of the employees opted to climb over the walls to work just the same.
Change the displays on the HP printers you have all over your network. Download the source http://www.atstake.com/research/tools/network_util ities/hp.c
compile it, write a little script to run it on the entire network and laugh.
-Insert Coin
-I hate my job
-Do not call the admin
-You suck
-slashdot.org
-Out of water
-replace CEO
-Tolerate my intolerance
How about just calling up your PM from a payphone and say that his wife and childern just died in a fire.
Because thats the level of humour and maturity of what you are suggesting.
For OS X machines with a microphone, there's always Conan the Librarian.
Don't do it! What a suprise if he won't take you back.
Instead go as a unit to lunch at some kind of sleazy place, or that could be sleezy. Or don't go there, but say you did. Don't take the PM if you fake it!
Then after lunch, go up to the PM one-by-one and tell him your sick from something you ate at lunch.
After the 2nd or 3rd person he'll be in a panic. Mission accomplished!
part of that whole 'reality' is a 'projection' of the common conciousness belief system.
truth is stranger than fiction...
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
damn, I'm forced to pimp my own site now: http://prank.org you will listen due to my low uid :)
the Prank Institute Because a reason why never beats a why n
Well I guess it's a good thing that not all people are humourless fucktards like you then, huh?
There is no "Linux Operating System" - it's GNU/Linux, or even GNU.
Ever heard of Busybox? If most certainly is possible to run the Linux OS without any tools from the GNU project. Don't believe everything RMS says... the guy's a little bit out there.
You wouldn't happen to be one of those people who had a problem with XFree86 wanting some credit for their work, but would like to see 'GNU/' pasted in front of everyone's project names against their will, would you?
Years back, in the Windows 3.0a days, I rigged up a coworker's desk for April 1.
I placed a large thumbtack on the underside of a desk drawer and ran segments of fishing line from the tack, out the back of the desk, to various objects on the desk -- phone, stapler, calendar, etc.
I left a note on his chair that said, "Check out the printouts I made from www.whitehouse.com. They are in your filing drawer."
My office was across the hall and I waited for him to arrive. Listening near the door, I heard him say, "Cool!" and then came the crashes and the obscenities.
Of course I was nice enough to actually put some porn in the filing drawer.
One Halloween during the boom, I got all the engineers to show up in suits. We looked pretty funny, and it was better than a lame costume. But as the guys started walking in, the VP got more and more agitated as he thought we were all interviewing at other companies.
Forget the actual quitting, just show up like you've already interviewed and deny everything.
Change the display on your printer to say:
"PC LOAD LETTER"
Bonus points if you redirect the traffic from said printer to somewhere else (say, another printer on the other side of the office).
Add a shortcut to a .bat file in your victim's Startup folder in a Windows 2K or XP setup (using some clever social engineering way to get the person away from their terminal), and put the following line in the .bat file:
shutdown -r -f -t 00This will reboot the victim's computer every time they start up their computer! It's harmless, and very annoying.
Replace the computers with really shit ones running DOS 1.0 on an 8086 processor, to make them appreciate how amazing Linux is and to shut them the fuck up complaining...
Oh wait, that was an episode of Red Dwarf. Sorry. Carry on.
I'm amazing. You aren't. SUCK IT
A very simple prank on laptops, is to turn num-lock on. This will map numeric values to the alphanumeric keys on the right side of the keyboard. People who never use this functionality (and have never turned the num-lock on by accident) tend to be stumped by this one for at least several minutes.
Maybe tell his manager about it first, so it doesn't get out of control.
I can't see all of you jobless on April 2 and wondering what happened.
"whaaa haaaappened?"
-a mighty wind.
Don't do that you guys may lose your jobs.
Here is one you can use.
GO out to lunch as a group. After lunch call from a cell phone in the parking lot.
Make sure you dial *67 to block the id.
Tell the PM that you all were arrested at lunch.
See how that grabs him.
I am Bennett Haselton! I am Bennett Haselton!
Filling your computer with packing peanuts will fry your computers as they get into the fans, and as they build up static electricity. Works much better with wadded-up newspaper.
Denver Isuzu Suzuki
Mirror news sites...nuclear war...have fun with the DNS server..
I plan to take an old-fashioned push reel lawnmower to the street corner, tell people it's a Segway, and see how many chuckleheads bust their asses or crack their skulls trying to ride it.
The Uncoveror: It's the real news.
I can tell you this much: if my team did this to me, and then even HINTED at how "valuable" they were, they'd be fired on the spot, project status be damned.
And then the project dies a brilliant, flaming death, and you get canned as well... smart move!
// TODO: Insert Cool Sig
I think that's all I need to say.
====
Crudely Drawn Games
To do this, in Windows 95/98, edit the SYSTEM.INI file and change the line SHELL= from EXPLORER.EXE to WINVER.EXE. When their computer starts, they see a pleasant message displaying the version of Windows running with an OK button. Clicking OK shuts down the PC. Repeat as necessary. :)
This also works in 2000/XP, but requires a registry hack and doesn't have the added benefit of shutting down the PC after OK is pressed. However, the user is left with a screen with no icons and no start button. (Warning: It's difficult to undo this one since it is a registry hack...)My Computer\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Win dows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon -- change value of Shell key from Explorer.exe to Winver.exe and watch your co-workers cry.
If you have a popular web comic strip, you could always post notices that the site was going to be taken down due to lawsuits from a major corporation. And for bonus points, you could get a geek.news site to go along with it...
wait a minute...
Is it weird in here, or is it just me?
How is this a troll? Some people need to learn how to mod...
Sounds to me like you'd be doing them a favour! --- A happy dvorak user.
Your CPU is not doing anything else, at least do something.
can i have their e-mail addresses? i'm just curious what it's like to work for an arrogant douchebag.
pr0n - keeping monitor glass spotless since 1981.
Best Prank I've yet to see. I know a lot of people in an intro electrical engineering course that was basically programming for palm pilots. The prof, a week before april fool's told them that they were going to get their final assignment on april 1st (used the day not the date) and it was to implement a basic operating system for the palm pilot. He gave them a list of all the things they had to deal with (including threading/process management/IO/etc.) and some source files to use as a start. the source files all said April Fools but most of the class just panicked and emailed the teaching assistants for help.
Can't belive noone mentioned this one...well, I didn't see it anyway. I have VNC installed on all of our computers so that I don't have to drive out to our remote branches (across different states). You can setup VNC so that when you log in, the person won't know it. Sit there for a while and watch what they do...then, ever so often, move the mouse. While they are typing, press random keys. When they call you, tell them you will check into it. This is really funny when the person is thousands of miles away connected via VPN. hehe cb
Remember, licking doorknobs is illegal on other planets.
place bootable linux CD's into your coworkers CDROM drives, restart computer.
of course if you've got plush linux penguins and Oreilly books all over your cubicle, they'll know who did it.
and if your reading this john that was a great prank.
Put a linux live cd in every cd-rom change the boot sequence to cdrom and presto fun for all. Knoppix will boot to the gui without any user input.
this sig intentionally left blank
If only we could find a news site around here....
*ba ba dum*
In all honesty, I agree with you. I have some friends in my dorm who are planning to engage in a friendly prank war tomorrow and we've layed out specific guidelines to make sure no one DOES just go off and do something stupid, something dangerous, or something that will get someone hurt.
A well thought-out prank is absolutely priceless. For example, I think the one someone posted elsewhere on this Ask Slashdot - about posting fake notices that the showers in a dorm will, in the future, be Pay-Per-Use - is extremely funny. It doesn't really hurt anyone, it's rediculous but believable, and it's easy to 'fix' ("April Fools! Gotcha!")
It's the ones that go overboard that are evil...
-Trillian
My office nemesis had a very loud video game installed in her startup file by someone very, very evil.
lying to someone about a death over the telephone is a federal crime.
A couple years back when I was still in University, one of my mates and I worked out that we could play sounds on other people's sunray terminals if they had write permissions. ... :)
So, when they walked off to the bathroom and forgot to lock their workstation, I conveniently added "chmod a+w $AUDIODEV" to their ~/.bashrc (they were a unix noob and didn't notice)
A few weeks later I was at home and had ssh'd into the uni's unix server. I noticed that this person whose bashrc I had modded was logged in to one of the sunray terminals at uni.
Stored in my home directory I had the file "libala.au", which was a recording of Timmy (South Park) yelling "libala!". You can see what happened
cat ~/libala.au > (their audiodev)
A few days later I met this person and they said that they had been showing a tutor some of their work when the sound played at full volume - oh how special that moment was for me. =)
Homonyms are fun!
You're driving your car, but they're riding their bikes there.
There's always this press release: http://www.artlogic.com/company/press_040104.html
I replaced my roomates harddrive with one that boots up DOS 6 and Windows 3.1! I wish I could be there when he boots it up this afternoon!
GRIZZ