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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.
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!
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.
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.
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?
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}$/
... so that our customers could trick people with them. Hopefully me posting this link won't ruin that.
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.
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
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!!"
--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
SCO??
For OS X machines with a microphone, there's always Conan the Librarian.
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).
There's a better one. Set the AutoCorrect (available under Tools > AutoCorrect options, AutoCorrect tab, for those of you who don't want to hunt it down) to replace a period with ', according to the word of our Holy Father.' or something more offensive, if you like. Be sure to check the 'replace text as you type' and 'automatically use suggestions from the spell checker' boxes.
This works especially well for people who are very fast touch-typists who don't read what they are typing as they go. Or for very slow, very old typists who are afraid of their computers.
Denver Isuzu Suzuki
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.
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.
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.