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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!
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..
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?
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}$/
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.
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.
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
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!!"
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
--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
For OS X machines with a microphone, there's always Conan the Librarian.
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
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.
>Of course, you have to pick your victims wisely. Know who will take it
>well and who won't.
Even better, pick on a whiny loser and make sure it can't get traced back to you.
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.
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.
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
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.