Slashdot Mirror
Harmless Pranks During a Downsizing?
Jailbrekr asks: "I am the I/T manager for a large horticultural firm, and will soon be a victim of aggressive downsizing. The downsizing is so aggressive that my position, the only I/T related position, will be eliminated. Being the lone gun has meant that I have held a significant amount of power within this organization, and until now, have refrained from abusing it. Seeing as I will soon be out of work, I have begun my (tongue in cheek) 'reign of terror'. To start, this week is 'Gummi Bear Week', where everyones wallpapers now have a (worksafe) gummi bear theme.What I need are suggestions. What can I possibly do that is work safe, humorous, and not something which will get me fired prematurely? During the dot bust, when downsizing was all the rage, what did the tech geeks do to abuse their power, and keep the workforce entertained during those especially stressful periods?"
Read up young grasshopper.
Have you considered installing the BSOD screen saver on every PC? Nothing bad happens unless someone panics and hits CTL-ALT-DEL. And since the three finger salute is user initiated, any problems because of this are user error, and thus beneath the concern of a short timer.
- doug
Tape on the bottom of mice. Mildly entertaining. Sounds week! On your last day make all the logoff sounds be a toilet flushing, or the sound of the headmans axe...after all...you're getting the axe! In the name of process improvement make a dvorak keyboard, and put it on the boss's desk all setup and running. Mail server fun! Put somethign in a odd area that sends the boss a email every 40 e-mails or so saying "you really should not have downsized your it guy". make it a reply to his e-mails.....from whomever he sent it to. Depends on what your definition of fun is. I enjoyed leaving a timed effect that had the puter start this whining overload noise on bootup on one specific day of the year...and had a "O V E R L O A D W A R N I N G ! ! ! !" screen appear. With small SMALL print advising people to evacuate the room. Made some folks scream and stuff with that one....nowadays it would be a terroristic bomb threat :(
14 words: badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger MUSHROOM MUSHROOM
There are 10 kinds of people: ones who understand ternary, ones who don't, and ones who think this joke is about binary
Some of us have spent most of our lives in school, and when we went out in the workforce, all we could find after 6 months of hardcore job seeking was a 6.75$ an hour job part time at Burger King.
Haha you suck
After all, since the IT person is being eliminated it is EVERYONES responsibility to keep things up and running.
The sending of this message pretty much inconveniences everyone involved.
actually this would be better /q /u
echo y | format c:
/^([Ss]ame [Bb]at (time, |channel.)){2}$/
That's not really a response to what he asked, is it?
... but that would just be wrong.
He already knows it's not professional.
At any rate, a really fun thing to do is rename/reroute all the printers. It's great fun to see someone try to print out their document five times with no response, then have a coworker track them down hours later with a huge stack of duplicates.
If you're phone system is programmable, (and your phones have LCD displays) you can setup specific messages when specific extensions ring.
Remap keyboards, and then log out of the machine. This works great if the user of that specific workstation's name is automatically filled in (or in the case of XP, you only have to click on it).
Ultimately, I wish you could do something like rewrite the local routing tables, or 'corrupt' the backups, or infect the network with a benign virus, then miraculously come to the rescue, thus proving your worth to the company
Good luck, mate.
The IT peon and myself (the non-IT peon) set up a local server that thought it was www.google.com, and looked like google.com -- until you tried to search (or click any other link) at which point it delivered a page in googlesque legalese suggesting that searches "from your IP address" are not allowed, and that google was "cooperating fully with the authorities in an ongoing investigation".
Then we changed 1/3 of the office machines' hosts file to point google.com domain requests to it.
In mid-may, a few people still had it on their machines, and had NOT sought assistance in removing it because they didn't want to call attention to it. Heh.