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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?"
Windows DrunkenMouse.exe and ChristmasLights.exe were always quite amusing to run on remote computers. :-)
accidentally redirect the top secret executive salaries e-mails/spreadsheets/etc to the public mailing list. This is especially a good idea just before a downsizing. Make it look like a simple computer error. Being the head of IT, that should be fairly simple.
I once set this up for April Fools day:
..init file (equivalent to a DOS autoexec.bat file, but on a Honeywell mainframe.) at the stroke of 11:59:59 the night before.
We had a shared id, and I set up a timed job to install a new
Every user that logged on started to run this program. If you asked it to list your files, it showed a blank list. If you asked for mail, it said no mail, etc. Of course, I installed a secondary password to allow me to get out and eventually delete it, but that's just planning.
I used this last April Fool's Day...went over well, except with the management who sent out emails expressing how irritated they were that someone had this much excessive time before a release. Was good for a laugh, though...
--trb
As the survivor of a number of layoffs, and the victim of one myself, I don't agree. Anything that lightens the mood will do the group good, otherwise you dwell on the negative and use terms like "walking dead" (those given pink slips), "angel of death" (the person who hands out the pink slips), "near miss" (being in the cube next to a visitation of the Angel of Death) and so on. This isn't a healthy state of mind. As long as the pranks are harmless, most people understand the situation, and you might even get a smile or two.
Obviously there will be a handful of people that won't get it, but they are usually well known as difficult. Admins are used to this sort of person because they have to deal with them all the time. (Note: "used to" and "like" can be miles apart.)
One thing that I do agree with is "stressed out as my livelyhood" bit. He shouldn't do things like deactivate everyone's accounts. That would get people thinking that they had been axed and hadn't been told. That would cross the line.
- doug
Create a slideshow of pictures of your coworkers -- if necessary, photoshop their faces onto other people's bodies, in a SAFE FOR WORK and APPROPRIATE but funny fashion (i.e., no nudes, no sex, and nothing involving politics or race or sexual orientation). Include everyone, even people you hate.
Set it to music (a midi file of "The Way We Were" or Chicago's "If You Leave Me Now" would be pretty darn funny), compress it all into a flash (or similar) slideshow, and set everyone's homepage to the page that lets them launch it.
Sensitive types will cry, easily amused types will laugh, and they'll all think about their coworkers in a more positive light.
If you're about to be leaving a nice small friendly company like I did, stick with what you're doing.
There's lots of malevolent things that can be done, and as we can see people are fast to hand these out and condemn you for mentioning the idea at all. The big cool stuff has potential for backfiring. So keep it simple, and be sure to back it out (and write down instructions to back it out, just in case).
The shop I left still has no IT person 3 years later. They get by with simply avoiding change and have the owners kids do the basic PC fix and reinstall. I get the occassional hour or two consulting a year to help with the overhauls, but with the economics they've just had to cut back.
Nobody complained about the screen savers and backgrounds...they can be done well, in good taste, and still provide plenty of humor. (Of course good photoshop skills were part of our IT job there.)
I fixed up the policies to prevent users from changing the screensaver and backgrounds. Then set them appropriately for different people--changing daily!
For the guy who loved to set his rotating text screensaver, I put in an app to set it various choices and force it back after he changed it.
Oh and of course, for the Notre Dame fan, set his browser's home page to a rival college fan site..
Warm happy smiles from the simple things can be nice.