What Dirty Tricks Did You Use for April Fool's?

zxnos asks: "What evil, underhanded, dirty mean trick did you pull on April Fool's Day? Since I arrive in the office first, I wrote a little routine to go off when my coworkers tried to open the application that we all work in. It said: "Sorry, you arrived late for work today. The application you have requested is unavailable." The only response was 'OK' and would then close the application. What did you do?"

Comments

April 1st

[daeley]

This isn't an actual dirty trick, but several years ago I started a new job on the first of April. I was the usual combination of excited and nervous on the first day, naturally, and had been deposited in my new cubicle to wait for someone.

Suddenly there was an alarm, and people in hard hats were coming through saying there had been an "earthquake" and that everyone needed to get under their desks.

Seems my first day at work coincided with the annual earthquake drill.

Or had it...?

Well, it had, but thanks to years of April 1st conditioning, I hopped up just to make sure there wasn't a crowd of people around the side of the cubicle laughing at the new guy. :)

Dirty tricks are bad form

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't think dirty or mean tricks are in the spirit of April Fool's. Friendly tricks, yes.

Example of a bad trick: Someone unclear on the concept of nice versus mean told me as an April Fool's joke that my sister (who lives far away) called to say she will be visiting next month. This would be very happy news for me. Then she said it was an April Fool's joke; in reality I probably won't see my sister for a couple years. It was very disappointing to learn the truth.

A better trick would be to say some (fake) negative news, then have a happy ending.

Re:Flipped desktops upside down BTDT

[anticypher]

Many years ago, at $stripeyFruit company, there was a system extension that caused the monitor buffer to be copied upside down into the screen buffer. It was a popular prank, and everyone got good at detecting it and deleting it. The biggest challenge amongst the software guys was ways of hiding the extension, but the OS guys could detect this software in seconds using the debugger.

On April fools, the hardware guys went around and crosswired the monitors of a handful of people's machines, including the guy who wrote the original code.

So people flipped their machines upside down, and went to work with the debuggers. After a while, just before admitting defeat, one of them cracked the case on his machine and noticed the fresh solder joints on the deflection coils.

It was a good day.

It was the same day a competitor's hardware group at $bigBlazingHydrogenBallofDeath put Scott McNealy's ferrari in his office.

the AC

Re:The oldies are the best...

[Kymermosst]

Of course theres always the oldest trick in the book, set a screen dump as someones desktop and delete their icons and put the start bar on auto hide. This won't fool anyone with half a brain but it is funny the amount of confusion it can cause on someone whos not so computer literate.

I was in the Army from 1995 to 1998. All the office machines were running Win95 (our field equipment ran Unix... hooah!). Anyway, Windows 95 had a fun "feature"... click the start button, hit escape, then ALT-minus. Select "Close".

Bye-bye start buttons on all of the machines, and nobody knew how to reboot them softly. (One way was to hit alt-F4 while the desktop is displayed.)

Anyway, the first sergeant, commander, supply sgt, training NCO (who was also my boss), and others I got took it well, since I was the "computer person" in the unit and assured them no permanent damage had been done.