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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?"
Spammed Slashdot with so many fake stories (and dupes of them!) that nobody could tell if there was any "suff that matters" for the day!
- Us
For those whose mail/news clients interpreted JavaScript, a window.alert() infinite loop on a newsgroup was not very funny, even on April Fools' Day. I have first-hand experience with this.
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.
I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate.
Why do I hate April first? If you want to fool someone, do it on another day. I avoid the web on that day because of all the stupid uncreative jokes. Why do people fall for these jokes? It is because people have trust in you. Why do you want to betray someone that has trust in you? I guess I just don't get it anymore.
Through some devious tricks (compare user's ip-address against a range of ip's where a friend of mine usually comes online from), i had a fake newsarticle show up on a popular Counter-Strike website.
;)
:P
While the article was vague on details, it essentially said that my friend was going to be replaced (he's the manager of one of the top-teams, sadly).
Of course, I topped it off with a small picture saying he was owned thoroughly
Apparently, he had his phone up, ready to call the people mentioned in the article before he saw my picture...
"I really hate you right now. I've never had such a shock. I don't wanna talk. *click*"
That's how a phone-conversation went five minutes later
Tiny little pieces of tape on the bottom of optical mice. Clear tape futzes them up, solid tape renders them useless.
Most of the Dells in our school computer lab have Intel Extreme Graphics chipsets, which support screen rotation. So, right before the school closed at 5:00 PM, I logged on to each one, rotated the screen 180 degrees, and logged off.
Plenty of people saw it and responded with varying degrees of humor, annoyance, and confusion. It got quite a notice before I had to turn them back right-side-up (many people can't log in with the screen upside down, and people needed to use them...)
But I love being at a school where the tech people don't mind these things as long as others can still use the computers.
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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.
I used a simple, yet effective trick: i taped my colleague's mice with trasparent scotch tape. The most interesting results were obtained with optical mice, whose cursors jumper around the scrennin 10cm increments.
Beware of programmers who carry screwdrivers!
Around the office, we use instant messenger as our primary means of communcation. So, to subvert the system, we create a bunch of fake screen names, similar to those of we were pranking, changing O's (oh's) for 0's (zero's), 1's (one's) for l's (ell's), and such, and sending other people around the office messages like "Could you come see me?", swamping one person's office with uninvited visitors asking "what did you want?", killing two birds with one stone. Good stuff.
Th
... we built him an outhouse. A full-size, ghetto-style outhouse, replete with rusty metal roof, and someone's real-life front door (recently replaced). Roped it off with police crime scene tape (obtained from a LE friend) and made a masking tape outline of a body on the floor (no tie to the outhouse, it just looked good). Put up signs through the whole building directing people to it, and as they visited and cackled, many people added bathroom grafitti on the inside walls.
:) ]
:)
[ Back history: Last year, we gave someone else a real toilet to sit on instead of his office chair. We had to keep the toilet theme going.
The best part is -- out of pure coincedence and a previous scheduling conflict -- our new VP arrived that same morning to make a presentation to the whole center. He loved it so much, he agreed to show our video of the build-up during his presentation, and ended up using it to lead off his deal.
I wish I had somewhere to put the pics up that would survive the Slashdot Death Ray, but alas...
I showed up for work. On time. Showered & shaved.
It THOROUGHLY confused people. They are still talking about it.
The only 'dirty trick' that I engaged in was completely skipping Slashdot on April 1.
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 once changed the mouse pointer to a realistic image of a fly.
Flourescent (adj): smelling like ground wheat.
Although it wasn't I who pulled the trick, a friend and classmate came to school on the first with a Harvard acceptance letter. A teacher got extremely excited and to congratulate my friend gave us no work and allowed us to talk during class(normally this teacher would be extremely strict, although his lessons do not at all relate to Economics or are the least educational). When he told them ,at the end of class, that it was a fake the teacher's face (and most likely thoughts on how to murder my friend) were extremely funny.
haha i pulled that this year, spread word that i was pulling a massive prank at the student lawn and for everyone to gather round at noon. a whole bunch of people showed up and just stood around. and it was amazingly lame.
Personally, I told my partners that a power glitch destroyed all of our source code and backups. Boring, to say the least.
But as a pilot I got a kick out of the April Private Pilot magazine. In their "Pilot Products" section there were announcements for three new products. One was a bike rack for your Cessna, complete with picture of bike and rack bungied to the wing of the plane. Another was for a harness for the "airport dog" that was specially designed so even a "23-poung pug could pull a 1,972-pounc Cessna 182" around the airport (prices yet to be determined). Finally, a new type rating requirements for airplanes equipped with "steam gauges" was introduced.
All of the articles were completely dead-pan, and it wasn't until I got to the last one that I realized the joke.
A co-worker wrote an email to another co-worker of our department (on a business trip in China at that time) that his desk at our office is being cleaned out.
People were complaining one of the servers I run didn't have enough disk capcacity, so I promised them I'd upgrade it to larger hardware. Since the box is in the office with the users (not my choice), I borrowed an old VAXStation from a friend (it was a huge one on wheels, see here for an example. The real box was moved elsewhere for the day. The older folk found it extremely amusing, the younger folk were bewildered compltely by it.
Actually, this can be a very effective tactic. I got one guy sweating since he took 4/1 off as well as this past week. He *fears* what could be waiting for him Monday morning, especially the way we were all talking it up before he left....
Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos
A good friend on my dorm floor recently got engaged over spring break. To get him back for how he asked her to marry him (he had a LE friend and had himself arrested), she called him in a panic saying she'd lost the ring (a few grand). She got his parents in on it and everything. He totally believed it, until about midday when she let it out.
Xhentil Do'ana
Take screen shot of desktop, set it as wallpaper and hide icons+taskbar and watch the confusion.
There are 11 types of people, those who know unary and those who don't.
... From everyone's favorite website.
-- Jinsaku
my roommate took a nap at about 11am, so i turned all of the clocks (including his phone) forward 4 hours. he woke up about 1 (and had a test at 2), but was freaking out because it showed 5. he was thinking about excuses he could tell his prof and then how he might have to explain to his parents that he'd have to drop the class. i eventually couldn't stop laughing and told him. he was probably about beat the shit out of me :)
best college pickem site ever: pickem.terrbear.org
A few years back on a friend's mac, I embedded two extensions together. One flipped all of the text left / right, the other caused the mouse to drop a little turd on his screen. I put this, along with another copy of the text-flipping extension into his extensions folder, causing the text to be flipped l/r twice.
He was happily using his computer, until after a few minutes the mouse made a squeaking noise and dropped a little turd. After the second time he figured it out, made a mental note to tell me off when I got back, and removed the "mouse turds" extension (actually the double-extension). Upon reboot, his text was now flipped L / R, making his computer totally unusable.
By the time I got back he had all sorts of theories about the extension installing things before removing itself, other dependency checks, etc. He had been taking out and putting back that mouse turds for hours. It didn't occur to him that if you want straight text you can just flip it twice, and that there was probably another extension in there.
The ______ Agenda
...last winter when it was icy here, we drove up Interstate 84 to Multnomah Falls, where there is a giant empty parking lot at night on the freeway median. One of the people we brought with us was a drunk, sleeping roommate. We put said drunk roommate in the driver's seat, buckled him him in and took the keys out. We got the truck spinning pretty quick and two of us jumped back in and started screaming. Drunk roommate wakes up and thinks he was driving drunk and fell asleep driving on an icy road right up to the moment the steering locks up from being turned off. Truck spun about 5 times total before coming to a stop without hitting anything. My arm had a big bruise on it from being hit about 20 times by drunk roommate in return for pranking him so bad...
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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
Hemos is like...sci-fi fans;he thinks technology is cool, but he hasn't bothered to understand the science it's based on
Me and my computer science teacher/school's net admin have a hacking contest going back and forth. The rest of the school is basically droolfaces when it comes to computers (the computers themselves are mostly underpowered '98 machines, with a smattering of 2k's in the main lab), so I decided to make his life interesting. I find some trick around the security, he raises it, I find a way around again, and so on. It started with simply typing 'Control Panel' in IE, and has now escalated to custom VB programs. (advice: on any computer with Word, pop open it's VBscript editor and run ' Shell (C:/windows/explorer.exe)' and bam you can access the whole HD =D ) Anyway, for april fool's day, the computers all load the same home page, stored on one of the servers, when he wasn't looking, I went back into the server room with a floppy of images to replace the default ones. One Win2k Find command later, and all of the computers now load animated gifs of the comp sci teacher and the principal dancing.
http://forums.tejat.net/ms.html This page replaced the index page for my forums. (Alright, I admit it, I modified it slightly to look better in Mozilla... but it otherwise matches layout-wise the 404 error page on microsoft.com.)
-:sigma.SB
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THERE IS ANOTHER SYSTEM