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10 wacky IT office pranks

A long time ago we also took advantage of remote desktop access to pull a great practical joke on one of our managers.

Back then, remote access was still not so wide spread, so we took advantage of that. When the manager in question was away in a meeting, we installed the remote access software. We all then agreed to pretend that we had installed some really advanced voice recognition software on his computer to save him valuable time. We all pretended to be very excited and jealous like any good nerd/geek should be in that situation.

One of our guys sat at the next cubicle and took control of the computer and we waited for the manager to come out of his meeting. When He arrived we proceeded to do a demonstration of the capabilities of his newly enhanced PC. One of our guys sat at his chair and started to give ???voice commands" that where flawlessly executed by the PC, that is, the guy next door remotely controlling the PC.

Needless to say, our manager got extremely excited about it, saying all kinds of praise to the accuracy of the voice recognition (practically impossible in a commercial PC at the time) and saying very effusive thanks to the team for the "gift".

We stepped back and let him "test drive" his new toy. He sat down and started giving voice commands and.... nothing. His computer was suddenly un-responsive. He tried different tones, accents and inflections.... and nothing. He got really frustrated and aggravated???

We couldn???t hold it together anymore and exploded in laughter all over the place. There were people in the floor hugging their stomachs at how hard they were laughing. We revealed the prank and eventually he also started laughing like crazy. Almost 12 years after that we still give him a hard time about it.

Cheers!

I forgot to mention the one thing that turned his anger into laghter. Once we revealed the prank, he felt like the biggest fool in the world when he realized that there wasn't even a microphone installed on his PC.

You should have had the computer tell him to say please before every command and thank you after each command was executed. Or tell him to speak louder.

I heard about the same thing happening except it was with an expensive copier. Office personnel and a salesperson conspired to play a trick on one of the owners and during a demonstration told him it was a "voice-enabled" copier (1994). The saleperson would say, "make 2 copies", and press the button on the side to make the copies out of sight of the owner. The owner got all excited and wanted to try it, and kept yelling at the printer to make copies and nothing came out. Everyone in the office started laughing after awhile and the owner stormed out of the office when he realized it was a prank. He eventually got over it.

My wife assigned me the task of buying a new minivan for her. She was aware of all the major features, but I found that I could control the stereo system with buttons mounted underneath the steering wheel. I told my family that everything on the stereo was controlled with voice commands. I showed them while driving along, I shouted "Volume UP!" while surreptitiously pushing the up volume button on the steering wheel. I convincingly showed them a variety of volume commands, changing stations, and changing modes before my oldest daughter spotted what I was doing and blew the whistle on my prank.

Apply a screen rotation to a users PC. When they call support and say "my screens upside-down" respond "so turn it around". It usually takes them a while to realise their leg is being pulled.

Take a screen shot of a Windows 95 or Windows 97 login screen and apply that as the login background for Windows 7. One could even go as far as using an OSX login screen on a PC. Can't wait to try that one myself.

One of the companies I used to work for had the policy of all users locking their computers if they left their desk, one individual who worked for me would just walk away from his desk and leave his computer wide open. He was warned time and time again so in the end I had enough, one day when he walked off leaving his PC wide open I jumped on it and sent myself a quite nasty email using a few well selected words about my management techniques and a few extra expletives. When he returned to the office I made sure I didnt call him in straight away but waited a little while. After about 40 minutes I called him in to explain his email to me, to which he denied all knowledge of, but as I explained to him because of the companies policy of locking your computer if you left your workstation the email couldnt have come from anyone else. From that day on his computer was always locked if he left his workstation.

We did that all the time when I was working in Doc. Control....until one day one of our co-workers did a reply all to a "distribution list" of about 200 people....none with any authority....but, our manager (which usually would do it too), sent out an email saying that we immediately need to stop.

The messages would usually say something embarrassing about leaving their computer open.

Where I worked we had the same policy (at least in IT). Many of the guys would forget to lock their machines when they walked away. We used to send emails out on their behalf, change their screen saver, or wallpaper to some sick image, or add audio or video files to their run or runonce in the registry. The fun part about that was they didn't even know they were pranked until they restarted their computer.

I had a co-worker who used to walk away leaving his IBM workstation (really old school) open with his messages up. Since we had to share the stations, it was an annoyance to the others who needed to use them. Finally, I sent out a message to our local distro list from his account telling people he was footing lunch that day, so bring all their receipts to him. Another message was sent from another conspirator letting people know it was a prank, but bring the receipts anyway and reference "his" message. He got the message really fast about leaving stuff open.

People keep saying they have nothing in their email they are afraid for others to see. I tell them that doesn't matter because it is really about what others can do using their accounts.

A few years ago the security policies of the company I work for were very unrestrictive, allowing users to install their own applications (Messenger, Winamp, BSPlayer, etc.). The really frustrating thing, besides the obvious security issues, is that people would call me because their Yahoo Messenger or Skype application (that were used for personal use) had problems. Obviously, a lot of my time was spent debugging personal applications, so I told them that I would not offer helpdesk for non-business applications. To, ahem, test this new-found power I decided to prank a fellow co-worker. She was always playing music in Winamp, and whenever I went to assist on a helpdesk-related task, her playlist really annoyed me. So, a little "psexec and taskkill /f /im winamp.exe" and voila, the horror would stop . The really funny thing was that sometimes she had the music on so loud I could hear it from my desk, and I could also hear when it came to an abrupt stop when I killed the task. She didn't call me, of course. But she was really persistent, even trying to restart winamp about 10 times before finally giving up. I revealed what I had done after a couple of months, and she said she even tried to reinstall different versions of winamp about 3 times each . She really loved her music ! :P

For one of our co-workers who prided himself as being the best prankster in the office, we pulled a trick on him that took him most of the day to figure it out. This was before dual monitors, we took a screenshot of his desktop and created a jpg. We then changed the wallpaper on his desktop to this screenshot and then hid all his icons and lowered the task bar on the screen. When he came back into the office we could here him moaning about nothing but the mouse working on his computer. He finally realized something was wrong when the clock on his screen said 9:15 and we were getting ready to leave for lunch at 12:00. After we came back from lunch we noticed that he had removed the wallpaper, but was still unable to find his icons. That task took him another hour before he found them.

Needless to say, we never heard him brag about being the best prankster in office for a long time

I can't believe this one took so long to surface. It should have made #1 on the list as far as I'm concerned.

A friend was out of his office w/ open computer... went in and made a desktop folder named "Porn". Took a screen shot of it, removed the Porn folder and made the screen shot the background. Try as he might, everything worked normally except he couldn't remove that Porn folder for several hours.

OMG.....that is classic....I might try that on my kids computers!

I used to work at a helpdesk and we did this to all the new people who forgot to lock their system when getting up. One time our team lead went into a side office (just out of sight of his computer) and did not lock it, we managed to do this to him, then lock his screen and get back to our seats before he got back. He was REALLY pissed, he removed his admin share from the C drive and locked the screen, then told us he would be back from a meeting in an hour and if it wasn't fixed we were fired! being the good prankster I had a windows password recovery tool on USB and was able to get back into the computer. Never found out if he was serious about firing us (4 people involved on a 16 person team).

Put a funny pic from facebook, or elsewhere as desctop background.

should be really bizzare

sincerly
www.dota2hook.de

I workin Holand for a Dutch company. I am Welsh. I have a colleague who lives in London and is English. Needless to say we are at each other, especially during rugby season. All in good fun ofcourse. So one day he made this remark about us Welsh. So I decided to take action. I created an OU especially for him and set a few policies. The best one was that whenever he wanted to log on he had to press ctrl+alt+delete he would get a popup saying: "Wales rules, England really sucks. If you agree to this statement, please click OK". There was no other option for him than to click OK or else he just couldn't log on. I promised him I would get rid of that message if he wore something Welsh to a rugby match. He has a few Welsh friends who are still laughing. This was just one of the things he had to endure.

Ofcourse he is a really cool guy and we still join eachother for a few pints now and then

Many years ago when the company I worked for was using Novell, our VP of Engineering
who was fairly computer literate installed a screenaver on my workstation which was a topless woman and the image scrolled from her waist to her face and all points in between.
The problem was that several women in our office came to my office to drop off paperwork and saw this screensaver in action. When I returned to the building I was ordered into the owner's office to explain how I could subject him to sexual discrimination charges. As I was being raked over the coals, the VP came forward and admitted that it was a prank and he didn't realize that maybe others would see his handywork before I did. This was about 20 years ago and I still remind him every once in a while.

Hark back to the days of windows 3.11.. If you had a startup sound it had to complete playing before relinquishing control back to the user. We added the 60 second orgasm scene from "When Harry met Sally" to our manager's desktop. As it happens he had 3 visiting managers from head office who ended up outside the office laughing so hard that one neatly wet himself.

There is nothing neat about that!

I think he meant to say, "nearly wet himself."

a nice one is always to use a 30-minute or so wav-file as the shutdown-sound win windows, especially for laptop-users. It is always interesting to see the difference in patience that some colleagues display.

The best part of this one is that by the time they restarted the computer, they forgot about the prank, and have to listen to it again when they shut down.
Windows 98 unfortuanately cut the sound off after a few seconds.

If you can succeed in recording the file without a microphone attached its even better.

Back in the days of '79 -on a bank of monitors - just swapping the keyboard with the next one along was simple, but surprisingly effective ... (this to an individual who had taken the literal kettle lead home for his own personal kettle, leaving us with nothing - times were hard back then - oh, how we laughed.)

Over 30 years ago, when a Systems Analyst, in a productive shop, we had many, many opportunities to 'prank someone'. Each took time, and creative energy. Let alone the risk of impacting a fellow worker, losing team trust and always looking over your own shoulder.
I'm impressed by any pranks that take very little time, are not likely to 'hurt' and/or may educate - example 9: Hard drive transplant and 'Lock your PC'.
What have you been coding your time to?

There once was a clever website created by a graphic designer in Germany. The minute you entered the website URL in a browser, it would take over the entire screen, and appear to be rebooting into DOS, uninstalling Windows, and installing MAC OS.
The end result was a full screen image of the MAC workspace/desktop including some seemingly functional menu tabs and icons, and the only way to get out of it was to press ESC.

Years ago, in the glory days of COBOL and mainframes, I heard of a prescient programmer in the payroll department of a large company who inserted a bit of code in the payroll program he himself had written, that searched for his own payroll record, and if it wasn't found, shut down the program. You can imagine how long it took his successor to find the cause of this undocumented "feature" when the prankster got fired.

Unfortunately I've never worked anywhere light-hearted enough that you can really get away with pulling any pranks; luckily, most of my friends work in more laid back workplaces.

My favourite is still when I was at Uni and my boyfriend of the time did something to annoy the IT Officer. The b/f being a typical "macho man" was not pleased when he logged into his account in the middle of a computer lab full of his peers to find his desktop plastered with pictures of The Hoff in all his tanned and oiled glory, and his homepage changed to The Hoffs official website. Needless to say, he never got on the wrong side of the IT Officer again!

Funnier still is one of my friends where the department supervisor has generally always been disliked for various reasons. They setup a remote connection to his PC so that, whenever any of woman walked past they could trigger a wolf-whistle from his PC. He kept muting the speakers, but they kept "magically" finding their way back to being on the second any woman made an appearance near his desk.

This one is fun. Swap the mouse connectors between two PCs that are close enough, but leave the actual mice where they are. As each user moves his/her mouse, the cursor moves on the other users PC.

This also works with keyboards and local printers.

Another one I've done is to cover the mouse laser sensor with a sticker. Button clicks work, but the cursor won't move.

We had an "accidental" prank occur once similar to this. A user and the office manager was convinced that someone was hacking our network. The users mouse would occasionally move and even sometimes click something. This went on for quite some time before they called me about it. First thing I noticed was it was a wireless mouse. A quick walk around the office and I found another user with the same wireless keyboard/mouse setup. Sure enough, when he held his mouse at a certain angle, it controlled both computers. We flipped a coin to see who would have to go back to a wired mouse and the mystery was solved.

We did a variation of this, only on purpose. We disconnected the wired mouse on a fellow co-worker's PC in the next cube but left the cable looking like it was still connected. Then we connected a wireless mouse receiver in the USB port and sat near where we could see his PC, but be somewhat hidden from him. When he was attempting to open programs such as Outlook, we would covertly open other programs. Unfortunately for us, the guffaws were too loud to allow this prank to mature into a service call.

I did something similar to that once. You can have a wired mouse and a wireless plugged into the computer at the same time. I was asked to come view a website layout after lunch and arrived there before the other person. While waiting I decided to plug in my wireless mouse. When they arrived I put my hands behind my back with a clipboard in one and the wireless mouse in the other. As they would move the pointer over an Icon and just before they could double click it I would quickly move the wireless mouse on the clipboard behind my back and the pointer would jump away from the icon. I then wiggled the wireless mouse as they moved the pointer back so that the pointer wobbled as they moved it. They thought the wired mouse was Faulty till I handed over my wireless mouse and said try this.

We do this one a lot here at the office when someone takes a vacation.

Place clear tape over a laser mouse sensor. Because the person being pranked won't see the tape over the sensor. They can move the mouse all they want but it wont respond. Clicks however still work like the sticker above.

Having a password that is called 'Don't know' can add to the confusion.

When people phone up to ask what the password is and you say 'Don't know.'

Whats my password?
It's secret...

My favorite is still to set someone's default font to white in their office suite. In these days of IT security it is often hard to install programs or screensavers without admin rights but people still leave their desktops open when they step away for a few minutes. Changing the default font to white will drive them nuts for a while.