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Are you an office prankster? (Office and computer pranks)

Yesterday my friend Marci told me about how her boss (who has an unprintable nickname) mentioned something about wanting to see Bon Jovi. The next day his office was covered in Bon Jovi pictures - old, new, screensaver, desktop wallpaper, in drawers, all over the walls like a teenage girl's bedroom in 1987. Even the window had two - one when he opened the shades, and when he tore that down there was another one on the outside facing in! (Obviously, he was on the first floor.)

The boss, having de-Jovi'd his office, then called in employees for a final check. He promised a free lunch to anyone who could find another picture. He shelled out for about half a dozen lunches before it was all over.

That trumps a thousand times over the April Fool's when I replaced my boss' desktop with a screenshot with all the icons hidden. He was a good sport.

I once had a co-worker who was the best at everything; you knew this because he told you. After several weeks, we had all had enough, so one morning I swapped keyboard and mouse cables on his PC, rendering the system essentially dead. He spent the morning troubleshooting, replacing the keyboard, mouse, and even the box without catching the color-coded mix-up. While he was at lunch, somebody else took pity on him and unplugged both cables. When he came back, he color-matched like he should have been doing all along.

I don't think he ever figured out what the actual problem was. I also used this when I was teaching in the PC repair lab to reinforce the need to verify connections.

always rule out the simplest things first. He either forgot that or never knew.

When they have a tangle of cables, I like to hide their mouse and set a different one on the desk. They can unplug and replug it in, but it isn't going to work!

Best for users that don't have another mouse to throw on.

Even simple things like turning off the power strip can throw a lot of people for some reason. Duh, first thing you do is verify there is power BEFORE you tear your system apart and change the power supply! Or so I would have thought......

This user moved her office hutch by herself, then placed a service call when nothing worked. I asked when I got there if she had plugged everything in before she had pushed the hutch back against the wall. She said "Of course!"

Now this hutch was one of those 'executive' type jobs: 8 feet wide, 3.5 feet deep, with a 4-foot ell. I have no idea how she moved it herself; I had to get help to pull it out from the wall. I traced the power strip to another power strip. I then traced the second power strip to--you guessed it--the first power strip.

When I showed her, she immediately realized what she had done and promised me a case of my favorite beverage if I would keep quiet about it. Then we had a good laugh.

Two days later, I had 24 bottles of my favorite carbonated beverage.

The bad thing is, I have seen that before....

My favorite "DOH" was about two months ago. End user from the very top of the food chain calls because the computer in his home office "just quit working".

He was going to be gone, but his wife would let me in.

I get there, mouse is dead, but keyboard is working fine. I notice that there is no light on the CORDLESS optical mouse....

He didn't realize that they had batteries in them that would need to be replaced. Magic?

He is a very nice elderly man, so I could see this happening, so I was going to keep it real quiet and not make him feel badly about it. His wife had other plans it seems. I wasn't even out the door before she was on the phone laughing to everyone about how he dragged me out to change his batteries. (she knew because I had to ask her for some)

He took it in good humor though.

Back when I was working support in a university for a bunch of professors, I got a call from a little old professor who couldn't get MS Word installed. Mind you, this was back when Word came on 4 5-1/4" floppies!

When I got there, I saw that 3 of the floppies had the plastic reinforcing rings on them but disk 1 did not. Odd. Looking closer, I saw that the errant floppy had the reinforcing ring on the other side. In addition, when looking at the back, I noticed that the plastic weld was broken on one edge of the the sleeve. DOH!

I carefully took the disk out of its protective cover, turned it back over and put it back in the plastic cover. Voila! Word was now able to install.

It seems that the little old professor was just a little too literal about the instructions "Take floppy disk out of sleeve and insert in disk drive"...

Walking out of there with a respectful straight face was one of the harder things I had to do at that job.

Yes, it is very hard sometimes not to laugh at stupid stuff, or to call stupid stuff stupid.

When I worked on campus, we had a "Doctor", and he expected to be addressed by EVERYONE as Doctor SDDSDFWE (name changed to protect the stupid).

Well, I ALWAYS called him Stan. (which was his first name.) After he had a talk and realized I was not saying it to be disrespectful of him, but actually it was a complement because I had accepted him up as MY equal and would talk to him as such. Paper degree or no paper degree.

He was a bit of an arrogant a$$ though. Maybe that is why we got along?

a bunch of us techs pulled this on a fellow tech with a bad temper. We screenshotted his desktop on his laptop when he went to the rest room, then dragged all of his icons off the desktop, put his start bar to the right of the screen and resized it to not be seen. Then set the screen shot to be his wallpaper. He tried using his laptop for about 40 minutes, cussing the whole time. There were 6 of us at the table building PCs trying not to crack, it was hillarious!

He was about to rebuild his machine, so when he stepped out, we were nice and put it back correctly. We told him later and he was pissed off for a few hours, but eventually laughed about it...

Once put a shortcut to Windows RG http://www.albinoblacksheep.com/flash/winrg.php
in the startup folder and set it to run in full screen mode for our sales guy.

We finally had to explain it to him.

My office had a service call from a remote user, the problem seemed simple and the system needed to be rebooted. The user was ask to reboot her system, about 10 seconds later she came back on the phone and said Ok it's all done but the problem is still there. We visited the remote office later that day and ask her to show us how she rebooted her computer, she reached over and turned off her monitor then turned it back on and said "Ok all done"

An actual prank, happened backin the early 80's my boss at the time was a heavy coffee drinker and superglue had just made its way into the shop. Someone had the bright idea to superglue the bosses coffee cup to the ceiling. (he was not amused)

during the Vietnam War, when our ship was in dock, here in Australia. The Dockies were dead against the war, fair enough, but used to take it out on us sailors - shoddy workmanship, "forgetting" to wire things up, wiring electric motors in the Air Cond to run backwards etc etc. Even downright Sabotage on the odd occasion.

Anyway, there was an un-declared war between "us" and "them." No quarter asked, or given.

A common sailor's trick was to "glue" a Dockie's Toolbox or tools to the steel deck where he was working - with an Arc Welder. They would come back after a l-o-n-g lunch and to see them try to lift their Tools was a scream.

One night, doing afternoon security rounds, after the Dockies had finished work for the day, and I found two of them fast asleep in a compartment down below.

My first idea was to wake them, abuse them and tell them to get the hell out of my ship! But my Leading Hand suggested a far more diabolical plot. Lock them in for the night ! So, we quietly closed the door and stealthily clipped all the "dogs," it being a watertight door, snibbed the big brass padlock and tippy-toed away. LOL

Next morning I went down, during my 5 o'clock rounds' and unlocked the padlock, but I was not game enough to actually open the door. Bet they didn't try that again.

I had a user who didn't understand why his cordless mouse wasn't recharging its batteries even though he'd put it in the cradle overnight - he said he even tried new batteries but when they used up their initial charge they wouldn't recharge either.
When I opened up the mouse, I found standard batteries, not rechargeable ones!
I decided to be nice and not rib him about it to our co-workers - who would have LOVED a good laugh at his expense - but his assistant took care of that for me and he had to suffer battery jokes for the next week!

Back in the day, a new tech on a site would always be the one sent to fix the computer that the user said had a broken coffee cup holder.

When the tech got there and asked to see the problem, the user would push the ejet button on his CD-ROM.

This was back when computers first started shipping with CD-ROM drives, and all these users would first push the button to see what it did (doh!), and it resembled the coffee cup holder in their car. Not knowing what it really was, they made a very expensive assumption that frequently resulted in eventual damage to a fairly expensive component (at the time).

One of my favorites was when an older gentleman brought his computer in saying that the sound card didn't work. I put the unit on the bench and the card worked fine. At this point in time, there was an issue with setting the card to digital with analog speakers or vice versa, in which case there would be no output from the speakers, so I informed him of this and showed him how to change the output on his sound card (a software setting) and sent him on his way. He returned later with his speakers because the computer was still "broken", and I set the system back up on the bench and made sure it all worked with his speakers - I didn't have to change a thing. He called again later that day quite upset because the computer must be broken since it didn't work for him at home. I asked him to follow the cable from the back of the speaker to the back of the computer without ever letting go of it so that he could verify where it was plugged in. He unplugged the cable to see what color jack it was. No, wait, that's the keyboard cable...

I had just started at this company as a hardware design engineer. I went to the tech lab (where all of the techs were curious about this new guy) and set up a signal generator, oscilloscope, power supply, and my circuit. When all I could see on the scope was a noise waveform, one of the techs came over and pointed out - in a loud voice - that the signal generator worked better when it was plugged it. I just started laughing - which I usually do when I goof - and they accepted me from then on. (They also checked my wiring...)

I used to manage RadioShack stores, and I had a WONDERFUL lead employee who I considered more of an equal and a friend than an underling...but I was still in charge and got paid as such, so he would vent his irritation with the status quo by pranking me, usually set up so i would walk into on returning from my day off. My absolute favorite was when he switched the zero (0) and Tilde (~) keys, so that the keyboard, rather than reading `1234567890-= across the top row now read 0123456789`-=. I took one look at the keyboard, and simply DIED laughing....and left it. It never phased me. My district manager, on the other hand, nearly had an aneurism every time he came to my store and tried to use the terminal, and he could never QUITE figure out WHY.

Waiting third in line at a Radio Shack counter during the Christmas rush, I pokerfaced my turn to the new part-time salesman.

Comes my time to be served and told the poor soul I was sure my computer got infected with a bad virus on my new Xp
and I didn't know what to do.

He didn't get my explanations, attracted his manager's attention and got me to repeat my problem.

"Because, one by one, all my fishes are dying on my screensaver." I repeated.

The young salesman, relizing he got owned, took it like a man.

We used to have all the computers on tables back to back. While on break, I swapped the keyboard cable with the computer across from me, brought up a text screen, and typed " error do not press a key" of course techs being techs, when he came back he pressed a key. since I also had a text screen up I knew what he typed and would reply. everybody crowded around, some trying to speculate the problem, others just entertained. this went on much longer than nit should have....

You got your bribe and decided to blab anyway... so what you're really saying is that you're not very trustworthy.

Nobody except the two of us (me and her) knows where. And the when was sometime in the previous centry...

I'm dating myself here but...

I used to repair AES word processors and one day got a call to a government agency because one of the steno's disk drives was "damaging disks".
When I arrived, this very nice older lady showed me her machine and explained that disks she had used yesterday now could not be read.
Right beside the machine, carefully organized in three rows on the desk, were her working disks...one for each person she did word processing for. (This was in the days when files were stored on 5 1/4" hard-sectored floppy disks.)

I tested the machine and it passed all of the diagnostics. However, wanting to make sure I had missed nothing, I replaced the secondary drive in her machine (the one that held the user's data disks) and told her that this should fix the problem.

The next day I got another call...the machine was doing it again!!
I went right over and the lady showed me a disk that she had stored a job on the day before. Sure enough...'Data error reading Drive 1' was all I could get when I tried to access the disk. It wasn't her imagination then!
So, I changed the drive again, tested it and was able to read and write a disk with no problems.

Next day - you guessed it - I got called back. This time I had the lady show me exactly what she was doing. Every step was correct. She could write and read files with no problems! However, disks she had written yesterday, could not be read.
Deciding that I was fed up with this, I changed BOTH drives; the drive cables AND the controller card. Promising her that this would solve the problem once and for all, I even had her test it herself.

Next day...another call.

Not to belabour this too much, this scenario went on for about ten days altogether. By that time I had replaced just about everything in her machine. I honestly think that the case and the display tube were about the only things I had not replaced (some items multiple times)!

Anyway, I finally got another call about her 'damaged disks' but could not respond on that particular day. The next morning, I went to her office and asked for her. Her supervisor told me this was her day off, but as I already knew where her cubicle was, I could just go there and "fix the damn thing".

As I entered her cubicle, I could not help myself...I burst out laughing - almost hysterically. Of course, that attracted the attention of everyone in the office; including the supervisor.

When I finally caught my breath, I looked at a somewhat annoyed supervisor and explained that EVERY time I had come in before, the nice lady was sitting right at her desk, working away. This was the first time that I had been there when she was not!
It seems that the nice lady was a 'neat freak' and organized everything 'just so'. I remembered that she used to have neat rows of floppies on her desk orgaized by the name of the person whose jobs were on the disk.
What I had never seen before, was how she put the disks away at the end of the day.

As the supervisor did not catch on, I had to remind her that these were MAGNETIC recording disks...so storing them by attaching them in nice even rows on the side of a filing cabinet with FRIDGE MAGNETS was guaranteed to erase the disks over time!!

Aparrently, this was how the nice lady stored them every night before she went home!!!

I never got another call for that particular lady after that.

After the lights went out during the big blackout, I went around to all PC and turned off the power bars for a little extra protection when the power came back on. Even though I put out the word that I did this, you would not believe the number of users who called saying that their computers would not power on.

If you would have emailed this information to them, they would have remembered!

the help desk that won't accept trouble reports except via email. And you have to report your own problems. If a trouble email is received with somebody else's name in it, it will be rejected.

If your problem is your email, how do you report it? Saw a help desk get reamed once because of this because the HD supervisor wouldn't listen to his techs and the CFO's email died. Three days later...

They call me because their computer is dead, so I tell them to send me an email with the details and I will get right on it.

After a stunned silence, I tell them I am joking and will be right there.

I like to let them get "Can you...?" out and say "No!"

I always get people asking me "Do you want to blah blah blah?"

My answer is officespacisih, "WANT is kind of a strong word to use. WILL I? Sure...."

But it sure is fun, isn't it?

I was once in a help desk position, and got a call from an individual because her computer wouldn't turn on. The very first thing that I asked was if she had checked to make sure the power cable had not been disconnected "by the cleaning crew hitting it with the vacuum". She assured me that she had checked it and was furious that I would ask such a basic question. Of course, 45 minutes into this irate woman's call (back in the day when you could take that kind of time) I finally talked her into checking the power cable again, and of course it was unplugged.

So yes, always check the simple stuff first.

Within 4 adjoining cubicles, hook up each mouse to the computer diagonally opposite.

I had a guy, similar, thought he knew it all. He went on a 2-day vacation to go balooning. He had 3 systems at the time (desktops).
I swapped cables to his hub, rendering Network Useless.
Then I went to his headset (phone) and removed the foam covers, taped them up, and replaced the covers.
System 1
I replaced his cd burner (took the cover off an olf cd drive so it looked right) and installed it. Took his processor PII 400mhz, and replaced it with a PII 266mhz.
I replaced his video card
System 2
I took his dual HDD's and replaced them with same model drives (dead).
System 3
Took his memory and replaced with faulty memory. replaced video card with known faulty one as well (same model).

We locked all of his parts up in our managers office (after I told her what I did, and she laughed for a long time).

When he came back, it took him 4 hours just to figure out about the phone and network cable swap in the hub. The other stuff -- several days before we handed him his bag of parts.

as if he'd even know his network was broke if none of his systems worked. Methinks you be dreaming

? When programs were ran straight from the command line.

A favorite was to edit command.com where the display message ?Bad command or file name? was displayed and change it to something like:

?Wrong, you, #$@&* idiot!?

Or personalize it with the persons name?

?Wrong! Sam, you dummy.?

===

Hahaha. I miss the old days of Windows 98. We used to hack into command.com and change the name of the autoexec (autoexec.bat) file to something else (startup.bat) and we'd hide it. Then, in the new startup file, we run a program that dimmed the monitor by 50%) every time they ran a MSDOS program (which was a lot), their monitor would automatically dim to the point it was virtually unreadable. Nobody ever figured out what we did. We'd let this run for a couple of days and then take it off. Hahahaha.

I remember back when i was a teenager and learned a little QBasic. Wrote similar little program that looked like DOS prompt only would answer each entered command with a series of stupid remars. Dont remember exactly what it said but it got progressively worse the more times they tried to type something. Ahh the good ole days.

Posted in wrong forum

Message was edited by: beth.blakely@...

I have a "screen saver" that looks like a real XP crash. Starts with post, starts to boot, then blue screens, gives message, acts like it is rebooting and starting all over.

It goes away if you hit a key, so I HAVE to unplug their keyboard for the full effect!

Life is good......

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Edited to ad:

If you like the idea of this, google it. There are now several free ones available and at least five popup right away.

Had to add this note because I have gotten almost two dozen peer mails asking for this. This should save everyone some time!

Go get 'em!

My husband and I were in a restaurant having dinner, my boss and his wife came in shortly after we came in and he had his waitress send me a 'drink', it was SUPPOSED to be a cosmopolitan, instead of Vodka, it was cranberry juice and water. They watched me take a drink, look at the glass, take another drink..then I caught on. This is a small town, so we know the people who work there and most of the regular customers..they were in on it and had a good laugh at my expense.

Was I going to let that pass? I think not. I went into work early the next day and created a little display file and a program that put the different screens in an infinite loop, changed his initial program to call on his AS/400 sign-on and waited for him to arrive. When he signed on, all he could see was screen after screen saying that until he called me and admitted that I had ultimate control over his work day, he was stuck. The next screen said..I can do this all day long..then on to..In fact, you must refer to me as the IT Goddess from this day forth..and so on. By 8:20 AM, my boss was on the phone with me telling me that I had the ultimate power, I was a goddess, blah blah blah. It was sweet.

Of course, since I pulled that prank on him, he's had me do it several more times to other people in the company.

While he was in the bathroom, I switched his coke for an iced tea. unsweetened.

Oh, the look on his face was PRICELESS!

It would have been good to see your bosses face as he went through the screens, oh goddess!

Last april fools we changed out intranet to load a closeup of a monkeys face for three seconds, and then go back to the regular page. When people would call on it, "What monkey"?

Many years ago I added server-side code to our intranet that triggers subtle changes to many of the pages each April 1st. The code also does a coin flip to decide whether or not to display the modifications on a given page, so half the time the support staff can't duplicate the problem even if someone calls up to complain. I've since been transferred and no one in that group really has a clue how Active Server Pages work, so it's a more or less permanent feature.

Is there anything in the code that points back to you?

No one else was in on the joke?

Totally classic!

you cant beat a april fools joke that goes off automatically every year, even when u dont work there anymore.

You should have set it to make the changes on any Friday the 13th. That would get you some superstitious folks!

about the stories you are not telling us JD!!!!!

Apart from the usual trick of super-glueing a 50p coin to the floor of the lobby to the building......... *** wink ***

Three of us decided on an Aprils fools challenge, there were a junior programmer, a medium porgrammer, and a senior one (me), This was 20 years ago, when I was about 30-ish working for a very large national government department.

The challenge was, a week before April 1st was all we had, was to get the password of the other two by the deadline.

The junior programmer tried the association method, using family members names, pets, favourite hobbies etc., the medium level pogrammer went the massive dictionary attack, testing all possible combinations.

We were using a VAX/VMS mini system with a dozen terminals, so I chose the more subtle technique of using this fact, we were separate to the two mainframe IBMs and Cyber super computer, so it was a limited experiment.

This is where I was naughty, I wrote a trojan horse for the system, it needed some security permissions, but I had those from a project I was doing.

Basically, it goes like this:
I had noticed that when logging onto the system, sometimes it would fail, and request a re-logon. This normally happens for many reasons, from simple typos to, what I call "keybounce" where you press. for example, the letter "k" and two or more "k"s appear, not so bad if you can see it, but awful when typing a password and all you see are those dreadful "*****"

So I wrote a trojan horse that masqueraded as LOGIN screen, with suitable responses to the input, but whatever the user did, it killed itself, (only after writing the input to an obscure file) resulting in a normal Login screen, where the user could proceed normally.

It is very rare for a trojan to kill itself, after use, but this is what I did.

Rather interesting was findout some other users passwords, and very amusing to fid out that a VERY SENIOR user (ie 3 ranks above me) used a 20 character password, of apparantly random letters.... I wondered what for? But being government Ministry of Defence, I figured it was none of my business.

I achieved my goal of getting the other twos passwords easily, and when I left that department shortly afterwards, I deleted all programs and data.
Yes, I was naughty, this could have been used for all sorts of nefarious purposes, but I am a guy of integrity, it was only used to achieve the goal of getting the other two's passwords, hence winning the challenge. As I left there shortly afterwards I could not access the system any more, plus I was very self concious of a presumed guilt.... suppose someone found out I had done this? I would have to update my CV straight away!

Also I was rather proud of writing the first ever ((at the time, I believe) SELF DESTRUCTIVE virus.

Never done anything like that since, or want to, my goal in life is fixing other people systems, and from that I get great satisfaction :)))

VAX/VMS - that brings back a few memories. Our favourite prank was to edit someone's logon script by adding "logout". If a guy left his desk for a minute someone would jump in and edit his logon script.

Logon looked 100% mormal but would log the user out right away.

We would do this to the junior techs and see how long it would take them to figure out how to supress running the logon script at logon.

"You have learned well grasshopper"

There is a famous case of a kid at a university using this to gain professor's passwords then changing his grades. Don't remember his name but I think he was the first convicted hacker. And of course he made a deal that if he showed the administration how he did it they would let him go. I think he runs the FBI these days A friend of mine that runs computing at a university in the city still makes this deal today. There's always a kid that finds a way to back door a system and have some fun. This one kid did it just to send anonymous email to a girl he liked and of course, she didn't think it was funny getting stalked so the police got involved. My friend made the clemency deal with the kid and it required a software patch from SUN to close the loop hole. Ahhh, to be nineteen again.

That is too much! I bet if you made those files available, they would crash the server from downloads!