Practical Jokes on Co-Workers? 430
leprasmurf asks: "Here I sit with Administrative rights to a public computer at work, and I'm trying to think of how I can have fun with my co-worker's profiles. I'm running low on ideas. I've done the 'copy 50 million folder shortcuts to their desktop' one and if he forgets to lock his terminal one of these times I'm going to do the print screen and hide all his icons one, but what else is there? Surely there are some harmless pranks an administrator can do without resorting to downloading programs for assistance. Any suggestions?"
You could ... (Score:5, Funny)
I find... (Score:4, Funny)
VNC (Score:5, Funny)
The one I really like doing is run a Perl script that send an email every minute, or sends an ICQ, telling them what time it is. To make it REALLY exciting, send some random text with it.
What I did to the guy in the cubicle next to mine (Score:5, Funny)
Re:You could ... (Score:5, Funny)
Use peer pressure to enforce policy (Score:5, Funny)
- I am bringing in donuts to the office tomorrow, please email me your favorite kind (turn on read rcpt and delivery rcpt)
- Looking for a roomate (lotsa possibilities here)
- I am proud to anounce the birth of my son... (include an ugly baby pic, or a dog jpg)
and so on.
Over time, people rarely left their pc's unlocked because they didn't want the ridicule of the office. It was great fun, actually improved morale, and kept the pcs locked tight.
Switcheroo (Score:5, Funny)
Make a new shortcut for everything they use, either on the desktop or in the Start menu, or Quicklaunch too. Change the name to be the name of a different program, and set the icon to use for the one for the original shortcut. The idea here is to have Excel open up when they click on Word, Internet Explorer when they try to run Excel, an MS-DOS prompt when they want to run Access. If they don't have admin rights, they'll have to learn by experiment where each program is located.
Guaranteed to stun the clueless. Since desktop icons will show the little shortcut arrow, go to [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\Cu
Explorer\Shell Icons] and set the "29" key to equal the path and filename of a blank icon. Or get TweakUI to do it.
pranks (Score:4, Funny)
(BTW, tends to work better on Macs...)
1. Take screen shot of desktop
2. Open the shot in Photoshop or similar gfx app.
3. Rotate 180 degrees so image of desktop is upside down.
4. Enlarge image to 100% and hide menu bar (this is where it works best with Photoshop), palettes and toolbars.
5. Act confused when brought over to see "whacked icons." 5a. mention virus or "sign that hard drive is in process of erasing itself."
All the machines in our office run Photoshop as do the laptops, so it's a trick to pull when things get slow on off-site gigs.
Start Menu Fun (Score:3, Funny)
For example, say their Start>Programs menu listed Dos Prompt, Word, Excel, Windows Explorer. Change each link so that they launch Word, Excel, Windows Explorer, and Dos Prompt respectively.
At first, they'll think they're clicking wrong somehow. Then maybe they'll replace their mouse. Good for some cheap laughs.
where to begin... (Score:5, Funny)
- record someone's cellphone ring on your PC, then install it as their new-mail-received sound. (when I did this, I didn't realize the guy had had 3-4 cellphones over the past year, all of which were stowed in his desk; I presumed he'd catch on after a couple hours, but apparently it was a 3-day ordeal for him and his neighbors...)
- there was a young girl who was (un-justifyably) a little scared of her boss: I had him record his voice saying her name, then added a trace of an echo, and waited until a day when he was out of town and I knew she'd be working late... I set her Windows shutdown sound to that sample, so she'd hear him calling her after everyone else had gone home. From what others on that floor told me, she ran screaming down the hallway...
- put up a phony form someplace, like a "Microwave Usage Tracking Form" in the break room... have lines for what's been heated, how long it took, etc... (when I did this, the only person who fell for the prank and actually filled out a line was the office manager - the very person who'd have been in charge of putting up such a form, if it were real!)
- others I forget
The easiest office pranks are those which involve people who leave their terminals unattended in a situation where security is assumed to be tight; I have dozens of stories about those cases, but they're not as funny to me 'cos, well, the more tight-assed the environment, the easier it is to spoof (and you have an unfair advantage if you're the IT guy)... I prefer to pull stuff in a relaxed, casual environment, where people aren't expecting anything.
Re:Fun Pranks (Score:3, Funny)
Run the jokes on YOUR computer (Score:5, Funny)
There is plenty that you can do to demonstrate your 1337 hax0r skillz and sense of humour on your own machine.
Try squashing your head and hands into in a colour scanner, use the resulting picture as a screensaver, with a piece of audio of you saying "help I'm trapped in the monitor!" set to that play every 5 minutes and go to lunch.
Funniest prank ever (Score:4, Funny)
I guess a similar thing could be done with a co-worker's computer and an audio cable, just run it to line-in and turn the volume way up. It'll take a few seconds before they find the volume control. Play something vile like Backstreet Boys or Britney.
Re:VNC (Score:5, Funny)
One of the engineers where I worked pulled a stunt like that on a naieve PR lady. He had a computer set up on a table on the opposite end of his office. He was tinkering with it via VNC. She asked him what he was up to and he told her that he had written some voice recognition software.
"Go ahead, say something."
"What should I say?"
And when she said that he fired up Notepad and wrote "What should I say?" on it. We all thought it was pretty funny until we found ourselves stopping an announcement that we had a new product in development.
The best joke I ever played (Score:1, Funny)
Borrowed from Scott Adams' 'The Joy of Work' (Score:5, Funny)
"The radiation shielding on your monitor has failed, please do not sit directly in front of your monitor."
I uploaded the page to our websever, sent out a company-wide email to try out the new demo, and went home. I got a frantic call at 7am in the morning. The first victim of my joke was the type to wash her hands in anti-bacterial soap if somebody dirty just looked at her. I had to keep from laughing, it wasn't easy. She eventually figured out it was a joke, but found it amusing, so she didn't tell anybody else.
I fired off a note to the sysadmin to let him in on the joke, but I wasn't sure if he got it in time. Unfortunately, he was the guy who everybody ran to first. When I got to his office, the dead-weight woman who was always calling in sick all the time was there explaining what she had seen. I intercepted the conversation and asked her what happened. She told me that her computer had radiated her. So I asked if she felt okay, and she put her hand on her stomach and with worried eyes she non-commitally said "I think so..." I glanced over at the sys-admin whose head suddenly disappeared behind his monitor. I found out later that he had read my email and was trying to keep from laughing.
I decided to carry this joke a little further. You all know Front Page, right? That WYSIWYG HTML editor that everybody here hates? Well it has a kick ass feature. It'll download a web page and you can just type right into it. Then, it'll maintain all the links for you. So I downloaded one of CNN's health pages and wrote up a 3 paragraph news alert about the "Microwave Virus". The basic gist of the article was that a virus took control of your monitor and amplified the ultra violet gun to burn out the shielding. Symptoms included fatigue, irritability, and a couple of other things you normally feel at the office. In about 15 minutes, I had a fake web page and I had set up Microsoft's 'Personal Web Server' to serve it up from my computer. I had then renamed my computer to www.cnn-news.com, and hosted the page. A new 'FYI' email was sent out, and I went to lunch.
When I came back, the woman that was in on the joke told me "all hell had broken loose, you better get to the dead-weight girl's office." When I got there, two of my coworkers were having a discussion about whether they should go home or go see their doc. From there, I lost, I couldn't keep a straight face anymore. I told them of the joke. They took it in stride, but they didn't think it was so funny. You see, they didn't realize I had faked the web-page. They thought I read it on CNN's site and I had faked the message. They were more amused when they found out I had faked the site too, but I think they were paranoid for weeks any time I sent out an FYI email. Heh.
On a side note, the sysadmin there didn't really like me until that day. He was impressed at how I had set that up. We were actually friends after that. Heh.
Re:Here's what you can do (Score:2, Funny)
Funny: (Score:3, Funny)
Step 2: Wait until (male?) victim leaves his computer unattended.
Step 3: Replace victim's sound alerts (yes, all of them) with aforementioned sound sample.
Step 4: Turn volume ALL the way up.
Step 5: Wear a diaper, there'll be a long line getting to the bathroom
Not the website he expected.... (Score:5, Funny)
one from old school days (Score:2, Funny)
I hacked up a quick test in TRS-80 BASIC to toggle the 64/32 bit, and it ran fast enough to create four scrolling bands on the display. Cool. If I toggled the entire byte, it also flipped the cassette motor on and off rapidly, causing the internal relay to click loudly. Double-cool.
So, thanks to a Z-80 programmer's guide (also from Radio Slack), I turned the whole thing into assembly, hand-assembled it, turned the hex codes into decimal bytes, and then punched it in with a rudimentary program. (It gave me a great appreciation for Altair programmers and their bootstrap process.) This program did something simple: present a totally faked boot-up screen, wait for a keypress, then go into an infinite loop, doing the same toggle. But, in machine code, it ran at CPU speed (1 MHz), not BASIC interpreter speed. The toggle in this mode was fast enough to cause the CRT circuitry to lose horizontal sync, resulting in nothing but lots of "static" on the screen. Beautiful.
I got everything into place, ran my code, and went to another machine to watch. Lo and behold, my first and only "victim" was the instructor. She sat down at the machine, looked at it, pressed the correct key (Enter), and jumped a little bit as the screen went haywire, while the cassette motor relay started snapping wildly. She looked at me, saw that I was watching, then reached down and pressed the orange reset button.
I was kicked out of the lab for the rest of the day. I suppose she had to do something, but it was worth it.
Re:If the target runs SETI@home (Score:3, Funny)
Re:add delay to people's .profile-files (Score:2, Funny)
export PROMPT_COMMAND="sleep 1"
tape on the mouse (Score:3, Funny)
Non-PC related pranks are even funnier (Score:3, Funny)
The best way to do it was to squeeze a small amount of the jelly onto a spoon, and then fill the donut with Frank's. I could then cover the hole with the Jelly that I removed. A little sprinkle of white sugar (from the coffee packages) covered up any evidence of tampering.
What made the prank even funnier is that all 10 of the donuts were eaten. People would bite into them, make really funny faces but still keep on eating. I actually had to leave the office for about half an hour. I was laughing so much I was crying, and I did't want to expose myself. (even though I was probably on a short list of suspects)
A few more that I have done:
-Flat cola poured into the coffee pot.
-Water the office plants with rubbing alcohol
-10 packs of sweetener in the coffee pot.
-black pepper over top of a box of Timbits.
-break all the pencils in the office
-call co-workers from the fax machine
Re:The best joke I ever played (Score:3, Funny)
In the old days if you have access to the emperor's seal you don't fool around with it if you want to keep parts of your body attached to each other, and very bad things happening to your household and property.
Fortunately in these enlightened times you'd only get sacked. They leave out the pillaged, rape, burnt part.
go low-tech (Score:3, Funny)
Re:pranks (Score:3, Funny)
Fun in Computer Labs (Score:2, Funny)
So to finish it off for fun, we fired off one last message to the general computer lab down the hall. "The computers are shutting down in 5 minutes for maintenance. Please save your work and log out." That was the funniest mass exodus we ever saw. Good times.
Music fun (Score:4, Funny)
There's nothing funnier than a week or two later, after we had pretty much forgotten about it, hearing that song blaring out in the middle of his Bob Marley playlist.
We also do the standard send-email-to-the-office-mailing-list prank, but we expand that to typing in their IRC and AIM windows as well. Telling peoples' friends "Tell me you love me" is always good for a laugh.
Re:Fax (Score:3, Funny)
It was great, I would call the 1800 number up and press the keys to get the manual for some mouse then type in the phone number. Best part was that if the line was not a fax it would continue to redial and retry.
Re:Schedules (Score:3, Funny)
Another fun one there is to use the autocorrect feature in Word to change the odd word to something similar looking with a completely different meaning.
Re:Honestly, haven't you ever played a joke? (Score:5, Funny)
Care to punctuate that? Or should we read it as is?
Horrible karma, but still funny.... (Score:2, Funny)
- you own up to what you did immediately
- apologize
- fix whatever you broke
- swear to never do it again, and finally
- help your victim find somebody else to do it to.
I swore off using my powers for personal amusement sometime in 1986, when I wrote a small program in QuickBasic that mimicked a DOS prompt, captured every keystroke the user entered, and substituted the follwing string, a character at a time: DEL C:\*.* Tiny little program would pop back with this: Are you sure (Y/N)? The victim would VERY CAREFULLY hit the N key-- --and of course it would show up as Y-plus-carriage-return, and the victim's hard drive would light up and start grinding. Quite a lot of shouting and swearing and unplugging things and similar merriment would ensueMusic - Y'know like Indiana Jones (Score:3, Funny)
Add it to your screensaver, make it loud enough for your neighbors to hear and see how many people are humming/whistling it by home time.
Indiana Jones is pretty effective, as is Mission Impossible.
Some more stuff... (Score:2, Funny)
Well here's some of mine
- We wrote a small app that uses the windows media plugin. It sits hidden in the background until it detects a file c:\playme.avi. Then it becomes visible, goes full screen and doesn't respond to any keyboard or mouse input. When finished it deletes the avi. Then any time you like copy any video onto their machine...
- Some people were using bizarre colour schemes on their desktops, so we wrote an app to change each system colour one increment closer to the default colour every second, slowly restoring them all back to the defaults. unfortunately changing the colours forces a repaint which flickers a bit.
- I wrote another app which enumerates all the volume controls and sets them all to 100%, unmuted, then plays a wav file from the command line and restores the settings, using psexec from sysinternals to push the exe over to the victims machine, and "Haha" (nelson from the simpsons).
- not sure where it came from but I got a stress ball chaped like a mouse, hide their real mouse behind their pc, and replace with the stress ball, the instant of "ewww whats that, thats not my mouse" is quite funny to watch. similar results could be achieved with vaseline, but that could be a bit messy.
I'm sure there have been others but thats all I can remember at the moment...
Indians don't do practical jokes at work (Score:1, Funny)
While you were playing jokes on one another, screwing up computer settings and inflicting real pain and aggravation on the unsuspecting people who were your victims, you were making enemies -- and upper management was getting ready to outsource you.
When the axe finally fell, those people were much relieved! No longer would they be a victim of your sick sense of humor. Your ass is out on the street, and the company is better off for it.
I think it is sick that anybody would choose innocent people to play practical jokes upon. You deserved to be fired! I would gladly support the firing of anybody who played a damaging practical joke at work. I am glad that nobody played a joke on me when I was working during the boom.
(Submitted as AC for obvious reasons)
Re:Funniest prank ever (Score:3, Funny)
And some of the guys in the next building over put their tools to good use. See, there was a grad student working there who had to live in an apartment that was converted from the last few rooms of a freshman hall. Totally irrelevant to the story, but she was really hot. Anyway, she left for a weekend, and the guys got some two-by-fours, drywall, paint, and miscellaneous hardware. When she came back, her room was gone without a trace. They even matched the baseboard.
Of course there was the one in the other building where they rappelled down the outside to get into the RA's room, then completely filled it with packing peanuts.
My freshman floor wasn't so original, we just taped newspaper over one guy's door for three mornings in a row, and waited outside for him to come through. Of course the second and third times he leaped through with style, but on the third time we had dragged a spare wardrobe in front of the door.
Re:add delay to people's .profile-files (Score:3, Funny)
Makes a great .profile heart attack.
Type sleep 1 & at your $ to see the correct spacing.
Re:Funniest prank ever (Score:3, Funny)
My neighbor in the dorm (let's call him "Nik") was constantly pulling pranks on his fairly humorless roommate (let's call him "Hans"), and since I was the only one on the floor with a toolbox, I usually got involved.
My favorite one:
Background: (1) The door had a keyhole on the outside and a simple pushbutton on the inside so you could lock it while you were home. (2) Hans invariably left his keys in his girlfriend's room.
So we unwired the phone jack, and then reversed the doorknob assembly, so that the button was on the outside. Nik sat in the room and waited for Hans to arrive, then said "goodbye" and darted out the door, pulled it shut, and pushed the button. He taped a sign on the door asking people not to open it no matter what they heard on the other side.
Soon we had a big crowd outside laughing at the whole thing. Hans was banging furiously on the door, screaming murderous threats of revenge. But then suddenly he went all quiet. And stayed that way.
Curiosity was getting the better of us, and by the time fifteen minutes passed, Nik was really fighting the urge to open the door.
The riddle was solved, though, when someone came running up the stairs to tell us he was just out in the courtyard and some crazy person was throwing clothing, books, and CDs out through a window on our floor! When we opened the door, Hans had Nik's stereo in his arms.