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What Dirty Tricks Did You Use for April Fool's? 121

Posted by Cliff from the fun-underhanded-tricks dept.
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?"
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What Dirty Tricks Did You Use for April Fool's? More

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

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  • I.... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 09, 2005 @12:46PM (#12187649)
    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
  • I said Google bought Mozilla [mozillanews.org]. :)

  • back in the day (but not too far) (Score:4, Funny)

    by bersl2 ( 689221 ) on Saturday April 09, 2005 @12:49PM (#12187663) Journal
    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.

  • April 1st (Score:5, Interesting)

    by daeley ( 126313 ) on Saturday April 09, 2005 @12:51PM (#12187680) Homepage
    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 remember when i had to choose high school, i was visiting one, and suddenly the bell rings. Okay end of class, but apperently no - i also ended up in the fire drill.

      Strange because at my elementry school we have had 2 firedrills on in like 3 grade and one 3 days before last school day - stupid because the school would be spilt and half the kids would not be there next year.

  • Boring (Score:3, Insightful)

    by lezerno ( 775940 ) on Saturday April 09, 2005 @12:52PM (#12187691) Homepage
    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.

    • Re:Boring (Score:5, Insightful)

      by gl4ss ( 559668 ) on Saturday April 09, 2005 @01:25PM (#12187893) Homepage Journal
      *Why do you want to betray someone that has trust in you? I guess I just don't get it anymore.*

      and there you fail to see the reason for april 1st to exist, it's a social contract that on that day - and that day only - you're allowed to fool someone just for laughs and they can still trust you for the rest of the year.

      i was just too lazy to do any tricks. and well, i'm the kind of a bastard that forwards people to the ah so famous "i'm watching gay porno" site for a joke on a normal day anyhow too.
    • "Why do people fall for these jokes?"

      That comes along when you become talented at what you do.

  • Got a guy fired (Score:5, Funny)

    by rylin ( 688457 ) on Saturday April 09, 2005 @12:52PM (#12187695)
    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.

    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 :P

  • Optical Mice (Score:5, Funny)

    by standsfornothing ( 675973 ) on Saturday April 09, 2005 @12:53PM (#12187697) Homepage
    Tiny little pieces of tape on the bottom of optical mice. Clear tape futzes them up, solid tape renders them useless.
    • Post-It notes work well for this trick also. I played it on my roommate last year.
    • A tiny bit of clear adhesive tape can also do wonders when cut to fit and applied to the contacts of a network cable. Your victim will never notice it unless they look VERY closely, and you get the joy of seeing them frantically troubleshooting their net connection, reinstalling drivers, unplugging the cable and looking at it (but not seeing the clear tape), trying another jack..
      • Or he could glance over at his NIC, see that the link light isn't on, and conclude that the cable must be bad and get another one. All you've accomplished is making a guy go through the mild inconvenience of replacing a network cable when he didn't need to.
        • Unless he's easily suckered. Which this guy was. We'd softened him up by repeatedly pranking his Windows box in the usual ways : the desktop screenshot, the invisible mouse pointers, etc.

          He was reduced to password protecting everything and locking it down hard to stop us, even to the point of swapping out his machine for one with a locking case so we couldn't just reset his BIOS password. The tiny piece of tape on his cable had him tearing things apart looking for a software trick since that's what he

  • 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 [commschool.org] where the tech people don't mind these things as long as others can still use the computers.

    • Re:Flipped desktops upside down BTDT (Score:5, Interesting)

      by anticypher ( 48312 ) <[moc.liamg] [ta] [rehpycitna]> on Sunday April 10, 2005 @12:12PM (#12193725) Homepage
      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

    • Doing that one one step beyond by also swapping the mouse buttons makes it orders of magnitude more difficult to deal with.

  • Dirty tricks are bad form (Score:2, Interesting)

    by 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

  • Dirty trick (Score:2, Informative)

    by smARMie ( 743226 )
    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.

  • What we did (Score:5, Funny)

    by wizarddc ( 105860 ) on Saturday April 09, 2005 @01:02PM (#12187755) Homepage Journal
    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.

  • Best trick (Score:1, Flamebait)

    by OAB_X ( 818333 )
    Teh best trick is to not actually do anything, when you had been making a buildup to think that they would. Yes, its lame, and not even funny, but I need to justify my lack of actually pulling a prank.
    • 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.
    • 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....

  • Our boss is pretty cool, so ... (Score:3, Funny)

    by hlygrail ( 700685 ) on Saturday April 09, 2005 @01:20PM (#12187856)
    ... 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...

  • Showed up (Score:5, Funny)

    by CDS ( 143158 ) on Saturday April 09, 2005 @01:25PM (#12187889)
    I showed up for work. On time. Showered & shaved.

    It THOROUGHLY confused people. They are still talking about it.
    • "I showed up for work. On time. Showered & shaved."

      Heh. we never got around to it, but one year we were going to put a sign on the men's room door that read "Danger: Gas leak". We weren't sure, though, if anybody'd get the joke.

      • Re:Showed up (Score:5, Funny)

        by CDS ( 143158 ) on Saturday April 09, 2005 @11:55PM (#12190973)
        When I was in college, I worked for the computer services department on campus. A coworker of mine put a sign on the door to the network room: "WARNING! This room contains radiation in the visible spectrum." (ie light)

        The system administrator made him take it down after a month or so because the janitor refused to enter and it was getting really messy in there.
    • Did anyone ask where you'd been interviewing? I always got that if I shaved.

  • Skipped Slashdot (Score:3, Insightful)

    by SA Stevens ( 862201 ) on Saturday April 09, 2005 @01:27PM (#12187904)
    The only 'dirty trick' that I engaged in was completely skipping Slashdot on April 1.
  • I stayed home, slept in, played some quake and avoided /. No one fooled me, but did I fool myself, by letting the foolers win?

  • The oldies are the best... (Score:4, Funny)

    by pkunzipforlife ( 874725 ) on Saturday April 09, 2005 @01:44PM (#12187979)
    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 like that one. A variation is to create a desktop picture that contains many, many icons. Then see how long it takes to find the real icons among them.

      Another (rather subtle) one is to swap over the monitor, keyboard, and mouse connections of adjacent pairs of Macs in a lab. Everything appears to work as normal until you put a disk in and it appears on your neighbour's desktop... (Obviously, this works rather less well in Windows.)

    • Re:The oldies are the best... (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Kymermosst ( 33885 ) on Monday April 11, 2005 @02:22AM (#12198185) Journal
      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.

  • Swat! (Score:5, Funny)

    by ballpoint ( 192660 ) on Saturday April 09, 2005 @01:46PM (#12187996)
    I once changed the mouse pointer to a realistic image of a fly.
  • I started a website for my high school alumni a year ago. Since day one, it has always said "no spam, no advertisements", etc.

    April fools, I put a big Classmates.com advertisement on the homepage asking people to click on our new sponsor.
  • 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) wer
    • I put together fake tests that were insanely difficult for all my students, and spent the first ten minutes of each class dogging them about finishing their exam in the (short) time allotted...

      I finished the day by telling my school administrator that I had been offered significantly more money to work at another school, and would be leaving after my contracted period without renewing. After her face went totally white and she looked at me pitifully, I reminded her of the date.

  • Aviation April-Fools Humor (Score:3, Funny)

    by Stele ( 9443 ) on Saturday April 09, 2005 @02:03PM (#12188093) Homepage
    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 [privatepilotmag.com] 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.
  • Especially all the comments. Joke's on you!

  • cleaned desk (Score:4, Funny)

    by PerlDudeXL ( 456021 ) <jens.luedicke@gmail.cTIGERom minus cat> on Saturday April 09, 2005 @02:16PM (#12188164) Homepage
    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.

  • It was the dirtiest trick I ever did for April Fool's day.

  • My joke (Score:3, Funny)

    by darkjedi521 ( 744526 ) on Saturday April 09, 2005 @03:30PM (#12188544)
    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 [netbsd.org] 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.
  • Way back in the day, I had to write some code into our client's web site that recognized search engine IPs & gave them different "optimized" pages to boost their search ranking (this was before people realized that getting caught doing so would actually hurt your rank).

    So on April 1st that year, I took the external IP of the internal corporate network, & made a front page of the site that was filled with images from the hampster [sic] dance [hampsterdance.com] site, complete w/ the sound file- the site still showed
  • 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.

  • The Standard (Score:2, Funny)

    by pbaer ( 833011 )
    Take screen shot of desktop, set it as wallpaper and hide icons+taskbar and watch the confusion.

  • got my roommate (Score:5, Funny)

    by hammeredpeon ( 572012 ) on Saturday April 09, 2005 @05:30PM (#12189088) Homepage
    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 :)
  • Our school ordered dozens of new tables. This aprticular site was renewed, so new furniture was ordered. Enfin it was the fourth time they (the manufacturer) told the furniture would show up at around 11:00 a clock. (the former 3 times just, well, they did not perform) At 11.30 a truck arrived, two people jumped out, shouted simultanously "Lunch!" and disappeared for 1,5 hrs. Then they came back and started assembling the tables. To discover at 14.00 they only had half the parts they needed, 'yuk yuk gosh s

  • Fun with Extensions (Score:3, Funny)

    by cgenman ( 325138 ) on Saturday April 09, 2005 @07:05PM (#12189540) Homepage
    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.

  • I sent out an email saying we were now filling our printers with cheaper, white toner, and that could users please now use the black paper provided.

    At least one person bought it.

  • oh jeeze, I'm running a site much like bash.org (People that Suck [zareste.com], just for reference) - I really should have pulled what they did last year when they said they'd be moving to a domain called funnybutfriendly.org and were planning to censor entries to ensure that they're nice and friendly. I honestly thought they were going to bite the dust like a lot of sites out there do when they fall into the Nazi-ish censorship state the internet is becoming.

    Anyone else run into that?
  • I'm still in high school, and every day we do a live tv show with a basic rundown of staff events, school sports, and other stuff no one cares about. However, for April Fools, we ran the normal news in a minute nad a half, then went into a piece on how a rival school hates America, complete with burning flag edited in. Also, the overly politcal theatre kids apparently have finally accomplished their goals of ending racism, violence, and teen pregnancy, so they can stop making their stupid plays. You can dow
  • I run IT at my corporation. One of our employees loves to play music through the dinky little speaker in his PC (it's actually in the case). So, naturally, I opened the case and unplugged the speaker.

    He still hasn't figured it out. Now he uses headphones.
  • I forged a bugzilla email to the software and test groups saying that we had to start supporting OS/2 for our product, due to a potential big government contract.

    Got a couple people wound up. :-)
  • I was doing z80 assembler and trs-80 basic at a medical lab. Since computers were fairly uncommon, I decided to have some fun and write a script that basically faked it that the computer was alive. It took them about a half day before they called me with the news, that the computer was alive. It took me about an hour to convince them that they could touch the keyboard.

    But for this year, I simply installed xroach on several computers. Ppl who had never seen it. Apparently, they really thought that the compu
  • My old school used to have apple iBooks for all the students, so on april fools day, one of my friends sent around a carbon application that made the LCD display look like it had be smashed with some sort of large, blunt object. It stopped becoming funny when us techies were bombarded with hysterical students bitching about how their display broke.

  • Not in April, but still funny.... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Baloo Ursidae ( 29355 ) <dead@address.com> on Sunday April 10, 2005 @02:02AM (#12191479) Journal
    ...last winter when it was icy here [wikipedia.org], we drove up Interstate 84 [wikipedia.org] to Multnomah Falls [wikipedia.org], 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...

  • Home Page swaps = fun (Score:3, Funny)

    by Blamemyparents ( 730461 ) on Sunday April 10, 2005 @06:52PM (#12196186)
    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.
  • I managed to fool most of my digital photography forums users into believing that my site had been bought out by a German site [shuttertalk.com]. :D

    What worked in my favour was that I pulled the prank at 12:01 Australian time which is GMT+10, so most people didn't know what hit them as it was still March 31st where they were. :D

    Gosh I'm evil... :D

  • I held an april fools pranking contest.
    But that is just what we do.
    http://prank.org/phpBB2/ [prank.org]
  • http://forums.tejat.net/ms.html [tejat.net] 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
  • I did a brilliant one. I got myself elected President by having a Republican-packed US Supreme Court back up a crooked election in Florida, squandered a national budget surplus on massive tax breaks for my billionaire friends, and parlayed a huge terrorist attack on American soil into an excuse to start an incredibly costly and intractable war that's succeeding only in destabilizing the entire Middle East and creating more terrorists. April Fool!

  • We have RFID door keys and an intranet page that shows who's in and who's out. People can also sign themselves in or out on a separate page. I signed everyone in the company out to lunch at 4:01pm using a SQL query.

    I was actually home sick for the day, so I didn't get to see the reaction. Apparently, news traveled quick, though. I got a call from our general manager an hour later.

    Last year, my wife and I carefully changed our kids into their pj's during their afternoon nap (the oldest was 4 1/2), ma

  • Foamcrete in a guy's car worked for me.
  • At my school there was actually someone who had faked a heart attack infront of teachers and staff as an "April Fools Joke". Paramedics were immediately called in and he was almost rushed to the hospital before the kid eventually jumped up enthusiastically screaming "April Fools!". Just a warning in advance, never try this at your school since the kid was promptly read his rights and arrested right after. Again, I dont think many people have the iq's of rocks.
  • I went to the moveon.org site that had (back in the day) a way to forward a link to friends. Since you could also give your return e-mail address, I sent an e-mail to our company's 'all@' address from 'catbert@xxx.com' that was funny and in retaliation for a snarly e-mail from the ceo. Oh, and would steal her IP address when she was out of the building and surf as many porn sites as I could load up the IP logs with on her behalf ...

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