April Fool's

[katyism.livejournal.com]

Let's start talking about our April Fool's Day plans for our clients/co-workers/offices/other computers/etc.

I work in a cubicle-based call center with about 20 phones and workstations, and I'm not prepared to do anything hackery software-related to every workstation (they are ghosted every night and I can't change the ghost image). Plus, even if I could, I wouldn't know what to do with the Macs. So I'll stick to hardware and physical pranks.

I'm hoping to get some inspiration and share my ideas to help out the rest of you. Mind you these are very low-key, I don't want people to have to clean up or miss hours of work repairing a huge involved prank. (Someone has already done the cubicle-full-of-styrofoam thing already)

So far, my ideas are:
pop off & rearrange keyboard keys to spell things
unplug all keyboards
switch monitor cables between 2 computers
hide all chairs in the bathroom/hide other shared objects
opaque stickers on the bottoms of the optical mice, remove mouse balls
for the kitchen: tape or rubber-band the faucet sprayer handle down so when someoneturns on the water they get sprayed in the chest.
rubber snakes, roaches, etc in the bathroom
glue quarters/dollars to desks/floor
something with phones/headsets (not sure what)
*EDIT* call the helpline on my lunch break and be an annoying user

How about yours?

Comments

[zercool.livejournal.com]

I call it a good day when we get through without verbal arguments or shots fired. I'm not going to tempt fate by playing tricks. :-)

[thatvoiceguy.livejournal.com]

A favorite old trick (caveat: it can only be played on a colleague who leaves his/her workstation unlocked)...

Take a screenshot of the Desktop.
Hide the taskbar.
Save the screenshot, then set it as Wallpaper.
Hide all Desktop icons.

Watch the fur fly.

[fuego.livejournal.com]

switch monitor cables between 2 computers

working in an office full of emacs blows this idea right out of the water. but hmm....stickers on optical mice...

[katyism.livejournal.com]

Yeah, that's a classic... unfortunately everyone locks their desktops all the time, even just to walk across the room. Well trained...heh.

[usekh.livejournal.com]

Instead of removing the mouse balls, just use a strip of sticky tape :) works just as well.

also uplugging their keyboard is funny for a while too :) (if they leave their computer on of course :)

[jecook]

We did the glueing of change to a table. slightly cute. the faucet/sprayer handle is pretty mean to whomever gets nailed by it.

The last work prank I pulled off was putting up caution tape over the boss's door.

My co-workers at another place took the handset apart and taped the mic up. (with full knowledge and blessing of the phone guy. it was pretty funny)

a boot disk that runs a joke executable (like water.exe) might be fun, or something in the startup (like this stuff)

[jacobine.livejournal.com]

My last supervisor did something even worse.... One of the techs left his workstation unlocked. Supervisor sat down, and remapped all his shortcuts.

It was so screwed up, tech in question ended up reformatting his machine, after swearing for a few days.

Funny, though.

[thatvoiceguy.livejournal.com]

There's an older and somewhat crochety colleague next to me, who leaves his computer unlocked. All. The. Time.

I've been resisting this prank for two years. Strength...fading...

[anivair.livejournal.com]

I work in a collection agency and my collectors get a login message every day when they log onto the dialer (welcome to the XXX Dialer system) so I'm thinking of switching that out with the "show me the money" wav from jerry mcguire.

[jacobine.livejournal.com]

Of course, we fill things with styrofoam. Or wrap offices -- usually involving tinsel, lights and styrofoam. Director had to tell us to cool it on that one, because it got pretty wild for a while.

An officemate had two monitors, and I swapped the cables... that's fun.

Plus the keyboard cables into other computers, if there's enough room. Evil.

What's also happened here (we prank any time of the year) is they've put music files on people's machines so they play randomly (only good if you have sound cars, obviously.) Our webmaster, who is about 5'10", thin and dark-haired, came in one day with a tan trenchcoat. Someone said 'Good morning, inspector gadget!' and it... escalated. My supervisor (the same of the switched shortcuts) and one of the network admins broke into his machine and made it play the inspector gadget theme song every half hour.

Turn things upsides down maybe, too, Or backwards. Backwards monitors or desktops are good for the wtf moment.

[jacobine.livejournal.com]

I used to leave mine unlocked, but they generally leave mine alone. I suspect this is because at the time I was the only helpdesk person so didn't /have/ hours to spend repairing, plus I have security access just below the network admins...

[oddball42.livejournal.com]

one of my favorites is with (bal mice) pop the ball out and put a pice of paper in there so it basically dont move. with potical (easier to find) just a post it note.

play with color/hue settings.

another mouse joke, get for littel cube like things. a paper clip and take the mouseball out, drop in in a desk drawr or something. put the mouse up on the cubes and leave the retaining ring lieing next to it with the paperclip looking like a tool of some sort for effect.

i also like unplugging things like monitors and maybe playing with volume controls.

[random-c.livejournal.com]

I haven't done anything for a while, but a while ago, someone I'd forbidden to install IE4 did so. I set the hamsterdance as his active desktop. He then kept trying to faff with my workstation settings. So I moved the start bar to the top of the sceen and set it to auto-hide, changed the icons to resemble mac icons (but, naturally, not anything obvious) and set the desktop to a screenshot of my mac's desktop. I came back from lunch to find him desperately clicking on the part of the desktop that looked like the Macintosh HD icon...

[jecook]

When I was at [tier 1 ISP], we learned within picoseconds to lock the workstations. Having one's home page set to gay/midget/kiddie porn did the trick nicely. (I never was the victim or the instigator, but a few co-workers were. I already knew coming in to lock the workstation)

I miss working there some days...

[c0c0c0.livejournal.com]

I like to set the keyboard layout to Dvorak. That always throws them for a loop.

[sunfell.livejournal.com]

Two words: "Lizard Hair". I have very long hair that I tend to braid, and the folks I work with seem to think it's their private bell-pull. I plan to put a fake pony fall braid on my hair (with my real hair in a knot, and the pony fall coming out of it), so when they give it a pull, they end up with my "hair" in their hand.

Lizard hair!

[belovedcrown.livejournal.com]

tape down the phone hangup button on the phone. the phone will ring, they will answer it but no one will be on the other end. it is hysterical. eventually they will figure it out and the look on their face priceless.

BSoD screensaver

[irishmasms.livejournal.com]

Bluescreen v3.2
This screen saver not only accurately simulates Blue Screens, but simulated reboots as well (complete with CHKDSK), and works on Windows NT 4, Windows 2000, Windows XP, Server 2003 and Windows 9x.

http://www.sysinternals.com/ntw2k/freeware/bluescreensaver.shtml

a favorite of mine...

[oggsmith.livejournal.com]

go into word and edit the auto correct settings. set commonly used words like "the" to turn into phrases like "the roof is on fire" or "I" into "I'm watching you" or any variation of this prank. seems to be a fun time when people think that their computer is possesed.

[zig-mover.livejournal.com]

This is what I did to my manager's computer the other day:

I was trying to get onto his XP box, which was password protected. I eventually figured out that the password was 'letmein'. I took a screenshot of the XP login screen asking for the password.

In Paint, I pasted the screenshot and used the text tool to write in the words 'letmein' into the password box. Hid all the desktop icons, dragged the taskbar down, and set the edited picture as the background. I also removed the password from the computer. I then put it in hibernate mode to ensure a faster startup.

What this does: victim clicks their name from the users list to log on to the computer. Instead of typing in their password, the password is already shown! And they can't click on anythign else because it's all hidden. He was pissed.

Re: a favorite of mine...

[katyism.livejournal.com]

yeah that's a classic... it won't work here though because a) no one uses word and b) locked computers.

Re: BSoD screensaver

[compwizrd.livejournal.com]

my boss almost rebooted the main file server because of me installing that one on it...

i suppose it's my fault for installing something on an important machine :)

[fnordx.livejournal.com]

A trick from some of the older days, if anyone has a glare screen on their system, take a sheet of black construction paper, and tape it to the inside of the glare screen, so it covers up the screen completely.

[jahbulon.livejournal.com]

I came back from lunch to find him desperately clicking on the part of the desktop that looked like the Macintosh HD icon...

Hahah that image is hilarious. Especially the panicked look of confusion on his face hehehe

[jahbulon.livejournal.com]

I have long hair. I think if my coworkers had taken to yanking on it I would take to weaving barbed wire through it. How do you put up with that?

[japester.livejournal.com]

we're planning on putting a mac mini *inside* our NT admins tower PC and running XP on virtual PC on it.

and sending a mock invoice to one of our other techs who managed to get 1.5/512MBit ADSL (at home) while only paying for 512/128.

[teriwyn.livejournal.com]

Set people's IE homepages to www.yaromat.com/macos8 and put IE in the startup menu..... <3

[110billion.livejournal.com]

Hahaha. Damn, that's good.

Re: BSoD screensaver

[jecook]

Cool.

There is an X-Windows varient of that which shows BSOD and crash screen for just about every OS that had one. Pretty spooky seeing a "guru Meditation" (AmigaOS) message followed by a Win2K BSOD followed by a Linux kfernal panic.

[jecook]

Awesome... Please post a followup on how that goes.

Re: BSoD screensaver

[irishmasms.livejournal.com]

thanks for the info - I will have to try & find that...

[dmsalem00.livejournal.com]

AH.. for the headsets, a miniscule piece of paper wedged into the plug between the phone housing and the headset cable(right where they plug into each other) will disrupt the connection, and they'll get no signal to the headset.

=D