April Fools
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You've got two days left. And unfortunately April Fools falls on a Sunday (so no crazy headlines here), but you could still have some fun on Monday.
April Fools Day is a time of pranks and fun, a time to see if your co-workers are paying attention. Usually there are some good stories around the Internet that make you scratch your head if you're not paying attention, but the best jokes are those that someone plays or you or vice versa.
I caught this interesting story on April Fool's Pranks, including the image above and thought a few of them were pretty funny. I especially like the picture of the desktop 🙂
Seeing as how it's Friday and poll day....
What pranks do you have planned?
The mouse and keyboard ones are classic and they'll usually get someone every year. But do you have anything more creative? Sculpt your boss' chair out of aluminum foil? Maybe get some long cables and wire two of your co-worker's monitors to each other's computer?
It's a good chance to exercise your mind and work on your creativity. Let us know what you've got planned. Maybe you'll give someone a good reason to come in and "work" this weekend 🙂
And let us know how they go on Monday. Especially if you see some good ones.
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This wasn't an April Fool joke; we did this as a welcome back from vacation for a "friend".
We replaced the doorway of their cubical with a solid wall section so there was no entrance. Just to make it better, we filled the cubical to the top with wadded up paper.
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swapping wireless mice between adjacent cubicles is nice.
years ago I did some work in Forth, you could redefine EVERYTHING even operators and integers. Simply redefining "4" to 5 could produce interesting results.
...
-- FORTRAN manual for Xerox Computers --
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Didn't happen to me, but happened to one of our shop guys. A prankster down there rearranged the keys on his keyboard. Since the guy looks at his keys when he types, he couldn't figure out why when he'd press an E, it would give him a Y. He called me, saying that his keyboard was acting funny. I went down there, took one look at the keyboard, and laughed. I know paybacks down there are just as bad... now to find out what he did to get back at the prankster!
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Well we had a key puller and a couple of extra keyboards lying around. So when one of our co-workers had been away on vacation we rearranged the letters on his keyboard to spell "Welcome Back" on the top two rows.
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The keyboard ones are funny for people that don't know their keys. While I'm not a touch typist, my fingers have a lot of memory from years of typing and my keyboard was rearranged for two days one time before I noticed.
Some Non-IT jokes. In London we once picked up a mini and slipped it in between two other cars so it couldn't get out.
In a restaurant, we once offered dinner specials that made no sense, like fried rice in an Italian restaurant, just to get a reaction.
In the nuke plant we had someone dress in full contamination gear and walk through the admin area, asking everyone to leave. That was funny for some of us, very, very not funny for others.
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I don't tend to pull a prank unless it would get me too, so the keyboard pranks are out for me... The only time I even kind of look at my keyboard is when I'm turning it upside down to give it a good shake.
I have a program that you can add to start-up which does some really crazy stuff to the mouse (switched directions, makes it jump whenever it hovers over a button, etc) I've also done the classic post-it note on the bottom of the mouse trick.
Some coworkers a couple years back got me with a YIM smiley replacer (admin priveleges, and easy to find computers can be dangerous) all of a sudden all the animated smileys were... far more animated then they used to be.
One year way back, the April fools rivalry in an IT department I worked in really went over the tep, and barely any work got done that day as we all spent the day trying to one-up each other by hacking each other's computers.
unluckily, I think this year, I'm going to be way too busy to find time for any good pranks :/
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In my last job PSKill gave me a lot of amusement. There were numerous calls to the helpdesk that Outlook or other application had just closed itself down.
Creative use of SQL Server scheduled Agent jobs was also employed for the first day in April. As it was used as the back-end of our helpdesk software I decided to set up a job that would email one of our 1st-line techs every 10 minutes with "The helpdesk application has caused an unspecified error please call 0800 xxx xxxx to speak to our support team". It was only half way through his call to an extremely confused helpdesk support member that he cottoned on to what I found so amusing.
Having SQL as a back end to many an app makes it so easy to put pointless triggers on to application tables such that anybody emailing the helpdesk on a Friday is faced with an auto-response to the tune of "Do you not understand?? Friday is a sacred day in IT; we are all far too busy extracting the urine out of this week's Helpdesk Howlers and trying to elect a user for the coming Monday Muppet award. Please come back Monday when we might show some interest."
I had too much spare time and not enough supervision in that job!!
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We are nearing the end of Phase 1 and well into Phase 2 of a 3 Phase planned system upgrade. I think I will e-mail everybody and say:
Due to current events, the partially implemented System Upgrade was forced to be completed over the weekend and all outstanding issues have now been fully resolved. Any problems from this point on will be considered user error and or user created. Enjoy the new features and system speed.
Timing couldn't be better because on April 2nd, our business will be sold and taken over by a much larger corporate entity. Confusion and paranoia will already be in place.
Perfect.
On the other hand, our new handlers may not have a sense of humor...
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Here's one I'm particularly proud of. It was originally conceived as an April Fools prank, but we missed the date, so we did it as a birthday prank instead. It was equally as effective.
The fun part was that the guy could still do all his work. The monitors, keyboard's keys, and the mouse laser were all exposed.
Paul
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Steve - that "what's wrong with this picture" thing got me good. I laughed out loud (for real) for several minutes. It is now on its way to four co-workers.
On the home front, a simple and very effective April's fool prank, if your kitchen sink has one of those pull-out spray hoses, simply wrap a rubber band tightly around the button you press down to turn on the hose, so it is already in effect turned 'on'. Then put the nozzle back in its place - aiming outward toward where a person would stand when they turn on the water.
Stand back and watch the fun begin!
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That's probably funny until it's your wife in silk that needs to wash her hands.
Be lots of manure shoveling for me if I try that one
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