October 31, 2007 at 7:33 am
Keith Howell (10/31/2007)
"This year we have a zombie and two soldiers." Sounds like someone from our goverment!In the telecoms industry guys were sent out for bottles of "Dial tone"
My dad was a PBX engineer but was an installer before that. He and I were "buzzing out" a cross wired cable with an early Fox and Hound set. One of the new hires, after hearing the tones, came over and asked my dad what we were doing. Dad said that he was filling the cable with dial tone and that I was using a pressure gauge at the far end. The sound he was hearing was the overflow when we had a pair full.
As he walked away the project supervisor said, "you two are a pair that's full." 😀
ATBCharles Kincaid
October 31, 2007 at 7:49 am
At the dental company we were so glad to be advancing into PC's and away from the TRS-80 mod III. Don't laugh yet, we had a dental clinic with 8 doctors and 16 operatories using a small fleet of those beasts.
One day somebody introduced me to the PROMPT command. I "fixed" the support managers computer. You should have seen the shock on her face when the computer booted and said.
[font="Courier New"]LDOS READY
>[/font]
She freaked!
ATBCharles Kincaid
October 31, 2007 at 7:57 am
At one of my previous jobs where I acted as IT Admin, I would send out "critical patch" applications to users I knew could take a joke. The "patch," looking semi-real, would inform the user that important modifications to the system were about to take place. The app would then replace the user's desktop background with a funny (and usually Photoshop'ed) picture of the user.
Another prank we did once was to a guy that had a habit of saying really random, weird stuff. For several weeks, we recorded his phone conversations to the IT department. By then, we had enough material to splice together a horribly rendered but still hysterical "conversation" of him telling the owner of the company about a drug deal that was going down in Miami the following week. I got my hand slapped a little for that one when the owner heard about it, but it was well worth it!
Regards,
Michelle Ufford
SQLFool.com - Adventures in SQL Tuning
October 31, 2007 at 8:24 am
These days most people lock their computers, so there isn't a lot you can do.
There is one thing you can do while the computer is locked. You can turn on stickey keys if they haven't turned off the hotkey. I think it's just tapping shift several times. Then you can leave the shift on and they can't type in their password.
October 31, 2007 at 8:41 am
Steve Jones - Editor (10/31/2007)
This year we have a zombie and two soldiers. My daughter has been subtly influenced by my middle son into going out dressed in a camouflage outfit. Hers has sequins, slightly to the dismay of my young GI Joe, but it should be a good time.
Love the sequins, a nice touch.
My brother-in-law is a chemist. He asked purchasing (who have very limited knowledge of chemistry) to get him 2 gallons of di-hydrogen oxide. When they couldn't find that in their chemical supply catalogs, he said hydorgen hydroxide would be ok instead. When they finally found out he was referring to H2O (probably by calling the chemical supply house and getting laughed at), they gave him a bucket-full.
October 31, 2007 at 9:47 am
I love the key switching story. In my previous job, I wore many hats, and we had a few pranksters down in the QA area. One of the guys down there is a "hunt-and-peck"er, and he called me to tell me that he couldn't log in. As soon as I got downstairs and saw his keyboard, I had to step away from laughing so hard. Then I looked around the lab and found the culprit. I let him put the letters back in the right order. 😛
The job before that, I worked in a tech support department for an Internet Service Provider. As co-manager, I worked with a lot of the other managers. We had a new kid with a lot of energy who really was getting on some of the other techs nerves, so we sent him on the hunt for the elusive "cable stretcher" to lengthen the already cut Cat5 cables. The other managers had fun with it and had him search a few other places and ask other managers if they'd seen it. Eventually the guy wisened up and realized what we had put him up to 😛 If the company wasn't in the process of getting bought out, we probably would have had an interesting case of revenge on that.
Where I am now, whenever I lock my computer, I tend to flip the screen vertically or horizontally since my video drivers allow it. My boss and cubemates know what's going on, but those outside of our area see it and wonder what the heck's going on. What's funnier is trying to work with the screen flipped - it throws them for a loop every time.
October 31, 2007 at 11:36 am
Hi,
My favourite happened when working as an Information Analyst in a small dept. We had 2 rows of desks with 3 people on each side facing each other. My neighbour plugged in his keyboard into the PC opposite when one of our team went for a ciggy break. I nearly wet myself laughing watching their face as the words "God knows what you were doing last night and isn't pleased" appeared on their report, certainly a guilty conscience 😀
K.
October 31, 2007 at 12:03 pm
I pull the subtle pranks that sometimes only I enjoy.
I worked for a defense contractor many years ago on a classified project. The company had hired a dev manager, Carl, who was a yeller, convinced that he was smarter than everyone. While he waited for his security clearance, he wasn't allowed in the secure area of the office and couldn't come to most meetings. We would send him weekly, unclassified (printed) reports of our progress, which he read and filed. He spent three months telling us we were all idiots, and when his clearance came through he would get those programmers "squared away". During that time, we had to move to a new office building, which was half secure area and half open. We dutifully packed up all our stuff and labeled it for our new digs. Carl had a big file cabinet and many boxes of documents that were destined for his office in the non-secure area, and while it was unattended I slapped on new stickers sending all his stuff to an unassigned office in the SCIF. He arrived the next morning to find his new office empty. It took all that day to find where his stuff went (because it was Carl, and nobody would help him). And then the security guys wouldn't let him just pick it up and take it to the non-secure side because each and every page of every document had to be inspected (by the security guys) to ensure nothing was stamped "TOP SECRET". It was drudge work to inspect those, so the security guys took their time. He ranted and raved to upper managment, but it took them about a month. They released the last box of papers the week before his clearance came through and he moved into the SCIF, which was shortly before I moved on to another company. A few people sidled up and asked if it was me, but I gravely assured them I would never mess with either his Carlness or classified information. And then I winked. 😉
October 31, 2007 at 2:21 pm
at one place I worked, we had a manager who would call up every new starter and go into a long diatribe about how great is was for them to be working at the company.
so on 1st April Mr Charles Lyon started work
with an extension that automatically re-directed to London Zoo (They used to have a special Number that they activated for the occaion)
October 31, 2007 at 2:28 pm
At a previous job, I got the unpopular team leader. The foolish man went on leave on his birthday (which we all knew about) and left his drawers unlocked. With the key in the lock. When he came in the next day, he found his drawers locked and no key. He was getting rather frantic. I had planted the key just under the drawers and asked the guy sitting opposite (at my signal) to turn around & point it out.
Once the TL opened the drawers, he found them full of confetti. And not the paper kind, either (couldn't find any) - the nasty foil kind, which gets chock full of static electricity and sticks to everything. He was finding it in his files for months afterwards.
He always suspected me, but nobody ever let on.
Scott "CosmicTrickster" Duncan
MARCUS. Why dost thou laugh? It fits not with this hour.
TITUS. Why, I have not another tear to shed;
--Titus Andronicus, William Shakespeare
October 31, 2007 at 3:44 pm
Sometimes you don't even have to pull a trick to get a great laugh. I worked as the help desk for a year and my favorite was a woman called me to say her computer wouldn't start. I went through all of the list and I still couldn't figure it out. After about 20 min I finally asked her to look under her desk and check to see if the power cord was plugged in. She said yes she had plugged it in to itself.
The one trick that I helped pull at another company was priceless. We had a guy who was the liason between us and the client. This one week he got on our nerves because he claimed we were purposely not working on the project and making him look bad. Another programmer and I decided to have a little fun. She added code that wouldn't let him log in. He would try and come and find me. I would log in as me and say see, I could log in. As I did that, she updated the code and then I would try logging in as him and say look it's fine. As he went back to his desk she would update it again so he couldn't log in. We did this several times, and he never did get it. We finally put it back the way it was and had a great laugh.
I've also had fun Remotely logging in to someone's computer and watching them type and then start typing more. Then they come running to me and swear that a ghost is taking over. Or making dragging their mouse to different parts of the screen. It is also fun to move files around as they sit there unable to figure out what has happened.
November 1, 2007 at 6:28 am
I, too, have made use of Sysinternals BSOD screen saver, with varying results.
I discovered that network folks can be less than appreciative of the screensaver being put on a production server. Sure, its funny now, but they weren't too happy when they figured out what was going on, AFTER a couple of reboots. Fortunately I was able to observe the results quietly, and it was a long time before they found out who the culprit was.
Still, the idea went over so well that I convinced a coworker to teach the boss a lesson about not locking his PC. Said coworker diligently followed instructions and installed the BSOD screensaver on the boss' machine. When the boss returned form the meeting he was in, considerably worse for the wear and in a mood to match, the first thing he saw was the BSOD. We heard something (likely a fist) crash on his pc cart and the keyboard jump, fall and clatter. We also heard the boss exclaim something, which I'll refrain from repeating here. The color drained from my coworker's face as he was pretty certain that his time with the company had abruptly ended. My coworker was not a newbie and had probably known better than to follow my instructions, but we couldn't know what the boss' day was turning in to. I must say I found it harder to get the coworker to participate in a prank after that.
------------
Buy the ticket, take the ride. -- Hunter S. Thompson
November 1, 2007 at 5:15 pm
I've never been one for playing tricks on people's computers, but there was this one time....
Back in the early 80's, we had a TRS-80 Model III. There was one production program on it that one of us operators, Terry, took as his own. Well, being a bit of a hacker, I had learned of some of the cool things that TRS-DOS could do, like hiding files and the equivalent of autoexecs. So I wrote a little BASIC program that fired off a random number generator, I think I gave it a 1% chance of continuing, and if it fired, it displayed "Terry is a bozo!" all over the screen. Our system programmer took over the program and tweaked it so that when it finished it drew a rectangle in the middle of the screen along with the special message in a larger font. After a delay, it cleared the screen and ran the appropriate production program.
I wasn't there when it finally tripped as Terry worked in the wee small hours of the morning, but Chuck was. He said Terry just burst out laughing.
We were all more than a little stupid back then, not to mention easily amused.
Actually, I did do a nasty little prank, but it was more of a social engineering thing than an actual computer hardware thing. One of our production systems was a Northstar CP/M system running UCSD Pascal. As I recall, that was the only computer in the building that had a hard drive -- it held FIVE MEGABYTES! The program in question took something like 90 minutes to compile and link. Steve, the system programmer, having started a compile, was wandering around the operations room being a general nuisance and making weird noises. I wandered over to his terminal, where the compile was proceeding along peacefully, and exclaimed "Wow! I've never seen it do THAT before!"
I swear you could hear air rushing into the vacuum where Steve was as he teleported across the room.
-----
[font="Arial"]Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves or we know where we can find information upon it. --Samuel Johnson[/font]
November 1, 2007 at 5:22 pm
G Bryant McClellan (11/1/2007)
I, too, have made use of Sysinternals BSOD screen saver, with varying results.I discovered that network folks can be less than appreciative of the screensaver being put on a production server. Sure, its funny now, but they weren't too happy when they figured out what was going on, AFTER a couple of reboots. Fortunately I was able to observe the results quietly, and it was a long time before they found out who the culprit was.
I always liked that screen saver, I had previously only seen it on linux boxes, I'll have to look it up.
We had a strange screen saver problem once upon a time when I was a DBA for a police department. Each precinct had a sysadmin who was the only semi-functional computer guy there. Their main job was to change backup tapes and do special projects for the commander. We started getting calls from this one precinct that their server was down. The admin had just left a little while ago for the day, so we'd have them go into the admin's office and move the mouse to see if the server had BSOD'd. They went in, server was fine, all was well.
10 minutes later, they call back, server was down. We'd remote in, all was well.
Turns out the admin really liked the 3D Pipes screen saver. That sucker ate 100% of the CPU, thus effectively crashing the server as far as the rest of the users were concerned.
-----
[font="Arial"]Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves or we know where we can find information upon it. --Samuel Johnson[/font]
November 1, 2007 at 8:21 pm
In 1994 it was popular for software companies to bundle their products with other non-competing programs, typically those getting ready to be rev’d and headed for the scrap pile. I was never a fan of this idea figuring that more is not necessarily better, especially when it’s mostly useless junk. However, I agreed to let our VP of Marketing bundle our primary product with 3 others from Symantec and other well known vendors in the hopes of increasing our registered user base (with a friendly side bet that I thought it would be a flop). Shortly after launch, I took several copies of the ‘Utility Pack’ to a local PC Users group meeting as door prizes. When I showed the box to the 100 or so attendees the reaction was immediate and universal – ‘Whoa, that’s one UGLY box!”. And so, “Butt Ugly Box“ (BuB) was born. (Not to be confused with Microsoft BoB).
The product was a huge…..flop (we sold less than 10% of projections) and as thousands of boxes floated back from distribution to our warehouse, I decided our VP was entitled to a little remembrance of his idea. While he was out for lunch, we hauled several hundred boxes to his office and arranged them in the shapes of famous landmarks. Ok, more like just large stacks of boxes with labels, but we didn’t have much time. We had the ‘Leaning Tower o’BuB’, ‘Eiffel BuB’, ‘BuB Canyon’, etc.
By the time he returned there was barely room for him to walk into his office, much less sit down, but the point was made and I won our bet.
Viewing 15 posts - 16 through 30 (of 46 total)
You must be logged in to reply to this topic. Login to reply