Hmm.. a college of mine is currently on holiday and will come back next week.
Now I'm wondering what I could do to fool him.

What I already did some time ago:

- took the mouseball out of the mouse
- changed the monitor settings and the colour-phases
- mixed up the switch-box connections of mouse/keyboard/monitor
- took an old DAT-Tape and fixed his chair, monitor, mouse keyboard etc alltogether
- glued his mouse on his mousepad
- locked a few keys of his keyboard

got the idea? what else could I do?


TeeMcBee
Got my Mk2! # 080000143

Take a screen shot of his desktop and use it as the backdrop.
Then select all the real desktop icons and hide them off screen.

Instant fun as he double clicks on the picture trying to open "My Computer"... =)

Two links with more of the same...
http://www.littlewhitedog.com/reviews_other_00015.asp and
http://www.littlewhitedog.com/reviews_other_00019.asp.

For educational use only though... =)

Jazz
(List 112, Mk2 12 gig #40. Mk1 4 gig #30. Mk3 1.6 16v)

Make a backup of his pc. Format the harddrive. Watch him in despair when he turns the pc on in the morning. Lots of fun.

.. or if his is not the touch typist kind of guy. Switch a few of the keys around.

Regards,
Kaare.

Mark II - S/N: 702

The format thing takes too much time. Just wanna make some simple jokes - easy to restore but hard to find the reason.

Change the font-color to background-color in word.. something like that.

TeeMcBee
Got my Mk2! # 080000143

You could try alt.shenanigans for this kind of thing.



Roger - not necessarily speaking for empeg

Use AutoCorrect in Word to change words like:

Sir,
Yours,
Dear,
(their address)
US

I'll leave the changed to values as an exercise for the reader.

Cheers

Paul.

Paul Haigh, Reg. 4120
(mk1) 6GB, Blue, 00254
(mk2) 12GB, Red, 00357

Wow! That's really extreme.

I don't want to get on the wrong side of you!

And when the backup tape is blank?

Cheers,

Paul.


Paul Haigh, Reg. 4120
(mk1) 6GB, Blue, 00254
(mk2) 12GB, Red, 00357

what else could I do?

If you have a Unix machine running a samba (Windows file sharing) server, put a file in his home directory called C:\*.*

If he tries to delete that file from Explorer, it'll delete the real C:\*.* (at least on Win95/98. It doesn't work on NT/2K)

If he has a Unix shell account that he doesn't really know how to use, put a file in his home directory called "-rf .*" (with the space) and watch as he types "rm -rf .*" (that one from news:alt.tech-support.recovery)

Peter

good ideas - maybe I'll come back to them for another co-worker :-))
But this college has W2K and usually doesn't work on samba-shares. :-(

TeeMcBee
Got my Mk2! # 080000143

- took an old DAT-Tape and fixed his chair, monitor, mouse keyboard etc alltogether

How did you tie his stuff together with a DAT tape?


DiGNAN
Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da, etc.

I pulled out the tape-strip itself out of the cassette and put it X-times around his mouse, keyboard,...

TeeMcBee
Got my Mk2! # 080000143

Alter the refresh rate on the monitor/pc to 60Hz or lower.

Then remove the appropriate tabs from display panel.

Also what was the point of:

- took the mouseball out of the mouse
- glued his mouse on his mousepad

Doesn't the second make the first a bit pointless?

Drives me crazy.

Paul.

Paul Haigh, Reg. 4120
(mk1) 6GB, Blue, 00254
(mk2) 12GB, Red, 00357

i think the point was the mouse trick were played on separate occations.

12gig red mk2 -- 080000125

Of course I didn't do all the things at the same time...

TeeMcBee
Got my Mk2! # 080000143

I thought that this might be a bit extreme.....

Paul.

Paul Haigh, Reg. 4120
(mk1) 6GB, Blue, 00254
(mk2) 12GB, Red, 00357

One of my personal favorites is registry fun. Remap his keyboard - only one or two keys (substitute other keys, multiple characters per keystroke, etc.). Use remote registry access to change the person's registry on the fly. Change the default boot order to always boot from another drive. Don't forget the telephone! If you can rig a ringer with a remote control...

Paul G.
SN# 090000587 (40GB Green)

Simple one:

Put sellotape on the earpiece of his phone. Listen to him say "This is a really bad line, could you speak up"

Something a friend who used to work for the telephone department used to do was swap the numbered buttons on the phone from left to right and right to left.
From this:-

123

456

789

to this:-

321

654

987

The few times he did it the people using the phone took ages to work out why they kept getting the wrong number.

ChrisTall
That really is my name!

Remind me never to work at any company you're working at.

Scott Adams wrote a whole book, "The Joy of Work", about having fun at the expense of your co-workers. Some of these kinds of things were in that book.

Personally, I have one that I learned back in the Windows 3.1 days that you might be able to get working in some cases. It's a variation of the "wallpaper is screen shot of desktop" gag:

Almost every application has the ability to remember and save its window position on the screen. For each app on his system that has this feature, move them completely off the screen and exit them via keyboard commands.

When he runs them, they'll appear in his taskbar, but won't appear on his screen. This was more fun in the Windows 3.1 days when there was no taskbar. You could even pull this stunt with the 3.1 Program Manager and File Manager, causing no end of trouble.

Note that most apps won't let you move them completely off the screen, they need at least the upper-left-corner pixel on the screen. Move them as far off the screen as you can, then drag their upper-left corner all the way down until all you see is the one pixel.

___________
Tony Fabris

Yeah, we changed 'the' to 'banana' on one support persons PC...

Endless amusment... =)

Jazz
(List 112, Mk2 12 gig #40. Mk1 4 gig #30. Mk3 1.6 16v)

Even better, put tape over the pickup switch so when they pickup the receiver it doesn't stop ringing... =)

Jazz
(List 112, Mk2 12 gig #40. Mk1 4 gig #30. Mk3 1.6 16v)

Ohhhhh yesssss.... I know someone who will be getting a taped switch today in this very office... lol. That's a great one.


|| loren.cox || 080000446 ||

I did this one to one of our sales staff, known not altogether affectionately as "The Weasel".

Edited his autoexec.bat file to call a batch file that was along the lines of:

cls
echo "Fatal Boot Error at Memory Location 14bf??:ffff"
echo " "
echo " "
echo "Press any key to Continue"
echo " "
pause
echo "Fatal Error at HDD Controller"
echo "Do Not Continue this Process or Irreparable Hard Drive Damage Will Occur"
echo " "
echo " "
echo "Call Packard Bell Technical Support for Assistance at 1-900-555-1234"
echo " "
pause

and of course the 1-900 number was a phone-sex line. It was staggeringly funny listening to the Weasel trying to explain a boot memory allocation error to a lady whose only idea about boots were thigh-high and leather and God only knows what she was thinking when the topic turned to his Hard Drive. Could have been worse, I guess -- the batch file didn't talk about his Floppy. :-)

tanstaafl.

"There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch"

That is art!!
This one goes down into the little black book of "Crimes to Commit Against DFU's"

Sweet!

Smoker_Man
#080000449 MkII - 36Gb Blue

That reminds me of an incident. Some time ago a co-worker of mine called me to say I had to return a call to England. He gave me the number and when I called, I had a guy on the other end who was cursing like hell. Everytime I tried to talk to him, he started raging again. It turned out he had given me a number of some english phone-curse-line

Frank van Gestel

A good idea. But I'm not sure how I could swap the numbers on our phones...

TeeMcBee
Got my Mk2! # 080000143

unfortunately the phone has no pickup you can fix. It's an indicator-pickup. And I don't want to have too much afford to play my tricks.

TeeMcBee
Got my Mk2! # 080000143

Well - he's system administrator. He wouldn't call someone for such problems. He'd solve them for himself. So you can just do some pretty tricky things...

TeeMcBee
Got my Mk2! # 080000143

Remind me never to work at any company you're working at.

Why not? You'd have great fun with us

The things I've done till now:

- I locked the keyboard's "SHIFT"-key with a small screw. When typing in his password he'll fail. When selecting and doubleclicking an icon all icons from the first up to the selected will be selected and opened (If he can click fast enough - see Nr.2)
- I set his double-click speed to maximum - It'll take a while till he 'll recognize what's going on at this point
- I made a screenshot of his desktop. Then I hid the taskbar and all icons and set up the monitor so that he'd never see the taskbar (which is not on the bottom any more but on the right side). Unfortunately he was logged off so I had to do this on my profile of his PC. But it'll take some time till he tries the "CTRL-ALT-DEL"... and then Nr. 1 and 2 are still waiting


It'll be a great fun next monday.

TeeMcBee
Got my Mk2! # 080000143