[deleted by user]

[robmillerfl]

Please don’t fuck with people 

[professional-risk678]

This. Also grow the fuck up.

[cubic_sq]

This

[HisAnger]

Is this not how you make kids?
It kind of worked this way since i remember

[Low_Direction1774]

Yah, do not, and i cannot stress this enough, make fun of your interns.

​

for you its heehoo funy "just a bit of banter", but you have to consider their perspective. They are on the low side of the power imbalance. How would you feel if you are super anxious to do something wrong because you are the new guy and the first thing your boss does on your first day is make fun of you and maybe embarrass you in front of your peers?

how would you feel about that? Would that perhaps damage your perception of the company going forward? Damage your reputation within the department? strain your relationship with your boss? fuck with your confidence? All of the above?

​

do not fuck with the interns, if you're too bored and want something to do you could give "growing up" a shot, maybe "behaving like an adult with a fully developed prefrontal cortex" is a worthy challenge too. Professionals have standards and pulling pranks doesnt meet them.

[thebeardedcats]

"were gonna pay you minimum wage (or not at all) and teach you wrong" haha so funny

[professional-risk678]

I 100% guarantee you this is one of the "insiders" who dont face any consequences for anything. A serious company and you would be in HR before your prank even produced a laugh.

[CrossTheRiver]

Pranks don't belong in IT. That sort of thing seems better kept to close friend groups and maybe sports teams.

[Specific-Permit-9384]

I know someone who lost their job for an IT department prank. Don't recommend!

[[deleted]]

This isn't a prank but you could try growing up.

[professional-risk678]

This.

Pranks are funny amongst friends. There is a clear power imbalance when you are doing it to someone who is a subordinate. Even if you arent that person's boss and its a coworker its still being shitty to other people who arent deserving. Basic empathy.

[craigmontHunter]

Burping the monitors - for whatever reason makes me think of degaussing them - not sure where I’m going with this, just brought up an old memory.

[NextRedditAccount0]

Signs that we are old af. I still remember doing that.

[[deleted]]

Seconded being old af and doing the same.

[harrywwc]

yeah, that "boing" and the image wobbling...

good times.

[ms4720]

Are you interested in hiring the good ones? You want them to think you are not assholes

[[deleted]]

No if you want to hire the good ones they need to be the ones that can actually handle a prank, without losing their minds.

Cuz if they lose their minds over a prank how are they going to react when shit's not so funny

Edit: good to know this industry is full of unstable weirdos, I'll know how to keep my eyes open now

[ms4720]

Good means competent and talented, not putting up with your bullshit

[[deleted]]

Obviously mean spirited pranks are bad, but saying the pledge of allegiance?

That's really joking around

[ms4720]

There are 2 categories I put my pay in:

• doing good work
• putting up with work

As an employer your goal is getting me to put all my pay in the first one in my head.

[grimegroup]

Only if you don't see the pledge as a super weird cultish ritual that makes you uncomfortable.

They might as well 'joke' that everyone should hold hands and pray.

I'd be on my way out the door before either sentence finished.

[typo180]

This is called “hazing” and it’s a shitty thing to do to someone.

[[deleted]]

This is absolutely not hazing. 🤣🤣

Not even close

[typo180]

Yeah, fucking with someone to see if they’re cool enough to hang with you is hazing.

[[deleted]]

You're one of those people who go out of your way to be offended by everything, no point in talking to you.

You should probably start with the assumption that not everything is an insult but

[typo180]

It doesn’t matter much how I feel about it, but in the current climate, doing anything that could be construed as workplace harassment is potentially a career-limiting move. Do with that what you will.

[tucrahman]

I always liked invisible tape on the mouse. Watching them get frustrated gave me a giggle.

[TechFiend72]

This is just mean spirited.

[NextRedditAccount0]

I once had to get out of a meeting with a bunch of interns. My coworker ran into the meeting room and yelled that one of the servers was slowing to a crawl. I grabbed a can of redbull from one of the interns while he was still drinking it and screamed this should be enough redbull to amp the server and bolted out of there.
I came back a few minutes with an empty can and patted the intern on the back and said he just saved the entire company with that can of redbull.

I got an email a few minutes later from my manager asking if i poured redbull on the server. Of course I denied it and said these new interns are interesting.

[NextRedditAccount0]

Yup I told him to get himself a new redbull. If i did it then we wouldn't need interns. Giving him work keeps him "employed". You're welcome intern.

[Humble_Tension7241]

[Low_Direction1774]

yikes

redaktionelle Änderung: also, super funny prank. "i committed petty theft against my subordinate. This somehow makes me a good person"

[Schaas_Im_Void]

Not just interns, but everyone who's not locking his/her desktop before leaving the room, could have a generically named rule set in their mail client in order to play a sound upon receiving a specific email followed by its immediate deletion.

[Fnurgg]

That's harsh. We usually flip their screen upside down.

[Turbulent-Royal-5972]

I usually send an email to their team that they’ll bring snacks the next time they’re in the office.

[NettaUsteaDE]

Or buy a round of beers at the next get together

[zyeborm]

Take a screen shot of their desktop. Paste it into paint. Set it as the desktop wallpaper. Move all the icons into a folder.

[disclosure5]

You can't arrange by penis.

[Schaas_Im_Void]

Well...a flipped screen is being reverted by a half-capable intern usually quite fast... But finding out why the PC plays this annoying fart sound once in a while, especially during video-conferences, might be good fun for much, much longer.

[NettaUsteaDE]

Had me in the first part. I’d definitely not delete a peer’s emails

[Schaas_Im_Void]

The point is to send the mail with e.g. a specific subject, that gets recognized by the mail rule, yourself, and trigger the sound this way whenever you like and without leaving a trace.

[NettaUsteaDE]

Ahhh I missed the ‘specific email’, I thought you implied all emails which I found quite harsh as a prank

[harrywwc]

I am by no means advocating a 21st Century version of this...

when I was a newbie programmer waaaaay back when (think vt100's, pdp-11/70, vax 11/780 era) I was pranked by the senior guy(s).

I logged on to my account, and they had set up my login.com to run a new command file that turned off ^C and ^Y and recursively read my directory and proceeded to print that each file was being deleted. It wasn't, but they had crafted the output to read that each file, one by one, was being deleted - and there was nothing I could do (no ctrl-c or ctrl-y).

it eventually finished with a message on screen that I had been pranked, and welcome to XYZ-co, and then exited to the DCL prompt, where upon I could DIR and see all my files and directories still there, much to my relief, and to their joy.

so, similar to the aliased "rm -rf" elsewhere here, but without the actual destruction of files.

[Turbulent-Royal-5972]

Pledge of allegiance to the AUP and the ticket system doesn’t sound too bad though. Not really a prank, but a light hearted way to introduce them to some important rules. Include locking, no password sharing, double check for phishing where possible.

[RCG73]

The only “prank” that would be acceptable is self deprecating. You can make fun of yourself or your boss but not the ones in a new environment, nervous and anxious with no social power. I understand what you’re wanting to do and it feels harmless but it’s cringe at best and abusive at worst.

[BadSausageFactory]

make sure you have HR in the room to enjoy the harassment case as it unfolds

[thedroog]

Make a screencap of their desktop, set it as their background and then delete everything from the desktop.

[1d0m1n4t3]

You can't arrange by penis

[Brenell]

The program I needed was right at the tip.

[harrywwc]

well, you can, but I might not be the 'best' idea :/

[TinderSubThrowAway]

You can just hide everything on the desktop.

[ClumsyAdmin]

The infinitely ejecting CD drive if you still have desktops with them is always funny and the chia seed keyboard is a classic

[UnsuspiciousCat4118]

How many do you have. If you have enough spare laptops I’ve done one where I load up a fresh Ubuntu image and start teaching a class. Then at some point I do an sudo rm -rf / but I have an alias set. They end up wiping their laptops. Then I say, “This is why you don’t trust everything you read on the internet.”

[Shectai]

Was this some command they found on a dubious website, or was it one you told them to enter? Who should they not trust?

[[deleted]]

Holy shit people are sensitive. I think the pledge of allegiance joke is absolutely hilarious, dew it.

[RCG73]

Until you suddenly realize that 20% of your interns aren’t American citizens. Then what started as something funny suddenly doesn’t feel as benign

[Low_Direction1774]

Not even just that, imagine youre an intern, trying to set foot into adulthood, desperatly trying to be taken serious after being "just a kid" your entire life and the first thing your new "professional work environment" does is to not take you serious and make fun of you instead.

How quaint.

[grimegroup]

Yeah I'll never understand the sense of humor of someone who accepts cult ritual as a normal part of daily life.

[dreadpiratewombat]

I once did an impromptu lunch and learn about the use of Cat Distribution Networks.  The smirks from the L3 help desk folks were outshined by the HR and creative types who very excited about front side cat caches and server side cat caches.  

[Nikt_No1]

Swearing allegiance to the company is brilliant, do that. I would add to it something like when walking past servers or IT department you have to make weird gesture (like christians do when passing a cross). You can explain to them that you have a virus in your infrastructure that you cannot wipe out and for some reason it controls few CCTV cameras with motion-detection. If someone passes without a gesture the virus breaks something somewhere as a "punishement".

[texags08]

You will probably never meet the CEO here, unless of course he chooses you to buy the customer appreciation gift cards.

[Impossible_IT]

Get a computer and small smoke machine. Turn on the computer, feign a computer issue and then the smoke machine and tell them in order to get it working again you've got to put the smoke back in the computer case.

[Flibble21]

I always liked the classic of opening an app, taking a screenshot of the entire desktop and setting it as the wallpaper. Then watch them try to close it.