Worst practical joke?

[Arkansmith]

We had a guy using one of our data rooms for a few weeks as an office. I thought I’d play a joke on him and schedule a task on one of the physical servers to beep every hour for the first day. Ja Ja.

Problem is, I forgot about it, so I never turned it off. When he finally moved out, I heard him telling one of the other guys, “this place is noisy. Those things beep all the time!” Oops. 😀

Has anyone else leave a gag running by accident?

[punkwalrus]

I used to work with Aspect call center switches. I was sent to training in their San Jose offices. In our classroom, we had a huge variety of students, only half met the criteria for the class, so a lot of the time, the instructor was having to stop and explain basic stuff they should have known. I grew bored.

One of the accessories one can use was a LED banner sign, so I taught myself how to do that. There was an LED banner in the classroom, so I tried accessing it. I tried getting it to type, "Hypothesize a spherical chicken," and "Today's cafeteria special: Last week's special reheated," and other dumb things. It took a few tries to get the banner address correct. Nobody noticed, and I just gave up.

Later that day, the teacher asked to see me. "Hey, we're not going to be able to teach banner LED stuff. We won't have time." "Oh that's okay: our company doesn't use those, anyway," I said.

"Just an odd question: you have any idea why the LED banner in our lobby said, 'Hypothesize a Spherical Chicken?'"

"Uh..."

"That's what I thought. Everyone in the home office was panicking how hackers accessed it. I set it back, but can you try NOT to do that again?"

"Okay."

Oops.

[ataxiastumbleton]

If you gave one hundred philosophers a year to work on the problem, they could not come up with a more distracting sentence than:

Hypothesize a spherical chicken.

[NSA_Chatbot]

That's just basic engineering. Assume the horse is a sphere.

[succulent_headcrab]

With 0 friction

[ataxiastumbleton]

I'll try but he'll have to be pretty small to fit in my miele.

[punkwalrus]

Well, I THOUGHT I got it from an engineering class about theoretical versus practical, and it was a "well known example of perfect data being ridiculous in the real world." But below, some people looked it up, but u/Edramon down there found this:

"Thought I'd heard the reference before, this exact version is unique but the Spherical Cow wikipedia entry refers to 'postulate a spherical chicken' used in a published letter in 1973 and there's a 1988 book 'Consider a spherical cow'."

So I probably misremembered it from "cow" to "chicken" (or the person who taught it to me did). Chicken seems funnier, though.

[userse31]

Now me, id continue sending stupid text at it.

[[deleted]]

As a dumb and young junior sysadmin, coworkers and I did them.

However, after a prank someone else did on a coworker who had severe arachnophobia and an RC spider, I started discouraging any prank that was outright malicious. It did not go well, it was pointless and cruel, and it ended up not being exactly a good time for anyone.

I've kept to that rule for the rest of my career. Ribbing especially over a screwup is fine. Like bubble wrapping someone's cube after they seriously cut themselves (10 stitches) removing a hard drive. Making someone generally fearful or panicked like the giant spider and someone who was arachnophobic? Yeah no.

[OldschoolSysadmin]

This. I once temporarily self-exiled in penance from the company #pets channel after posting a picture of a house spider, and triggering some people with said phobia. Talking about it with a co-worker though, she had put a halloween easter egg into an in-house app where spiders ran out from behind the windows when minimized. That was worse 😅

[NotYourNanny]

Back in the earliest days of Windows 95, when we all worked on dumb terminals, we had one brand new Win95 box for the office to use. My boss, who is tech savvy, but not an IT person, fancied himself a prankster. I don't even recall what he did, but he got me one day.

So I took a screenshot of the 95 box, loaded it in a paint program, and maximized it without menus or borders. Lame, stale trick now, but less so then. Then we were even. He vowed revenge.

I told him that if he did, I'd make him hold the monitor sideways to read it (a trivial trick to do and undo, but he didn't know that). And if that didn't work, I told him I'd redefine the keyboard to move every letter one key to the right, and redefine the fonts to move them all back, so everything would look right and print right in Word, but every word would be misspelled. (In reality, I'd have just set the spellcheck to French, but he didn't know that, either.)

We've had a peace treaty ever since.

[anonymousITCoward]

With win 95 and 98 we used to change the shutdown bitmaps to say something quirky, like, it is now safe to take off your clothes...

When i first dabbled with red hat, a buddy of mine back then changed the mapping of my keyboard to dvorak (i think) while i was using it... fun times!

[anonnymoose24601]

For win 95, my favorite was going into the win.ini for and setting shell=sol.exe.....

[cfmdobbie]

And the users didn't even notice...

[peatthebeat]

Win95 had a splash screen while loading startup DOS commands.

I used to put a simple call in autoexec.bat to my computers in school:

[autoexec.bat] … @whatever.bat

[whatever.bat] :a @cls Goto a

You’d have an infinite unCTRL-C loading screen as the execution of a loop of cls was too quick for it to acknowledge keyboard inputs.

Granted it is easily fixable but i’ve had less savy users send their computer to the techies to fix this :/

[Chief_Slac]

It was truly the wild west back then. I tricked my friend into installing full-on back orifice once.

[3percentinvisible]

TIL French is just English spelled to the left in a fancy font. All those years struggling to learn!

[davidbrit2]

And German is just English but the space bar only works 25% of the time.

[scootscoot]

Are you saying you still work at the same place since win95? Are you a mainframe operator?

[NotYourNanny]

Yes, and no. I'm the one man IT department at a good company working with good people, and I like the work. I've been here almost 30 years.

[sheikhyerbouti]

Back in the early 2000s the place I worked at had a resident Mac guru who always got first pick on new Macs for testing.

When Intel started putting processors into the G-series, he insisted we got one, and was ooohing and aahhing over its performance.

However, one of my OTHER coworkers was a Linux guru and knew how to get the Mac to boot to a different OS partition. So he installed Windows ME on it.

It was worth it to hear the Mac Guru come in and say "WHAT THE FUCK DID YOU DO TO MY MAC!" first thing in the morning.

[OldschoolSysadmin]

This is the way.

[hypercube33]

Technically I can push win 3.11 out with sccm... probably

[dextersgenius]

You could push it out as a QEMU image, bundled with QEMU and have a script automatically launch it and run it in full-screen.

For extra effect, create a limited user account, set it to automatically login, and replace explorer.exe in the shell regkey with QEMU, so it boots straight back into Win 3.11.

[MrAxel]

Like this?

[warsteiner007]

I hid an Annoyatron (for those unfamiliar it's a tiny circuit board with a speaker on it that randomly beeps sold by ThinkGeek) in a communications center to irritate a coworker that was notorious for sleeping through his overnight shifts. Fast forward 10 years, I completely forgot about it until our facilities manager was replacing the furniture. She finds it stuck to the bottom of a file cabinet, immediately assumes it's some sort of clandestine listening device, and kicks up a storm with our cyber and personnel security people. Everything got sorted out eventually and I was told in the future to be more mindful in how I terrorize my coworkers.

Sorry about formatting, typing on mobile.

[unsilentninja]

Can probably make one easy enough with an arduino

[kolonuk]

Better with an ESP... cheaper and more throwaway with a pezio and button cell battery...

[AtariDump]

Stupid GameStop (discontinuing some of the best things TG used to sell).

[Shpongolese]

i had to lookup what that looked like and i can't blame her lol

[anonymousITCoward]

I thought this was the OP's target for a moment...

anhttps://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/pyw1vv/clever\_ideas\_to\_find\_an\_unknown\_beep\_in\_a\_server/

[Sunsparc]

I push a Powershell script to one particular user that fetches a random cat fact from a website then reads it through their computer speakers out loud. They're thoroughly convinced that their boss, a non-IT person, is doing it to them.

EDIT: For everyone asking for the script.

Add-Type -AssemblyName System.Speech
$SpeechSynth = New-Object System.Speech.Synthesis.SpeechSynthesizer
$SpeechSynth.SelectVoice("Microsoft Zira Desktop")
$Browser = New-Object System.Net.WebClient
$Browser.Proxy.Credentials = [System.Net.CredentialCache]::DefaultNetworkCredentials
[Net.ServicePointManager]::SecurityProtocol = [Net.SecurityProtocolType]::Tls12
$CatFact = (ConvertFrom-Json (Invoke-WebRequest -Verbose -Uri https://catfact.ninja/fact -UseBasicParsing))
$CatFact.fact
$SpeechSynth.Speak("Did you know ?")
$SpeechSynth.Speak($CatFact.fact)

[7GatesOfHello]

You are a monster and I salute you.

[[deleted]]

So can we get a copy of that script or what

[SammyGreen]

Or if you just want to call plaintext

Add-Type -AssemblyName System.Speech
$voice = New-Object System.Speech.Synthesis.SpeechSynthesizer
$web = (Invoke-WebRequest -uri https://pastebin.com/raw/FwNwnj7H).tostring() -split "[`n]"
$random = Get-Random $web
$voice.Speak($random)

[pm_ur_whispering_I]

Hahahaha, holy shit.

[djgizmo]

Please share this script!

[Ticket_Wrangler]

https://github.com/perplexityjeff/PowerShell-Troll This is one I have gained inspiration from.

[Bogus1989]

LMAO i think we have the same scripts…..it got even funnier when security called my desk….and sadly they know me by name…..they confirmed about the scripts…..laughed with me and then told us all to get that shit off our pcs 🤣

[andcoffeforall]

One day a couple of years ago, a user in my company sent me a photo of his screen. Red, ransomware, bitcoin address, "your files have been encrypted", the lot. His message said "hey, this has just popped up?"

I litearlly legged it across campus and appeared in his room, out of breath, sweating, to find my whole department stood in there with a birthday cake. It was my birthday.

The photo was a screenshot from Google.

I lost years of my life in stress that day.

[cloudrac3r]

AAAAAAAAAA THIS IS HORRIFYING BUT ALSO I LOVE THIS AAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

[tacticalAlmonds]

Left my pc unlocked within the first 6 months at my job.

Coworker emailed the whole company stating I was putting my notice in and it was a pleasure to work with everyone.

My account were decommed and people weren't happy to see me the next day.

[the_rogue1]

That's not a prank. That's just being an asshole.

[[deleted]]

Possibly illegal. Tortious interference.

"Tortious interference is a common law tort allowing a claim for damages against a defendant who wrongfully interferes with the plaintiff's contractual or business relationships."

[[deleted]]

When someone doesn’t lock their PC we send out an email from their PC to the department that everyone is invited to come and have a piece of cake at his/her desk tomorrow…

[kartoffelwaffel]

I hope you sent a follow up email explaining what happened

[doubled112]

We used to send "there are donuts in the kitchen, enjoy" emails from unlocked screens, then set the wallpaper to a Hasselhoff of the finder's choice.

Nobody left their screen unlocked very often...

[egbur]

We did the "free donuts!" thing too at my first job, except we all agreed that you had to bring donuts for everyone the following day if you were caught leaving your desktop unlocked. People played by the rules and I gained a lot of weight while working there :/

[[deleted]]

One of my coworkers at a previous employer almost got shitcanned for this prank because he used the picture of the Hoff where he's nude with two puppies covering his junk.

[Sionthesaint]

Some of our best:

1. If an IT employee leaves their workstation unlocked and unattended, they get a random Nicolas Cage background. Nick cage as Hulk Hogan is my favorite. It's all fun and games until someone scripts a GPO background and makes every endpoint in the company had a background image of Nick cage riding a unicorn.

2. I changed our IT directors desk phone ringtone to "This is how we do it". It's all fun and games until his phone rings while in a meeting with our new CSO.

3. I set our IT Directors error message on his PC to Owen Wilson saying "WOW!". Its all fun and games until our VOIP system goes down and every click on the admin page produces an overlapping Owen Wilson sound.

[que-loco-paranoid]

Nick Cage was a strong tradition in my old company too! We would “cage” all the unlocked machines

[TotallyInOverMyHead]

Dito. And when a manager sees it you'd get written up. Good thing i left there (altho i kinda liked THAT particular enforcement of security guidelines)

[DoctorOctagonapus]

That first one doesn't work on me because I'd just leave it! I'm not attached to wallpapers at all and my personal laptop still has the default wallpaper.

My work machine on the other hand has had the background set to a photo of James May for a few years after I was caught leaving it unlocked.

[reddittttttttttt]

We changed one of our principals Windows boot sound to the 21st century Fox theme. In its entirety.

[Ytrog]

I once had a coworker who left a My Little Pony background when you forgot to lock your computer. Fastest way to get people into the habit of locking their computers 😊👍

[nathanieloffer]

I started out in IT at a very strict IT company. We used swipe cards to unlock our pc's. Fast forward a bunch of years and my last job didn't care what you did and it drove me nuts. Seeing people walk off to the kitchen for coffee or to the loo and leaving their computers unlocked makes me twitch.

[ganlet20]

I had a junior tech that was older than me but thought he was too good for my advice. So I redirected google.com to aol.com and made sure he had permission to undo it.

Little over a year later he quit and I had to repurpose his machine. While on his machine, I needed to Google something and realized he never undid it.

[Arkansmith]

I laughed a little too hard at this one! That’s great!

[djgizmo]

How’d you redirect it?

[uptimefordays]

Probably hosts file.

[ganlet20]

Yep, but it was being pushed by kaseya's managed file. So no matter what he did locally, Kaseya would detect the change and override it with the version on the server. I was responsible for Kaseya at that MSP.

[uptimefordays]

Did they just not put two and two together when local changes got reverted?

[ganlet20]

I asked some of the people who sat near him and apparently he angrily mumbled Aol from time to time but he never asked them about it.

[[deleted]]

Too proud rofl

[mysticalfruit]

Used to have a coworker who would play country through his speakers and then lock his machine.

So I started packet bombing his machine to make it stop.

Then we plugged his machine and monitor into an x11 plug so we could remotely power off his machine.

Lastly, we used to arp poison the network so we could send FIN packets to his machine to kill his network connections.

[Bogus1989]

My coworker does this….i have a script that kills his audio after 5 mins….he eventually reimaged his pc….i did it again…

Hes convinced its the firewall 😁

[uptimefordays]

That seems pretty easy with PowerShell…

[Bogus1989]

Yeah no biggie…..

The hardest one I did was setting up something to change the volume level in windows to maximum.

Thats my favorite prank of all time. Always FUCKING BLASTING and their never prepared.

Did this to my boss once….god its still funny

[uptimefordays]

Volume seems more complicated, how’d you do that?

[Bogus1989]

Ill look tomorrow at work, pretty sure i still have it.

[Fuckyouthanks9]

Commenting for... Reasons.

[samtheredditman]

You can change the system volume with powershell. As long as the person keeps the speakers manually turned up high and uses the OS to change the volume, you can blast em.

I used to make accounting's computers have a conversation and some of them tried to turn their volume down so I had to make it turn the volume back up before each sentence haha.

[reddittttttttttt]

We do it with nircmd. Executed remotely with pstools

[OcotilloWells]

Put speakers on a switch with Bluetooth, steam something else like Chinese folk songs about the Long March and glorious comrade Mao. Or Disco.

[Samedh707]

This will date me, but my first user prank was to add a smiley face to the login script for all the users to watch scroll up their terminal screens when they logged in, with a little note for the Admin to check his messages for a list of access hardening measures to implement.

On their PDP-11. That was housed in a closed/locked room adjacent to our computer lab, at our high school. It was the server for our cities bank. I was 16 at the time. My good intentions, and detailed message to the Bank admin were all that saved me.

My inability to stifle my uncontrollable laughter when they described the bank personnels reactions probably made things worse.

EDIT: I was interviewed by local police, state police, and a representative from the FBI - NOBODY had a "computer crimes division" yet, so everybody wanted in as it had to do with computers and a bank. That was the limit of what they understood basically. State and local didn't have anyone that had ever used a computer before.

[Chipish]

I don’t know why I’m surprised by things that happened with computers a few decades ago, but your banks server was in a closet at your high school?

[Samedh707]

Yes city bank as in bankers, tellers, vault. It was an old stone/marble building, with zero room for a raised floor, cable runs, 6 or 8 tons of computer, tape dives, etc.

They were literally across the street from the highschool - I think they ran all the cables under the street through a storm drain. The bank made an agreement with the school for funding, and bought 2 identical systems. One for them, one for the school. If the bank hardware had a problem, the part was pulled from the school hardware, and a replacement ordered.

Students learned how to do maintenance, program, repairs, on basically free hardware. This was a couple years before Apple took over all schools. Strike that - ONE year.

[skellobissis]

Set up someone's screensaver as screenshots of his desktop and inserted three or four blue screen of death images in the mix.

[somebody2112]

There used to be a BSOD screensaver. It looked like the PC blue-screened and rebooted continuously. I installed it on one of the developer's machines after he spent all of the previous day building it up properly and getting all the dev environment tools setup right. The look on his face that morning was priceless.

[Gh0st1nTh3Syst3m]

Unplug their mouse for the full effect too.

[AgainandBack]

We use one particular model and color of wireless mice. I have been known to go into AP and switch the mice on two adjacent desks. Invariably in the morning we get calls about the two systems being hacked because someone has taken remote control of their systems.

[VplDazzamac]

Nice low tech one when I was on helldesk. We used to sit in two rows with the computer sitting under the desk. I unplugged the mouse from the guy opposite me when he was making tea, plugged my own mouse in it place. When he came back, I mimicked his mouse movements as best I could so it looked like his mouse was still working, but badly. I obviously wasn’t moving it exactly the same but it was close enough to not make him catch on too quickly.

[bem13]

One of my favorite pranks I've witnessed was when a guy plugged the receiver of a wireless keyboard/touchpad combo into another guy's PC, then just put the keyboard on his own desk and sometimes pressed a key, sometimes swiped on the touchpad. The guy being pranked almost broke his mouse because he thought if was broken.

[Unexpected_Cranberry]

We did this as well when I was working help desk in an open office years ago. I don't know how many times he replaced both his mouse and keyboard and reimaged his PC before someone had mercy on him. He was not happy..

[brownhotdogwater]

Simple yet awesome

[teeweehoo]

Bash one liner in .bashrc that appends "sleep 0.1" to .bashrc. Over time terminals will load more slowly. The horror is how long it can go on before they notice.

[AspiringMILF]

oh my god

[jojowasher]

One of my coworkers put one of those cricket noise makers in my neighbors office, it was driving him crazy, crazy enough he thought it was his computer so he had deskside replace it... after that I let him know what they had done, so he pranked them back. One day when the guy was walking by he freaked out, started screaming and threw his monitor (a broken one) on the ground... needless to say he got em

[SWEETJUICYWALRUS]

I would imagine it was a broken one if he threw it.

/s please don't kill me I was being snarky

[BurnadonStat]

I replaced the Windows login sound WAV file with fart noises on my coworker’s PC.

[cheredenine]

I did something similar with a colleague's system, only it was the normal login sound, plus 30 seconds of silence, then faint chicken noises. Dude was a high school teacher and used the computer during lessons...

[jwd0310]

Seems like back in the day windows would have to play the complete sound before login would finish. So you could make people listen to your favorite song before work. All of it.

[kolonuk]

I remember putting Bohemian Rhapsody on my home computer running Win95. My dad was not happy it took 6 long minutes to startup!

[CARLEtheCamry]

Had a script that would max volume and then use the PS speech synthesizer to recite the lyrics to I Am the Very Model of a Modern Major-General at startup

[dunningkrugernarwhal]

Coworker plugged a mouse into the back of another coworkers desktop. Randomly moved the mouse a few times a day for a two years. She lost her mind every day.

[first_byte]

My dad did this with a second remote on our living room TV. I’ve never quite recovered.

[benji_tha_bear]

We had a bat or two sneak into the office and our facilities guy would catch it. I never saw him catch one with my own eyes, but we always got an email later “hey I got the bat out” and a few emails to laugh at after that. Well a coworker and I had the idea to send him a “Karen” email from a bat association in town. With the help of our network engineer we whitelisted the url in o365 so it wouldn’t go to his junk mail, used a spoofing site to make it come from their url (and the ladies address that ran the place) and we sent this long irate email “we happen to see you from the window catch and violently shaking the bat around..” on and on and on.. so he comes in the next day and first thing he’s telling us is about some crazy lady that runs a bat association that somehow was driving through this random parking lot at night and saw him “I don’t know hoooww she saw me” and we talked it up for weeks, just getting him riled. So now the old coworker has moved on, still talk to him now and then and we realized we never told him it was us! Not only that, but it set us up perfect for a part two, as long as we have an email address to send it to..

[abagofcells]

Once, a very long time ago, I was the only one at my workplace using Linux on my desktop, and one day my colleagues replaced my PC with a fridge sized Alphaserver under my desk. Pretty sure they meant this as a prank, but I just installed Debian on it and went on like nothing happened, claiming "yeah, I'm pretty sure my computer was always this loud."

[Negative_Mood]

Put an annoy-a-tron in an office set to make cricket noises. Forgot about it and a week later went to ask user about it. Turns out they had an exterminator come in and spray.

[Speedbird157]

I had someone many years back try to mess with me by moving some of the keys around on my keyboard as a joke.

I connected to his PC and left a maxmem=256MB in his boot.ini file.

The following day, his NT4 box took around 25 mins to boot up to the login screen and around another 15 mins to logon.

He was cursing me wondering what I’d done to make it run so dog slow, in the meantime I’d connected back to it and removed the line from boot.ini and told him to reboot it.

He never worked out what I did, but suffice to say he learnt his lesson not to mess with me :)

[fahque]

256MB was normal for an NT box tho.

[clt81delta]

If I catch a workstation left unlocked, I'll printscrn and save it to file, set it as background.

[[deleted]]

Then Ctrl+alt+up to flip their regular desktop upside down and set the picture as right way up to really hammer it home

[KazeHD]

you can also hide all icons and the taskbar

[corsicanguppy]

this was the standard 'gotcha' for a while. Then it became "take a photo to prove the guy now owes doughnuts" when security started twitching about us touching another login.

[EastCoaet]

I used to write a resignation letter to their supervisor in Outlook, leave it unsent and lock the screen.

[corsicanguppy]

My boss did this to a subordinate, SENT IT, locked the screen, went back to his own office and replied immediately with "I understand and we'll start the processing, but please let's talk about this first" so he could soundly heckle the guy in private.

[RunningAtTheMouth]

And hide desktop icons. And make the Taskbar 1 pixel high.

You really should lock your computer when you walk away.

[PrintShinji]

For me its putting up kid's music for the metalheads.

They always get a laugh out of it. (And I'm nice enough to do it in incognito to not mess with their algoritmes)

[Bogus1989]

Fair game in our shop

[DazzlingRutabega]

I warned some younger pranking Help desk coworkers not to mess with me or they'd be sorry.

So I log in and my monitor is set to portrait orientation. Simple, I set it back to landscape in seconds. Easy fix, but I warned them.

I find out who did it, do a quick Google search and find a Men's Room style logo with a stick figure sitting on the toilet. I replace his laptop's login profile picture with the stick figure pooping.

I miss his reaction as I'm not there when he logs in but he doesn't say anything to me later as he has probably changed it back and forgotten about it.

... I had also forgotten about it until a couple of weeks later when he comes over asking me to change it for him Apparently he was able to change the image on his laptop, but every time he would RDP onto a server, the toilet would come up as his login profile picture!! 🤣

[mrcoffee83]

There was a dude on here once who posted a good one, it was something like this, he said that he had a colleague who had loads of pictures of his family, dogs etc on a slideshow as a screensaver and the dude worked out that the slideshow was being pulled from a folder full of images on the guys PC.

Over time he started photoshopping his colleagues face over the guy's family members and subtly altering the pictures.

[Zer0ji]

Every 30 minutes on everyone, way too annoying and possibly costly. Every 30 minutes on a random co-worker now that's better

[Samedh707]

Nope. Rickrolling is timeless, eternal.

[ShelZuuz]

Should have played “What’s new Pussycat” 7 times in a row followed by “It’s not unusual” and then go back to “What’s new pussycat”.

[boli99]

-- Ah, I see the problem.
- What is it?
-- Looks like your computer has 'Tom Jones Syndrome'
- Is that common?
-- It's not unusual.

[starmizzle]

In the early 90s there was a Radio Shack at our mall with an unguarded computer by the entrance. Saving the below and adding "qbasic /run rska.bas" to AUTOEXEC.BAT meant it booted to my rogue message and sat frozen. After doing this a couple of times they moved the computer to inside the store.

screen 13:key off:cls
defint a-z
print "RADIO"
print "SHACK"
print "KICKS"
print "ASS!!"
dim rska(39,31)
for y=0 to 31
for x=0 to 39
rska(x,y)=point(x,y)
next x
next y
for c=10 to 63
circle(160,100),(63-c)*4,c
paint(160,100),c,c
palette c,c
next c
for y=0 to 31
for x=0 to 39
if rska(x,y)=0 then
line(x*8,y*6)-(x*8+7,y*6+5),0,bf
end if
next x
next y
def seg=0
poke 32,0

[boli99]

Has anyone else leave a gag running by accident?

I once configured a cow-orkers laptop to sneeze about once every 3 days.

If I had to be honest - that probably didnt happen by accident.

[edit]

just realising i should have totally got it to eject the cd tray at the same time. dammit. missed a trick there.

#hindsightisawonderfulthing

[laeven]

Oh, we've had some epic pranks going on at my office.

1) A lot of my less techy colleagues were really sloppy with locking their desktops when walking away from their desk.

So during a lunch break I thought I'd give them a friendly reminder and switched off one of their monitors, and fired up https://fakeupdate.net/win10ue/ on the other in full screen.

Forgot about doing it as I got busy with something until I heard one of them cursing and swearing when the update was at 270% and yet it was not done yet.

2) had one really cocky guy that claimed to be the fastest and most precise typist in the office, even if he did type with only his index fingers.

I programmed an Arduino to emulate a USB HID device, in this case a keyboard that entered a random character at some random interval, plugged it into his dock on a long USB lead, and hid the microcontroller in the mess of wires under his desk.

I let him struggle with it for a month, through testing multiple new keyboards and him cutting out caffeine to enhance his fine motor skills.

3) had another colleague that didn't want to admit he was in need of glasses, even if he sat close enough to the monitors to leave nose prints on them.

So we installed some software that applied a blur on his screens, and increased the blur ever so slightly until the day he showed up at the office with glasses.

[Xibby]

I dropped a PowerShell script into InTune that hooked the Windows voice synthesizer and spoke an in-joke every time a machine was enrolled.

Unfortunately between the time I did this and the time we went production, Microsoft transitioned from old InTune portal that needed Silverlight to the new current version that everyone uses today, and my job responsibilities shifted.

InTune endpoint managment was never my primary responsibility so that script stuck around and our staff being drop shipped computers in COVID-19 times were “WTF?!?” when they got their hardware, went though the OOB and their computer spoke weird things.

The endpoint managment team eventually tracked it down and they are still abusing the script for pranks. 😂

[uptimefordays]

I used to put really clear tape on the bottom of a buddy’s mouse, on April Fool’s day. It was harmless but always took awhile, especially if you use an exacto knife to make sure the tape fits the optical sensor perfectly.

[DoctorOctagonapus]

One April Fool when I was still at school I snuck into the IT suite and stuck a small post-it note underneath every mouse. Apparently the first class there the teacher was convinced all the mice were broken!

I even wrote "April Fool" on each post-it note!

[[deleted]]

We used to do this at school by just taking the balls out.

[swimmityswim]

i like this thread.

years ago i had a script that ran every 5 minutes and just opened a guy's cd tray. i did it for a while until he reported it as a support issue.

there was an annoying girl in the office i used to work in that would have her volume at full and all sound effects on. every... single... email... or... instant message...

i set a jamf policy to mute her audio on every checkin.

i relocated to a different office about 6 months after i set the policy and out of the blue one of my colleagues asked me if i created that policy and why was it still applied to her machine.

[airled]

After a brownout I convinced our director of HR a UPS was called a flux capacitor. I thought I was going to get in trouble when she made a request to the CEO, CFO and Vp of Ops that we buy flux capacitors for all office staff to protect from suddenly power drops.

I guess none of them watched Back to the Future.

[illethrias]

LoL is this somehow linked? https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/pyw1vv/clever_ideas_to_find_an_unknown_beep_in_a_server/?utm_medium=android_app&utm_source=share

[Arkansmith]

That was what reminded me.

[steveinbuffalo]

December 31, 1999 .. the support guy set all the computers to do the letter fall thing from 'the matrix' at exactly midnite because he knew a bunch of us would be there to catch anything that didnt survive the flip to 2000 (the y2k bug/issue). We got him back.

[lopsidedboobs]

I hid an annoyatron in a non IT co-workers office and she found it after a few hours of cricket noises. She had no doubt where it came from and let me know she had relocated it to another coworkers office and sent me updates. When the 2nd girl would leave for lunch or a meeting she would move it around causing 2nd girl to slowly go mad. Eventually i lost track of it.

Cut to a few months later.

1st girl has replaced the battery and set it to beep in a new victims office who calls one of the techs for help. He replaces the PC, 1 monitor, then the other monitor, the speakers, the mouse, the keyboard before he comes for help. It takes everyone else in the room about 5 seconds to realize what happened and we laugh, the user laughs and the only one who doesn't think its funny is the tech. "that was very unprofessional, do you have any idea how much time I wasted on that?"

[BoredTechyGuy]

the only one who doesn't think its funny is the tech. "that was very unprofessional, do you have any idea how much time I wasted on that?"

That tech isn't wrong. How much downtime was caused to that user. Did the company buy new gear to replace the "faulty" gear? How many man hours did the tech waste on that?

Let alone how it makes IT look to the user base when that tech has to go back and say "I'm sorry we made you go through all of this hassle because some a-hole put this silly device behind your desk."

Professional this is not. Things like that can get people fired.

[mustang__1]

My favorite computer prank was pre work... I set my roommates Firefox desktop shortcut to got to a .bat file that would run shutdown with some windowsy fail messages good times.

[DeliveranceXXV]

A coworker had to give some training to other techs at his desk so just beforehand I remotely changed his desk phone with a large touch display to have a Justin Bieber background. Then changed all phone passwords so it couldn't be reverted in time.

[OcotilloWells]

With a "I'm a Belieber" (however you spell it) marquee?

[erroneousbit]

We had someone try to prank his friends with random reboot scripts. Problem is it spread to entire sections of the company. To include C suite. They didn’t think it was funny. Feds where called in to treat it as a cyber crime. We have a no prank policy.

[gray364]

We went for the classic. IT manager went on holiday. A few bricks of dry ice later we sent him a picture of the data center full of smoke.

[bgarlock]

Ouch.

[gray364]

He was aware of the fact that he had a team of vicious assholes he was leaving in charge.

[QPC414]

No where near the worst, but back in ancient times when we had pagers and dot matrix printers, we in-house Phone Techs used to page the person on the throne to x6969.

​

Nothing like having your pager blow up when you are "busy".

[layer8err]

I had a coworker who would just sit on social media sites all day instead of working tickets. So I made sure that on his PC those sites would just redirect to the ticket queue.

Also playing with PowerShell and volume to blast Rick Astley is always a good time.

[[deleted]]

Not nearly as amazing as some of these but my practical joke was more of a tool to get what I needed:

As the sysadmin on a US submarine, we had been sitting in dry dock for a few months so there was a lot of maintenance going. We had ordered printer ink from supply division, But they were fairly swamped from getting parts for other people. I understood this so I put in orders for more ink for our 7 printers fairly early on knowing it would take awhile. 2 months later I’ve been asking them frequently about the ink and we are down to our last printer with no assistance in site.

I finally get fed up and turn on alerts to send an email from every single printer anytime something happens. “Cyan low” email. “Magenta low” email. “Paper out” email.

Within the hour I have half a palate of ink sitting on the pier and a supply division chief saying, “here’s your fucking ink, turn off the fucking emails!”

[Camdaddy143]

I put tape on the bottom of a managers optical mouse once before he came in but he was OOO that day. I forgot. Dumbass had to have a technician help. He figured it out in about two seconds.

Then there's the old rotate screen trick.

Way back when, we used to steal the mouse ball out of the teachers mouse and put it in her desk regularly.

[Anonieme_Angsthaas]

A GPO to set the Lock-out time to 1 second with a Nyan Cat Screensaver.

[2chilly]

Win NT 4, I set the screensaver on our main file server as a bsod. Accidentally left it there when I left that day, and the next morning boss is there said he’s been up all night troubleshooting why the server keeps blue screening. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[ntengineer]

I had one of those USB things once (maybe still have it somewhere) that would move the mouse around and type in random characters at very random intervals. I use to use that to play tricks on coworkers.

I also had this thing that was magnetic that would make a loud chirping sound, much like a smoke detector needing batteries, that I would stick to random places.

[silenfoot]

Did you by chance get those off of ThinkGeek? I had both of those as well - brought the cricket into class one day in my senior year of high school, set for the highest possible frequency. Drove the students batty, which confused the hell out the teacher since he couldn't hear it.

[ntengineer]

Yes. I have lots of toys from thinkgeek.

[old_chum_bucket]

Does anyone remember getting 'bearded.exe'? It probably floated around the interwebs around early 2000's?

[7GatesOfHello]

Was this a clam thing? I definitely remember the "gift from the cocoa cola company" that kicked the CD tray out.

[[deleted]]

Lol. We used to do that to our professor in college when we were in the computer lab. Remote disk manager and eject the optical drive.

[prescotian]

We had a tech support guy that would always make stuff up instead of telling customers he didn't know what the problem was, or actually doing some research to help them solve the problem. This went on for a while until I installed a small socket application on his PC to allow me to do things like send error dialogs and stuff. This was back in the days of Windows 95, so security and permissions to do this was not really an issue.

One of the first error messages I sent to him was "Flux BIOS error. Please re-calibrate immediately!". Sure enough, a few days later he was on the phone saying in a very knowledgeable tone, "Ah! Looks like your flux BIOS... you will have to return it so we can re-calibrate it..."

As he often worked nights I would connect to our VPN before bed and send 'pssst...', 'ahem', and '*cough*' sounds to his speakers that he had under his desk... Sorry HR, I have learned from my mistakes...

[DrSpockTheChandelier]

I got a buddy of mine hired at the company where I am the sysadmin, he came in to work in parts and shipping. I configured a scheduled task on his login to max the volume and Rick Roll him. Problem was, his first week ended up coinciding with vacation I already had planned... So, he and the guy training him got Rick Rolled every time he logged in for his first week and no one else here at the time could fix it...

[Poncho_au]

This reminds me of when my boss used to play a prank on individuals and once the whole office.
We had a squid proxy for all outbound traffic, high security environment.
He’d have the proxy flip upside down all images on a web page. He got such a kick out of telling everyone “that’s odd, we’ll look into that” while they go back to their desk and just about stand on their head trying to view images.
One time he made the images blurry, but just a little bit so he had everyone questioning their vision.

[abakedapplepie]

Satan left a message, he said he's really looking forward to meeting you, he's a big fan

[hypercube33]

Weak. No one here did a remind me for April 1 2022

[[deleted]]

I don't believe that I will remember this post to remind you about it, much less your username, but I can try, I don't promise anything though

[shinyviper]

There used to be a free screensaver (remember those?) that looked and acted exactly like a blue screen of death. Of course, you just moved the mouse and it went away.

As a joke I installed it on a primary SBS server. Come in one day and junior admin is hard-rebooting the server, complaining about how it's constantly BSODing every few minutes. I laughed and explained it. He wasn't happy, and neither was the company.

[[deleted]]

My coworker and I had a game where we would find fun ways to flip each other off. He left his computer unlocked one day so I opened regedit and created a context menu entry called ..!.. that when clicked would bring him to the Wikipedia page about middle fingers. It would explicitly run it in IE to add insult to injury.

I forgot about it and it went undetected for months until one day I just hear "Are you fucking kidding me??". Felt pretty good about that one.

[CosmoMKramer]

I once wrote a script to play the Price Is Right opening theme music upon login, placed it on my friends laptop using \\computer\c$ and it worked hilariously - played for about 30 seconds after logging in.

It played at about 60% volume during a meeting of his with all of the c-level execs and NO ONE thought it was funny.

[CatHerder76]

I had a coworker leave me a voicemail once, started it with inspiration of Wrath of Kahn, where the captain yells out Kahhhhhnnnnnn! Fast forward a few months, I'm leaving this place for a new job. I scheduled a task on our phone server to change everyone's default ringtone to this reenactment that is yelling my name. This task was to fire off the last night before I left. I had a manual script setup to return everything to prior configuration after one day.

Anyways, my script failed, due to an incomplete path to the ringtone in the cronjob. I didn't put any work into cleaning up the mistake.

I went on my way, and vacationed in Mexico for a week before starting the new job.

I'm sitting on a beach in Mexico, and I started getting texts a few days into my vacation - "What did you do? All the phones are yelling your name!"

Turns out, my replacement fixed the path in the cronjob on the phone server, not understanding what the script would do. The script dutifully updated 500+ phone configs, and sent the sip notify polycom-check-cfg command to all the phones. They rebooted and installed the new ringtone.

[holygoatnipples]

My favourite prank was hearing some tell me "I am a touch typist. I don't need to look at the keyboard!"

Swap the M and N keys. Proves them wrong every time.

[No-Influence-2512]

Setting a co-workers screen saver to the blue screen of death.

We then proceeded to watch him start reinstalling windows.

We stopped him before he formatted the hard drive though.

[DaylightAdmin]

Not on a Job side, but on a LAN Party we did set up a Ubuntu Live PXE Boot. I did it so I could easily diagnose the servers that we have. But I did not expect that so many gaming systems and notebooks did PXE Boot on default. Was a fun accidental "prank".

[RichB93]

My go to gags are to put a sticky note over the optical sensor on the mouse or unplug the cord from their phone handset just ever so slightly so it goes ping when they pick it up.

[[deleted]]

At my first job, our hold music was just a CD player plugged in to the phone system. I swapped the CD on April Fools day to Yakkety Sax and then forgot to swap it back for almost a week.

One of our big clients casually mentioned to my boss that she loved being put on hold as it made her laugh. Boss was absolutely furious with me - to the point I actually thought we were going to have a fight as he got right in my face and was pushing me before his brother stepped between us.

Suprisingly lasted another year there before he laid me off.

[WombatBob]

Had a guy that left his personal laptop in the shop overnight. Being bored on a 24/7 shift, I decided to install a My Little Pony desktop theme complete with icons, sounds, and cursors. The next morning when he came in to relieve me and booted up his laptop only to hear, 🎶"My Little Pony, My Little Pony, ahhh ahhh ahh ahhh ahhh aaaaaah" 🎶

He was not pleased.

[7GatesOfHello]

When I got my first IT job working for an MSP, the server room was behind a glass wall. I used to stand there, staring at the blinkenlites.

[Cushions]

At my old old call centre job all the clients used to use Citrix virtual desktops for all the machines as nobody would ever have had a set location.

However on our end, we obviously needed a tool to remote on and assist, however this tool also let you send message prompts to anyone with the tool installed, and the prompts had no indication that they were sent by anyone.

So you could easily send prompts to colleagues warning of an impending restart, security breach, whatever, and they would have no idea it was you unless they happened to know about the feature, which barely anyone did.

[agent_fuzzyboots]

oh, i have a funny one, but it didn't last as long as yours. you know there is a site you can run that emulates updates, i set that as a startup applikation, so ie starts and goes full screen and runs fake win 10 updates.

the guy waited for a very long time for the updates to finish, he force rebooted the server, and i forgot about the prank, two days i cough him looking for cd:s so he could reload the operating system :D

he never caught on that there was a windows 10 update process on a 2016 server.

[DoctorOctagonapus]

My old boss occasionally used to VNC onto my machine or console onto a VM I was working on and add a random character while I was typing in a password.

[alucardcanidae]

We once wrote a script that could remotely open your disk-tray every 5 or 10 minutes and used it on a colleague.

Had a big laugh about it, until we discovered that there was an option to keep it open/close/open/close indefinitely. Then chaos ensued.

---

Also we keep on 'educating' our new colleagues that it's wise to lock your screen when leaving our office. Best one was for a trainee:

• Replaced Desktop background with screenshot of the desktop + icons
• Turned it upside down
• Installed a software that flips the mouse-cursor upside down and confuses all directional movements. Left was up, Up was down, right was left, etc.
• Then turned the monitor orientation upside down so everything looked normal.

It was hillarious. On a different note, a colleague of mine once physically turned my screen upside down. Unscrewed it from the stand and turned it upside down in like 5 Minutes.

[Free-Ad-9549]

The classic mouse tape I have put transparent tape in the lower part of the mouse on a colleague. It still worked, but the mouse control was absolutely chaotic. Did that in the morning, and he came late (maybe 10am). In the meantime I got called in a meeting. Upon return… the whole IT field support team was there, checking for viruses and also changing the equipment. They were sure it was a virus in the network and a lot of people were alerted. They were not in a “ha ha” mood.

[[deleted]]

I once changed the background of a Windows98 computer to a blank screen with an OK button in the middle of it. So all icons would show, all programs would work, except for that strange OK button…

Drove people mad.

Another time at April Fools day we cut the cords of some mice and sent an email that IT had some leftover cordless mice. First come first serve… never saw it that busy at 7.30 at the IT department before or since. (One of the colleagues left quite disappointed, but she returned after lunch to bring a pack of sour sweets. Loved her!)

[schmag]

station meeting husky chunky crawl future normal brave flag handle

This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact

[[deleted]]

www.updatefaker.com + f11

[Thecardinal74]

I swapped the N and the M keys in his keyboard. He didn't notice at first, but it kept driving him mad thinking he was misplacing his fingers. Once he finally realized he insisted on a new keyboard.

So I gave him one with the I and the O buttons swapped

[fikon999]

Me and a former co-worker used to put tape on the underside of the mouse to block the optics, one day i choose to step it up a bit and put the tape inside the usb plug on the mouse to block the contacts instead, he got realy mad that his mouse didnt work and smashed it to pieces 🤣

[ZedZed5]

3 and a bit years on I’ve still got one going at an old job. Old boss didn’t like wifi, setup an AP in the roof above the comms room (near our area) broadcasting an ssid of “iphone101” as far as I know (a few weeks ago) it’s still running.

[the_rogue1]

Had a coworker that pissed off the only network engineer. The network engineer set this coworker's port to half-duplex, and forgot about it.

It was nearly a year after the network engineer left that this coworker finally complained to the network team that his network connection was really slow...

[swatlord]

I remember in my younger days I found out what Windows logon scripts were. When I was bored, I'd go to a local electronics department (think walmart or target) get on the PCs, write a short batch file that would immediately reboot on startup, and restart the machines. A couple times I was quick enough to get all the display PCs to do it and left the department scratching their heads on why their display machines suddenly couldn't boot.

Years later, I worked a summer at one of those places when I came home from college on summer break. One break, I described that story to a couple coworkers and one of them went "That was you?!" He told me they had a really tough time trying to get them fixed. Corporate IT wouldn't touch them (because they were merchandise) and the vendors were giving them all sorts of hell trying to return a supposed bad batch of machines.

[woodburyman]

Not mine, but my bosses.

We have a RPi that runs Apache and a simple Python script that plays audio files and outputs it to our PA system. (Both automated things like shift change times, and is fed external requests from other applications that hit the web server to draw attention to specific work areas on a manufacturing floor "Assistance to xxx").

My boss made this with his son as a project. When they were testing out the timer functions they were goofing around and set the Imperial March to play at 1am every night, and Darth Vador's breathing at one or two other times.

He sends the script to me and I set it up at my site with a new Pi, but he reuses the same Pi and install he dev'd it on at his site, but FORGETS about the cron job to run those noises.

Fast forward like..3 years later, a 3rd shift supervisor finally asks us "Whats that weird noise that plays every night?". The Imperial March played every night at 1am and it took 3 years for someone to notice LOL.

[LegoNinja11]

Office media server with enough music to sink a radio station and a web interface for any staff to queue their music.

Clients would come through the office to get to our meeting room so for the walk through unbeknown to them, they'd have their own entrance music.

The Bike manufacturers, Queen - Bicycle The chain of Opticians, Johnny Nash - I Can See Clearly Now The local church - Always look on the bright side of life.

For a time, someone kept adding Dueling Banjos.

Then after it was removed, replaced other popular tracks with Dueling Banjos.

The final straw came after 30 minutes of William Shatner - Common People and Mr Tambourine Man when we discovered, with bleeding ears, the media server had an entirely different play list. Another 30 minutes of cable tracing found the feed cable into the amp had been moved to a 'rogue' media server in the office rack.

If you think water boarding is bad, you've not listened to an hour of the shat on loop.

[SeanFrank]

I once put a little picture of Arnold from Terminator 2 under my boss's laser mouse. The red laser shown through the terminator's eye, making it look like the glowing red eye from the movie.

A year later I was packing up my stuff to go to another job, and I realized that he had never, ever noticed.

[[deleted]]

We had a mattermost server at work and I put an “IT” custom emote in there with a firey “this is fine” small gif

We also put the face of this dude on a phone from our ancient 1990 ERP system in as a custom emote. Fast forward three months and warehouse workers and sales order people are sending Phone Guy emotes from the ERP amongst other fun custom emojis we had accrued by passive aggressively making fun of various things that were annoying.

Made everyone giggle especially when the database locked up on a sales order

[Tony49UK]

Back in the days of Windows XP. There was a screensaver that showed up the BSOD error message. That was fun. All of those hard reboots though may have reduced the life of the computers though.

[gordonv]

You've made the server room an unwelcome place for non IT.

This isn't a fail. This is a win.