Computer Pranks and Fun

2021-11-22

Not really a response to Kelson's recent post but inspired by it as it got me reminiscing about some silliness we used to get up to. Back in college a fellow nerdy housemate and I would have conversations with each other from across the house by turning our speakers up and typing out our message for the text to speech voice to bark at each other. The other housemates got annoyed with that rather quickly X-P.

When I was working as a technician in the technology department of a large school district our home base at the central office consisted of a counter where we all had a our computers in the cabinets below with input devices run up through cutouts in the counter. It was a fairly common occurrence that someone would forget to lock their computer and wander off for a bit and come back to some sort of prank. Some of these included pretty tame fun like changing the wallpaper to something we all knew they weren't keen on, disabling the mouse or sometimes putting a piece of clear tape over the mouse's optical sensor.

Now for my favorite pranks. One time my coworker took a screenshot of our other coworker's desktop, set it as the wallpaper then removed all the desktop icons and task bar. This resulted in what looked like their normal desktop environment but nothing worked :-). Probably my all time favorite is the time I plugged a second keyboard into my coworker's computer in the cabinet and ran it to a hidden spot within my reach but not in his field of view. So sporadically while he would use the computer I would add some random characters to whatever he was typing, alt-tab to different programs and just confuse the heck out of him. He ended up replacing his mouse, keyboard and nearly wiped his machine trying to figure out what was causing the madness. I fessed up before he actually wiped it and we had a good laugh. This was all in good fun as part of an impromptu mini prank war we had going on. Nothing truly mean or out of line but we had a good time.

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