@ tempemeaty
http://www.questionablecontent.net/view.php?comic=1051
Guns? Check. Ammo? Check. Bloody squibs. Er no. Chainsaw? Oh, yes indeedy. Right, let’s have a jog around the office, maybe waste a few dudes. And do please keep the camera steady, will you? We want to make sure this gets on video. This is not, as you might imagine, a case of going postal at work or happy-slapping taken to …
Well back in the day it was superglueing a stack of AOL CD's together to make a rather nice office hockey puck.
The second liners used to play Black Jack to see who had to do "The Call From Hell" that day.
Wrapping EVERYTING on someone's desk (inc. monitors, mice, fans, pens, everything) in newspaper before they came in. Filling umbrellas with holepunch clippings, removing the balls from the mice (yeah that old), moving all the wireless mice to different peoples desks.
Then we discovered low powered Airsoft guns (not the high power ones, we discovered they break LCD's :/ ), oh the fun of datacenter battles.
The dev team I work on was recently re-homed in a separate building. Our portion of the office was a huge open plan space that we barely made a dent on.... last Christmas myself and a colleague set up our scalextric for a two or three days .... it was a huge four lane digital setup that enabled up to six of us to race at any one time, the others were "marshaling"
The circuit was as close to Silverstone as we couldl make it
This was exciting only in the aftermath. Many years ago when I was a lowly midnight shift computer operator at a bank, the four of us on duty would fill some of the empty time by tossing round tape canister lids around the computer room like Frisbee discs. We did this, anyway, until I skipped a lid off the top of the 2540 card reader/punch after which it sailed into the big POWER OFF button on the front panel of the IBM 360/40 that was most of the way through the nightly 6-hour demand deposit account update batch run. We did recover by deadline, but just barely.
Wasn't so much into that stuff, office pranks were more my thing...
1) Screenshot someone's desktop, move the desktop contents somewhere else and set the screenshot as their desktop.
This is a great one for those (l)users who think they know it all.
2) Swap out their keyboard for one with keys rearranged or otherwise mucked about with. A favorite was to see how many swear words you could spell with the available letter keys.
3) Back in the Quake days, when we had our Friday afternoon LAN game of quake, we doctored the client of the managers to have a super hi-viz skin as they were all camping bastards. They never twigged this one, because when you saw your own body on the ground, you always saw the default skin.
4) Seeing how gullible the management / marketing bods were.
We once convinced them that we had developed "Double sided sprite technology".
5) Plug a second mouse into a colleague's PC (Preferably a wireless receiver inside the machine connected to an unused front panel header on the motherboard). Move very slightly every so often.
Back in the days of Windows 3.1, one smart-ass user decided to play tricks with a colleague, and changed her screen saver. During the middle of a phone call, Marquee kicked in with a message nobody ever wants to see... "HARD DRIVE FAILURE PLEASE CONTACT CHRIS FOR ASSISTANCE".
I heard the scream from the other end of the corridor, and the boss-man sent me to investigate. After getting the lady to calm down, I worked who the perp was - okay pal, two can play at that game, and I'm MUCH better at it than you...
The offender switched on his PC after lunch, and discovered that his desktop theme was Barbie Pink. We're talking glow-in-the-dark, nuclear pink, no pastel shades or anything that subtle. And I'd done the whole [don't load] thing in CONTROL.INI so he couldn't change it back.
Imagine the scene: Someone has VIOLATED your desktop in the worst way imaginable, and the Control Panel is completely devoid of icons so you can't fix it...
I heard THAT scream from the other side of the building, but I made him wait until the end of the day before normality was restored.
in a city far far away, two floors underground in the dead files archive: switching off the lights and hunting each other in the pitch black, with 200x15mm rubber bands, in the maze of shelving and collapsing piles of old patient notes. Some preferred the silence of an ambush while others crept up on their prey. Either way you could smell the fear.
Those things are bloody lethal. Don't whatever you do hit the suspended ceiling tiles, unless you want the evidence of your tomfoolery stuck in polystyrene foam, ten feet up.
In less office-like environments, a little pallet wrap can go a long way. Clear across the warehouse in fact, when bunched up into a ball. As for the end-caps from cardboard tubes, those make rather lovely impromptu frisbees.
And oh, the fun you can have with a pump truck, PPT or LLOP, and a wet floor. Dangerous, but fun.
Easy way to make games of football, volleyball etc.
I can still remember the look on the regional managers face when he came in on six of us playing volleyball between racks of E-Machine PCs and Nvidia FX GPUs.
Ah, working at PC World - where you are indoctrinated to not give a toss by piss poor management...
When I worked at an IT training company many many years ago, we used to have a monthly Quake tournament - the boss would raid petty cash and send someone to the offy down the road to pick up as much discount alcohol as they could lay their hands on, 2 or 3 hours of male -vs- female, secretaries -vs- managers, and various gimmick matches made more lively by piles of free hobo-booze, strategic pulling of network cables, flinging of projectiles and copious swearing.
It's always a mistake for a company to introduce self branded round objects for publicity! you know the kind of things I mean, Company branded mouse Mats and stress balls have both played a huge part in the 'fun' moments of my career!!!
I worked for a Dot-com boomer who introduced bright orange stress balls to give away at InfoSec. Some fool left a couple of sacks in the Office and soon the (rather brilliant) coders, all full of mighty brains and PHds etc, were squeezing away as they rocked back and forth deep in C++ thoughts.
Off course, in true BOFH style, when the sys-admin dept were given cubicles on the same floor, it wasn't long before resistance broke down and a pre-emptive strike was launched on one guy seen to shut his eyes just a little longer than one would while working on an issue---yes he had dozed off!!
This was a bad move when every dev had half a dozen stress balls on their desk and 'one up the spout' ie in the hand, within a moment there was mayhem!!! 20 straight laced super boffin coders acted as one and sysadmin were pinned down!!! still, we had our own sack full waiting ;-) what a day!!!
Then there was the time that only 15 years later I can look back on and smile!
I ran a large config lab in the City in charge of building tons of kit, and being a terrible Manager I occasionally joined in the war of the mouse mats. These were round, hard and flew with incredible speed.
I still remember the feelings of joy as I launched a good 30 yarder at an assailant who had just twonked me on the head with a well aimed shot, then the feelings of fear as he ducked!!
It felt like time slowed as I watched my missile head inexorably straight towards the red 'Break Glass' fire alarm button behind him!! Brain to self-'No WAY could I hit that.....'
I can't remember the excuse I gave to the CEO as 550 people sauntered out onto City Rd but I am sure it was top grade BOFH stuff!!!.................Legend!!!!!
One colleague received a Syma S107 Remote Control Helicopter for Christmas. After his wife got sick of the constant whirring of the rotas all day, he brought it into the office.
The same day, the whole department ordered one each and kamakarzi dogfights were the norm on a Friday afternoon.
Obstacle courses are now also commonplace and usually include a Dyson Airblade or two.
I worked a contract at a large infrastructure b2b specialist in hammersmith, and it was the most fantastic place to work ever. So much so that despite the pain of a commute from sussex daily, I took 3 extensions.
NERF darts were already de rigeur to prevent people wanting to kill the awkward head of security for doing his job, and I quickly armed up. By the end of my stint I was the possessor of a NERF ballzooker with 18 shot capability, a nerf gattling gun that did hundreds of darts in a few seconds, screaming whistling darts and other handy semi offensive tools. But, it was a calm and great place to work, we got the frustration out and had a laugh. I thought nothing of working till midnight to get something sorted and you could always find someone in each office block beavering away in the peaceful hours after the beancounters had left for the day.
Now I have a 9 year old son and he pours over the nerf catalogues wishing he could afford the latest kit, and secretly Im wishing I could work in a fun enough environment again to need them and occasionally we revert and have a nerf battle at home. I have often said to my wife that'd I'd take a pay cut for a job like that again, she always describes it as the role I compare everything else since to, and find everything else lacking compared to it. Sadly Ive now risen in the expertise ranks so much I have to be a stuffy boring git , sorry, corporate, but one day I'll just say sod the money, and be a web monkey at a fun shop and have a giggle...
Posting anon, because until I find that new role...
Oh the joys of being an AD admin, making a little OU here and their, adding a lovingly tailored GPO to it and dumping your mates computer and user accounts into it!
The next day when he boots his laptop to discover the startup theme is the entire Magic Roundabout theme tune, then enters a world of nightmares when he discovers everything has moved, changed, or just isn't there any more.
Ah such evil delights :)