Can't get pranked by your team if nobody in the world can log on Welcome once more to Who, Me? The Register's weekly column featuring readers' tales of the things they'd rather forget having done. This week's face-palm moment comes from "Dennis", who wrote in to tell us about a time in 1996 when he was stationed in a northern UK town rolling out Windows 95 at a chemical plant. Dennis and …
True, although I'd rather be pranked with a rotated screen by the tech support people in the basement than stabbed in the back by an accountant with a spreadsheet on the top floor.
Time and place for everything, but a good manager who makes it very clear where the boundaries are also leaves space for the humor to grow, which contributes to better productivity for all.
So it was NT 3.51 to Windows 95? That was a downgrade in terms of security and stability. I used NT 3.51 for a while. Possibly the least crashing Windows I ever had. Unlike later versions, it still followed Cutler's original architecture that tried to minimize kernel mode code. Of course it had the bit clumsy Windows 3.x ui.
If he had domain admin credentials, as it was required to access the DC and block everybody...
In a company I worked for about 20 years ago, the domain admins of the development network had the bad habit too of logging on to their workstations with their users also being domain admins - I don't remember if NT4 (used back then), had a simple way to run an application with a different user when you had to run a domain admin one.
At least, they were careful enough people, and they never created havoc. Still, if something went wrong on one of their machines, the damages would have been broad.
When I was young and thought that sort of thing was funny, I created a little DCOM widget that let me open and close other people's CD trays. Yes, there would've been more efficient ways of doing it but I was arsing around with DCOM at the time.
I'm too old for office pranks now. Also, as a contractor, not a great career move. Especially as I haven't worked out a way to get magenta laser toner into the intake of a Dyson Airblade.
A couple of good ones....
1. Exe that sent messages to random PCs on the network telling them to eject the CD-ROM drive (when all PCs had them.
2. Replace screen saver with one that generated random BSODS but that carefully hid messages in them saying stuff like - "Don't worry just move your mouse".
Previous job in a large public sector org, the IT dept made a point of locking down 95% of all settings on standard PCs.
Of course, one of the locked settings was the volume control, and they had the volume turned way up. Suffice it to say, every day you could hear when people arrived at work, and their Win98 systems all went into a cacophony of Sci-Fi sound effects.
Most staff were wusses, and wouldn't complain to IT, but I did, and explained my role (partially IT) within the dept, and they relaxed my permissions, but whether by accident or on purpose, they also gave me admin pemissions to all the other department PCs.
The power I had. Mwahaha!!
(Not really.) If I blabbed about the power, someone in my department would have shopped me to IT, so instead I used the power to reduce the volumes, and claimed I had spent an afternoon 'dealing' with IT support to get 20-odd PCs sorted ("It's complicated stuff, ya know").
I ended up with a modicum of respect, and most IT issues got put past me first. IT support rarely got phoned thereafter. Everyone (including IT) was happy.
Changing the default WAVs that came with Windows to more "entertaining" ones was always a good trick. The fact that "DING.WAV" is now not just a 'Ding' sound gets past any locking down of settings.
Not that I know from personal experience - I think I read about it here on The Register Forums. Yeah, that's it!
Got tired of a coworker who would prank everyone, constantly (and therefore not get much work done). It did train us all in proper workstation security, but daily having someone had to fix their setup because of him - tape over the laser in the mouse, paper under mouse buttons, toothpick in the keyboard He was, as he would need to be, very cautious about locking his screen when he left his desk, so the group revenge on him was to unplug the line cord from the laptop PSU/brick. Then it was reinserted just enough to look plugged in, but not make a connection.
About 3 hours later he was in a near state of panic when he was getting all kinds of warnings about the battery being almost dead. He even crawled under his desk to look at the power cable, and reseated the plug in the socket. After his laptop suspended because of the low battery I told him what to check, let him know we had more in our list of revenge pranks, and told him it was time to stop. Which he mostly did.
Taking his car apart and reassembling it in his bedroom would have been one thing, but I don't know how we could have gotten a giant Jiffy-Pop into his house, nor been able to retarget an space-based laser system. We can't all be students at Pacific Technical University, after all.
Where I worked a while back, we had a guy who was SUPER ANGRY about the O.J. murder trial verdict. He just went on and on and on about Johnny Cochran (the lawyer who got him off) and what a bastard he was, etc, etc. Literally for hours.
After listening to his ranting for two days, I came in early the next day and set his background to a big picture of Johnny Cochran (the famous "If it doesn't fit, you must acquit" one) with the caption "My Hero." He knew who had done it and came to see me about it, although he took it well. I changed it back, but I think he got the message because the ranting stopped.
Back in the days of DOS, our Small Systems Group provided systems analysis and software support within the Armed Forces, producing turnkey apps using SuperCalc and Paradox. QA was conducted by a senior civil servant, 'S'.. The analysts detested passing design documents in front of 'S', and the other two programmers were annoyed at having programs rejected for menu screens with "press any key to continue"; Mr S would press the CTRL key, ALT key, ESC key and so forth, before looking up and rejecting with a dry "I pressed several keys, none of them continued. How do you expect end-users to cope?"
I though this was somewhat pedantic, even if he did have a point. I was also very very new in the role.
I wrote a TSR that intercepted the keyboard handler, and when those keys were pressed opened a dos "window" that displayed "F--- Off, S****". Added it to autoexec.bat on his PC, and gleefully told the other two programmers about it. Until the other civil servant, a likeable young lad, told me just how senior S was, and he didn't have a sense of humour. Too late to undo the changes, and too late to recover something I had left on his desk for QA with a very deliberate "press any key to continue" prompt.
Going in to own up, S had just loaded the program from floppy, sees the menu, pressed CTRL, and was greeted with a box in the middle of the screen with the aforementioned message. I'm seeing promotion disappearing out the window, probably with my current rank and a posting to somewhere cold and nasty, when he burst out laughing. "I think I deserved that!" or something in that vein.
After that, he and I got on famously and I never had to submit code for QA; all our stuff was turnkey, no one had ever delved into x86 assembler, or "real programming" as S termed it.
... we've always followed at the places I've been is anything that stops you working is a no no. A minor prank is OK. I've been hit where two of us were connecting to home without 3rd line knowing as they'd object. So we were using an unused port but would raise no suspicion as the odd bit of traffic ran over it anyway and we encrypted our traffic. I can't remember which one.
Anyway. Stupidly left my desktop unlocked. Came back later and noticed folders renamed to "cock" on my desktop at home :) engineer next to me said "shouldn't of left your desktop unlocked".
Funniest one we did was to an engineer who was a rude cock. So we took a screenshot of his desktop and set it as his background. Then hid the taskbar and icons. Took the tit longer than it should have to work out what was wrong.
The ISP I used to work at had a majority of the workstations on the outside of the corporate firewall. You learned very quickly to lock your workstation, lest your home page get changed to something decidedly not safe for work.
We pranked one co-workers by making up an ethernet loopback plug and sent his workstation's packets back to him- he was.. not amused.
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