General > General Technical Chat
Best pranks/stunts pulled on friends or co-workers
Benta:
Back in the 80s I worked in an electronics shop (mostly components sales, semiconductors, resistors, caps, wires etc.) selling over the counter.
Behind the counter there were plastic boxes with relatively large polyester caps, IIRC 220 nF, 470 nF, 1 uF, even 2.2 uf, all 400 V rated.
One day a couple of us charged all the caps in one of the boxes to 300 V, carefully replaced them and waited for the unsuspecting (and unpopular) colleague to make a grab into the box to serve a customer.
The fireworks of sparks and the screaming was overwhelming. So was the telling-off from the boss... :(
mikeselectricstuff:
I worked at a repair shop where we did repairs on warranty returns of cheap consumer stuff like clock-radios & cassette recorders for the importer.
Much prankery was aimed at me, typically stuff like 10uf 10v caps inside the mains plug of my soldering iron, or slamming the bench when I powered something on, so I decided to get subtle...
This was back when mains stuff in the UK didn't usually come with a plug on ( obscure historical reasons), so we had quick-connect type blocks on the bench to connect the mains to them (think crocodile clips in a box).
I took the fuse out of my colleague's one, and put a 1N4007 diode inside the fuse, so it looked normal from the outside, but when you connected something like a clock-radio, the DC would saturate the transformer and blow the internal fuse inside the transformer.
Took quite a while for anyone to figure out what was going on...
DrG:
Well, it is probably not what you intended, and certainly more impressive than I could ever be part of, but I can't help but be reminded of the 1982 MIT prank of putting the phone booth on top of the building - of course it could ring. *dang* they don't make nerds like they used to ;)
https://webmuseum.mit.edu/media.php?module=subjects&type=popular&kv=147&media=26
David Hess:
--- Quote from: 25 CPS on July 31, 2020, 03:52:32 pm ---
--- Quote from: james_s on July 31, 2020, 03:38:24 am ---One of my favorite tricks back in the day was to wait for someone to forget to lock their PC when they went to lunch, then open a browser window or some other window, take a screenshot and then set that as the wallpaper. ...
--- End quote ---
I used to do something like this in the high school computer science room. The room was filled with these Tron 386 PCs that had Windows 3.1 on them and I'd screenshot Program Manager and set that as the background, then move the actual Program Manager window off screen into one of the corners, then grab the corner of the window with the mouse and drag the rest of it down into the corner so all that was visible if you looked closely was one pixel in on of the corners of the screen. Then use the keyboard shortcuts to exit Windows which would cause it to save the last used position of the window hidden away down in the corner. The next person to load up Windows on that machine would have it come up exactly as I left it with the screenshot background Program Manager sitting there and the actual window hidden away. That was always good for confounding people especially some of the less computer savvy teachers the place had.
--- End quote ---
I would do the same thing in a different way. I would take a screenshot of the desktop, edit it to remove all but one desktop icon, and then set that as the desktop wallpaper with the real icon moved to a safe place. So now the desktop looks completely normal, except one icon is completely unresponsive and cannot even be selected, but everything else works.
dave j:
--- Quote from: james_s on July 31, 2020, 03:38:24 am ---Oh and swapping keycaps is always fun on keyboards where those are easily removable. If it's something like the N and M or S and D it isn't immediately obvious at a glance.
--- End quote ---
Back in the days before numeric keypads gained cursor keys as an alternate function, swapping the 123 and 789 rows was always good for causing confusion.
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