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Best pranks/stunts pulled on friends or co-workers
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DrG:
Well, not quite at the MIT level...

I remember sometime in maybe 1987, I had a VAX terminal on my desk, as did most of us (loved me some kermit). In everyone's login file was a call to a cookie service - a little fortune cookie was  delivered through a random choice in a database. I managed to replace my supervisors cookie file with one of my creation. As you might have guessed, all of the fortunes praised me and encouraged raises and promotions for me. I didn't get those (because of the prank) but did get some smiles...followed by a "Now fix it"!
jmelson:

--- Quote from: DrG on July 31, 2020, 07:56:43 pm ---I remember sometime in maybe 1987, I had a VAX terminal on my desk

--- End quote ---
Back in those days I managed a VAX 11/780, and it was discovered that the Shoemaker-Levy 9 comet was going to crash into Jupiter.
So, I changed the login script that normally just gave the current time and said when you last logged on with something like this :

Welcome.  It is 9:15 PM, do you know where your Shoemaker-Levy 9 is?  OH NO, it is going to crash into Jupiter in 37 days 14 hours and 23 minutes!

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Another one was in the dorms of an engineering school.  Some guys from our floor shoved an envelope filled with shaving cream under the door and stomped on it, spraying the stuff all over a few feet inside the door.  My roommate dashed out the door and saw the culprits running rown the stairs and out of the building, so we knew we had a few minutes to retaliate.  They had left their room open!  I had made a little bit of Nitorgen triIodide and had it in my dorm room.  We smeared it all over the light bulbs, doorknobs, and places where you put your hand to open dresser drawers and closet doors.  The stuff was exploding for weeks before they had managed to set it all off.  Nitrogen triIodide is quite harmless, but makes you jump every time you set a bit of it off.  (A contact explosive.)

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At another school, they had a carrier current AM station with transmitters in each cluster of dorms.  Program audio was distributed through dedicated phone lines.  We got keys to the phone room and rewired all the program audio to go up to my dorm and then back to the common feed.  We took over their feed and started playing mothers of invention (Frank Zappa) and all sorts of stuff that they were not allowed to play.  Eventually, the culprits were mostly identified, and brought before the campus judcial board.  4 of the 7 members of the board were in on the prank.  One of them was a pre-law student, and observed the J-board bylaws said anyone who had knowledge of the incident or relationship to those involved "SHOULD" recuse themselves from the hearings.  He pulled out Black's law dictionary and started recitng the specific legal definition of the word "should", meaning specifically that the person does not HAVE to do so.  That was pretty much the end of the case.

I probably have a few more war stories.

Jon
Jon
Messtechniker:
Never tried it but should be effective and simple:
Popping chewing gum as soon as someone switches on some gear.
Should nicely frighten the life out of the victim. 8)
Circlotron:
I think it was Bob Pease that told the story that one of this colleagues was always boasting of the great fuel mileage he was getting from his car, and he would check it daily and regale the office with the numbers. Eventually the guys came up with a plan. Some days they would drain some fuel from his car, and other days they would put that same fuel back in. Had him going for quite a while as to why his numbers became so inconsistent.
Sceptre:
Many years ago, I was a coop in a small lab at a large organization.  Staff members sat at two desks, and I usually sat at one of the two adjacent benches.  A friend from high school asked me to make a flashing beacon for the model rockets he flew.  I went to Radio Shack and bought an LM3909, copper clad, and a small bottle of ferric chloride etchant.  As luck would have it, there was a perfectly-sized graduated cylinder in a utility room at work, so I decided to take the etchant and board to the lab to do the etching.  I set the graduated cylinder containing the board and solution on the bench.  The staffer who sat next to me arrived for the morning and expressed concern about the hazardous chemical mere feet away from his desk.  I assured him that it would not be there for long, and that I would not spill it.  As I worked away on whatever task I had that morning, an idea came to me.

I always brought my lunch, and they usually went out.  Around noon, I went to the utility room, emptied out the solution, rinsed off the etched board, and washed the graduated cylinder three times.  Back in the lab, I poured some root beer in the graduated cylinder and placed it on the pull-out shelf on the nearby desk, then ate my lunch.  When the concerned staffer returned, he was aghast and demanded that I remove the noxious chemical from his desk.  I picked up the graduated cylinder and drank from it.

Unfortunately I could not contain myself and started laughing a few seconds after taking a drink.  But it was still great fun.
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