General > General Technical Chat

Best pranks/stunts pulled on friends or co-workers

<< < (10/12) > >>

jmelson:

--- Quote from: n5al on August 05, 2020, 11:04:06 am ---
The technician noted that the annoying "clunk" sound was coming from the vicinity of the passenger-side, rear door.  The tech detached the interior door panel.  Inside the door, he discovered a screwdriver dangling on a length of twine.  A note attached to the screwdriver read, "I Hope This Drove You Crazy, You Rich Son-of-a-B**ch".

Some anonymous assembler, at the Detroit factory, just wasn't a happy camper.

--- End quote ---
There's a well-documented story of this happening on a Ford product, might have been a Lincoln.  There was a large nut on a string in a door.  it was found by the dealer, and sent up to Ford management with the VIN number.  It was supposed to have been QUITE a moment when the line manager walked up to the guy who assembled the door that day (they had extremely detailed records of who did what when) and asked him if he had lost anything recently.

Jon

langwadt:
https://youtu.be/NtLpCT5f2CM

schmitt trigger:
Back when TVs still used CRTs, a common prank was to swap the wires of the horizontal deflection coils. One would get a mirror image on the screen.

Another in color TVs, was to interchange the RGB signals.

n5al:
At one of the first companies where I worked (I don't remember which one), an engineer had designed a rack of equipment and was preparing to power it up for the first time.  Undetected by the engineer, a technician had positioned himself behind the tall rack.   Just as the engineer threw the power switch, the technician started blowing cigarette smoke through the back of one of the card cages.  I was standing off to the side and the panic-inducing effect was pretty convincing!

======

I remember another prank, where I was the instigator....

Back in the early 80's, my company had a dedicated Perkin Elmer minicomputer that was used to write circuit board testing programs, for complex logic boards.  This minicomputer was set up to timeshare four user workstations.  These four workstations were located side-by side, in a common area.  The computer was fast for its time, but the actual third-party application software ran noticeably S-L-O-W.

The minicomputer and its administration terminal were located in an unsecured room, with the operating system manuals stored in a bookcase.  Reading the manuals, I found the specific OS commands to change how the user time slices were divided up.  The existing allocation was 25% to each of the four users.  The next morning, I changed the time slice settings, so that I got 97% utilization and the other three users only received 1% each.

Returning to the workstation area, my three coworkers had quickly detected that something strange was going on.  They began complaining among themselves that the system, which had always been slow, was now almost useless.  Meanwhile, I was happily working away, with my programs moving along at a lightening pace.  My computer bliss didn't evade detection for very long, however, as the others soon noticed that I was the only person in the room who was NOT complaining! :)


 

Ian.M:
You were too greedy.  17%:17%:17%:49% would have ~ doubled 'your' workstation's speed, and would probably have gone unnoticed for a long time, (or at least till someone else had cause to use 'your' workstation).

Navigation

[0] Message Index

[#] Next page

[*] Previous page

There was an error while thanking
Thanking...
Go to full version
Powered by SMFPacks Advanced Attachments Uploader Mod