Top 10 Tech Pranks: Harmless but Funny IT jokes

[MannerMauler]

Put the blue screen of death for Windows as a wallpaper and unplug their peripherals... or the gray apple screen of death for macs....so fun! =)

Even better, get a BSOD screen saver.

 

[theUnforgiven]

Use this image as the wallpaper

https://ibb.co/cuHqfm

 

[davimill]

What ever happened to the old "Melt" program that, after a delay, would start to soften the on-screen text until it melted and ran down the page? I'd like to get a copy of it again.

 

[Sausagemeat]

Press Alt - F4 just before saving to do final spellcheck.

 

[Sulty]

Also nice for unattended computers, FakeUpdate https://fakewindowsupdate.com/

 

[ThatBMXGamer]

Here's one! delete system32 Then blame it on that jerk that works in your facility!

 

[Plutoisaplanet]

The first "prank" here is only a partial prank...you have forgotten the best parts.
1. Take a screenshot of the desktop.
2. Turn that screenshot up-side-down and save it under temp (or where ever you want).
3. Rotate the display so that it's up-side-down (as in the 1st prank here).
4. Set the screenshot you took as the background pic, it should now look as if all is ok, the mouse is just "broken".
5. Open taskmanager and kill explorer.exe

I know this is 3 years old (the article was just reposted) but you can do step 3 last to make this much easier.

 

[Faplyboy]

I like the one where u cover mouse sensor haha. give this to a crush and type under if she would go on a date XD

 

[comnut]

TLDR, but most of these cannot be used in a managed office... what kind of ***** company lets users have admin access????

 

[VitalyT]

More discounted training material, this time on how to become an a-hole?

 

[Daniele 00]

Combine prank n°1 + n°9 (but rotate also the screenshot of the icons)

 

[p51d007]

April fool's day is for AMATEURS. Everyone EXPECTS a prank/joke on that day.
I'm the joke/prank guy at my office and I don't even bother on April 1st. It's more
fun to watch coworkers wondering what joke I'm playing on them on April Fool's
day, when it turns out the joke is on them, because I don't on that specific day.

 

[MaikuTech]

TLDR, but most of these cannot be used in a managed office... what kind of ***** company lets users have admin access????

You be surprised of what you would run into with business supervisors that let employees run the show.
If you want to run a quick funny joke via through computer and not get terminated at the end of the day.

Slap this as desktop wallpaper, hide the icons, start button taskbar.
Move the mouse and keyboard into a safe spot where they can find it.
Watch them shreek in fear, any regular tech savvy will figure out its fake and normally doesn't happen.
Anyone else would freak out and have a melt down for the next 10 minutes.

 

[woofer]

For budding developers, create a little program that makes the mouse jitter randomly, and have random keyboard inputs....

I get that effect all the time with touchpads as my "lazy" thumbs brush them all the time. If a pad is too sensitive, I activate my "handy" Thinkpad Tablet 2 bluetooth keyboard: no touch pad; just a wonderful optical Trackpoint, and the bonus of larger keys and more "real" keys such as PgUp, PgDn, Home, End, etc since there is more space for keys without the touchpad or adjacent wrist rest areas.

 

[Nobina]

I used to put a piece of tape over the barcode scanner for one of my colleagues. He's pretty clueless when it comes to these things and we would watch him as he's raising his hands in disbelief. He then calls the maintenance and starts walking around while we take the tape off. Maintenance comes and tries the scanner, it works perfectly and they think he's ****ing with them. He even got fired later cause he was going to the restroom all the time, unsurprisingly for us, he was drinking there thinking we couldn't smell it.

And this middle-aged guy, he's also tech illiterate, I turned his monitor off and he thought it was broken. It's not much of a prank but that depends on who you do it to.

 

[TheBigT42]

At one place I worked....A manager pranked one of his employees. He added a speaker splitter to his computer. Then ran an audio cable to his computer. He would randomly play strange sounds on his employee's computer.

The manager informed IT of this so we never "figured out the problem"

This went on for about 6 months until the manager played a clip saying something like "your computer is infected with virus #3820". He called IT and we said we couldn't come look today (know what was going on).

The employee shut his computer down and went home. The manager had to call him and admit what he did.

 

[PanfiloTexas]

A co-worker of mine hated George W. Bush, I used group policy to change his wallpaper to a picture of Bush. he would change it to whatever and when he restarted his pc he came back. I would never tell him how to fix it, said he was in IT and should be able to figure it out. After 7 years of, we were bought out by a larger company and lost access to group policy. They absorbed all our old policies. I left the company a few years later. He finally retired 15 years after I change his wallpaper, it followed him around since it was attached to his username. He emailed me after he retired with his middle finger up and said he no longers has to see Bush.

Another thing I would do to people, I won't dare do it on a SSD, well I did and it caused it to fail, I wrote basic batch file that would create a text file copy itself and delete the original. Everytime it copied itself it would double in size. Once it got to the point where it was writing a 1024 meg text file and trying to delete a 512mb text file you computer would become painfully slow. It would continue until the pc locked up or you restart. One guy I drop it into the start menu so it would run everytime he turned his desktop.

 

[p51d007]

One of my favorites back in the old windows 3.1 days, was to set the orientation of the mouse backwards. I'd turn the mouse 180 degrees, set the orientation, then turn it back. It was fun to
watch the look on their face when they would move the mouse left, it would go right, up it would go
down.
One time, when I was working a 911 shift, the midnight person was TERRIFIED of computers. Before hand, we had always done everything by paper. So before she came in, I went into the settings for the screensaver. I set the delay for 3 hours, so it wouldn't kick in until it died down.
I got a phone call about 4am saying I'm going to kill you! I used the markee saver and wrote this to be displayed: "Warning! All data on computer hard drive is deleted, contact your system administrator".

 

[madboyv1]

Man I was about to reply to a comment that was 5 years old, you ALMOST got me, whoever reposted this article. XD

 

[Nunya]

For prank #1, you don't need to do all this to turn the screen upside down.

For Windows: Right click on the Desktop > Display Settings > Change the screen orientation to Landscape (flipped).

Just press Ctrl+Shift while pressing the down arrow key twice. The other arrow keys also work with Ctrl+Shift. Have fun.

 

[Athlonite]

The best one I ever did on a mate was replace the error sound with one of Homer Simpson yelling DOH 32 times. As he was always doing something wrong enough to cause the error sound this got quite funny for about week then I changed it to Homer yelling STUPID BOY

 

[RudyBob]

Pranks are goofy

 

[Plutoisaplanet]

One of my favorites back in the old windows 3.1 days, was to set the orientation of the mouse backwards. I'd turn the mouse 180 degrees, set the orientation, then turn it back. It was fun to
watch the look on their face when they would move the mouse left, it would go right, up it would go
down.
One time, when I was working a 911 shift, the midnight person was TERRIFIED of computers. Before hand, we had always done everything by paper. So before she came in, I went into the settings for the screensaver. I set the delay for 3 hours, so it wouldn't kick in until it died down.
I got a phone call about 4am saying I'm going to kill you! I used the markee saver and wrote this to be displayed: "Warning! All data on computer hard drive is deleted, contact your system administrator".

Here’s the full story on that last prank 😅

I use to volunteer in the 80's, 90's and early 2000's as a 911 operator. "Back in the day", we had to do everything on paper, had only 1 terminal to run wanted checks, licenses etc. Around 95, we got computers to do everything. We had one dispatcher, one of my best friends, older lady who was scared to death of computers. One evening, I was about to go off shift. I went into the control panel, changed the scrolling message screen saver, to not kick in unless nothing was touched for over an hour, which means it wouldn't trigger until 2-3am, when it died down.
Even after I left at midnight, I'd stay up til 3-4am on Friday night/Saturday morning.
My phone ran about 2:30 am. The voice on the other end said... "I'm going to KILL you the next time I see you".
Why? Well the message that blanked out the screen and started scrolling said "Critical hard drive error, all data lost on C:\. Contact your administrator to have system installed".
We all had a good laugh about that one.

 

[StrikerRocket]

This is why I always lock my computer when leaving the keyboard, either at work, or at home where my kids, who don't know much about computers, could wreak havok on it real quick...

 

[lazer]

Ah man! I laughed soo hard at some of these "jokes" I really wish that I was back working in an office so I could do some of them.

Did anyone do them? Let me hear about it!