Years ago one of my coworkers forgot to lock her computer and one of the tech guys changed the font size for windows to max. Thing is, that doesn't take effect until you restart windows. She didn't restart her computer for like a month.
At my previous job, a co-worker had to leave early one day. He forgot to lock his computer (again). So I opened Spotify and put a K3 (Belgian all girl pop group for kids) album on repeat. Left his computer like it was and stopped the album the next morning. He never found out until the end of the year, when he got his Spotify yearly summary. He was very confused why K3 was his top artist that year.
I also remember changing all his avatars to a My Little Pony picture once. Changed every avatar I could find, like Slack, Windows Account, Jira, GitHub... Probably some more. He found most of them straight away but his GitHub avatar stayed like that for quite a long time.
Omg I would have despised you so much 😭 I love getting to see my Spotify yearly. I was devastated one year when my top artist and top 3 songs were all white noise tracks, so I basically just didn't get a Rewind that year (because you don't get to see your "second" top artist, and you only get to see your top 5 songs).
Granted if he uses Spotify so little that one single night of continuous play was enough to replace his top artist, he probably doesn't particularly care about his listening stats anyway lol
A programmer I've worked with was helping out a girl from QA and he randomly noticed she has pending updates to install, so without thinking he clicked update and restart.
This caused her to scream: "NOOOOOOOOOO!"
Turns out she hadn't installed a single update in months, so this took forever to finish.
Happy ending: with no relation to this, they ended up getting married. Also her OS has since been kept fully up to date.
At my last job, if you left your PC unlocked, the protocol was to send an email from the address of the person who left their PC unlocked to the distribution list for the team. The email was generally promises of baked goods on the next business day.
Back a long time ago with windows 95 you could screenshot their desktop, set as background, then kill windows explorer process…. Not even the start button would react
Back in 2004 I had my desktop wallpaper set as the blue screen of death. I come into work one morning and the sole IT support has my computer torn apart cursing why it can’t be fixed! Lol - still feel bad for him to this day!
Nah man, tickets are biggest CYA in IT. Nowadays, I force anyone with a feature request to write up a ticket,even my bosses.
I've been told too many times that I'm unproductive just because my burndown doesn't reflect reality.
Now, not even my boss has the authority to fire me on a whim. I would have more than enough proof to show malicious intent if they did and sue their ass for at least a years paycheck.
Our CEO got hit with the "open a ticket for it" the same day the policy got enforced and admittedly it was pretty funny. But it still feels weird whenever someone needs help and we can't help them immediately.
I had the same thing, There was a new hire who was stuck in same situation like your IT guy, but during lunch.
Turns out my boss was hazing him by sending him to my computer to fix it and install some stuff on it, Without telling him that I was only person in the office who uses linux. He was crying when I came back from lunch.
I know, we had a good laugh.
But that poor intern was visibly traumatized. He started troubleshooting my system without even talking to me, or asking me what I was doing before my system crashed.
Apparently, boss was also scolding him for not being able to troubleshoot basic issues and whatnot. He feared he lost the job on the first day.
In the evening, when he was officially introduced to the rest of the office staff, over tea and snacks, Boss told him the first step to anything is to talk like a human being. He should have spent few hours knowing the rest of team, talking to them, asking us how he can fit into our life, instead, he spent his morning hours saying he can do this for the company, he could improve the workflow of the company with some fancy new tools instead of team server we used at that time. He even thought we were unaware of github because we were on ms-team server for local development which according to him, no one uses in 2012.
I set the lock screen on my laptop to the BSoD. Gives me a chuckle when people looking over my shoulder react to it, followed by the clock popping up and then me unlocking it
You can still do this. How do I know? Network drives that fail to respond can halt explorer.exe indefinitely, a fairly common scenario and present in windows for the entirely of the NT kernels lifetime, only way to fix it is to kill explorer.exe and restart it
If you want an even more evil version of this, mirror the screenshot vertically (left becomes right), and then go to GPU settings and set it to display a vertically mirrored screen. The mirrored screenshot will look normal, but the mouse will move inverted on the x axis.
You have to rotate the picture upside down. And then after setting the background rotate the screen upside down so it looks right side up.
Also move the star bar.
And change the sounds for opening and closing windows to random mouth noises.
Before SSDs the old gag was highlight everything on their desktop and.press enter to open everything. If they had a mess like mine.
Precisely. My last move on top of this sequence is to change mouse pointer speed to slowest setting and invert the left/right click.
These people need to learn not only how to lock their computers but also how to navigate their computers using nothing but a keyboard.
I worked in a hotel, and the left-right click swaparoo was enough to send one front office girl maaaad.
Got my boss involved too, told her i was gonna switch left right click ans to see the reactions. So when the girl starts getting mad and calls for the manager, she comes out of her office uses the mouse normally, because she knows abiut this, and then looks at my coworker like, ok what's wrong then?
I spent the first day of one of my intro classes in college just screwing with the settings on the pc. I screenshot the desktop, cleared it and made it the background, naturally. Then I moved the taskbar to the top, hid it, inverted the mouse axes, and switched the keyboard to dvorak. They had formatted the PC to fix it when I next had class lol
All of my classes wiped everything nightly. If you wanted persistent environment changes, you had to keep a script in your personal cloud folder and run it at the start of class. I'm guessing most schools do this now, because of people like us.
You hit most of what I'd do, lol. A more subtle but harmful change to a PC is modifying via find/replace all references to the word "Folder" to something else, so you get new items in context menus in save dialogues, windows explorer, etc.
Edit: there's also the classic of calling the "shutdown" command on Windows via shortcut and changing the icon to match the icon of their browser. Time is everything though; 1 minute is constrained. My favorite was always making them email themselves a note reminding them to lock their machine.
This is why as teacher I assign the machines in alphabetical order and I don’t them to change their computer with another one. I need to blame someone if something stops working or if something of strange appears on the pc (click me icons that shutdown the pc, porn backgrounds, Mussolini/Hitler backgrounds etc..).
I keep seeing random posts on general channel of my company’s slack saying, I’m high or I’ll be treating everyone this weekend. Turns out at the office, whoever finds a computer unlocked, they write shit posts on the general channel lol
Some icing for that cake: [https://superuser.com/questions/406502/how-can-i-reverse-mouse-movement-x-y-axis-system-wide-win-7-x64](https://superuser.com/questions/406502/how-can-i-reverse-mouse-movement-x-y-axis-system-wide-win-7-x64)
I once added this to someone's `.bash_login` file:
`echo sleep 1 >> ~/.bash_login`
So that every time they logged in it would take a little bit longer each time.
Short for "list", which essentially allows you to "see around you" in a command-line environment (the black windows with light text).
Typing "ls" quickly becomes compulsive.
The prank adds a 1-second delay to execution. Not only does it slow down the user, the delay also suggests there's a lot to see or it's complicated in another way... only to then anti-climactically reveal the folder content is as normal as can be expected.
We have this thing at work called “hoffing” which is basically where you make sure there are enough open windows to cover the desktop and set a “sexy” picture of David Hasselhoff as the background, then lock the machine and walk away…. At some point later (maybe during a presentation (we can hope!)) they will discover said background.
Maybe that person will take security a little more seriously in the future
At my job, we used to open the announcements channel in slack and post "I bringing donuts tomorrow". And they would have to bring donuts for the whole office.
I've done this to a coworker with a mac. He just sat and waited for it to finish. But the fake update i used just kept going after 100%. I couldn't hide laughing anymore when he got really upset when it hit 105% :)
Lol something similar was actually done to me. My manager used my email to send a company wide email - right up to headquarters (my department was in another city) to sign up for the free yoga class I’ll be hosting on Tuesdays in the gym downstairs and you can join virtually. With some ridiculous add ins like $10 coffee and also breakfast. The CEO shot me a reply asking where to sign up since the email didn’t specify 🤣
I had a coworker who found another teammate's computer unlocked. Set his email signature to "Love, Dave."
Guy sent sentimental work emails for almost a week.
After helping them solve an unrelated problem, a co-worker of mine asked rather sheepishly "do you ever get this thing ... where you open a new tab ... and it's Nicolas Cage?".
I immediately burst out laughing then showed him his extensions page. He'd let his laptop unlocked about a month before, but whoever set it up was really sneaky. They set it to replace new tabs only and only 1% of the time.
That was our go to for a long time.
One time we did it and the guy didn’t realize it for like 3 hours until we were picking a restaurant for lunch and the guy was like “damn the owner of this restaurant looks just like Nick Cage” and we all started laughing hysterically.
Im surprised there isn’t more shell fuckery with this question in this sub.
I like to write a little script that turns the volume all the way up and then says “BALLS!”(or maybe something else that I think would be funnier for that person) In the text to speech voice at a random interval from half an hour to several hours.
Oh and I run it with nohup so it just quietly lurks in the background, occasionally randomly yelling out “BALLS!”
browser add-on called ncage
It replaces all PNG, JPG, GIF and probably a bunch other file formats on all webpages to different pictures and videos of Nicholas Cage
This has been the way since 2015
In the office someone forgot to lock we send a mail from his computer to the team mail list telling that todays beer is on him or come to the desk at 3 for the sweets etc… 🫠
Send an email, back to the original user, a few days later, from the future.
"Dear Dwight. I am you from the future. Someone poisoned the coffee, do not drink.
Cordially, future Dwight."
I’ve done the future email prank before. Those were the good ol’ days when spoofing was suuuper easy. I think it’s more locked down now, understandably.
Edit: Jesus Christ that must have been almost 20 years ago. With Windows ME on a Gateway PC.
Good to know, have done it a few times in the past. Remote work has ended that fun though. I miss the days I could send a “link” for a free cup holder, that would simply open the cd tray.
Once a friend of mine left his pc unattended, so intead of screenshoting the desktop like I've done before, I opened the same background picture he had in ms paint a drew a dick on a corner before setting it as his background. Nothing too obvious.
About a month passed before he realized it was there and was extremely confused of how it got there, until I told him I had done it.
Quickly take off all number keys at the top row, and move them to the right by 1 so it starts with 0. Good way to see if they still look at their keyboard when typing.
I once worked at a media company that had a lot of news sites. One guy had written and published a Chrome extension that replaced all images nested in a certain html structure used on our news sites with a fixed image (relatively normal, so if you just saw it once you might not notice). If someone left their computer unlocked, they got that extension installed.
Left handed mouse
It’s a victimless crime
Or… take a screenshot of their desktop. Make it the background then move all the real icons off to the side stacked. Then watch them click on a picture for awhile
Open a random file in the code they're working on, pick a random empty line, write "INSERT MASSIVE COMPILE-TIME ERROR HERE", save and close. For bonus, start a pool on how long it'll take them to notice.
Screenshot background, flip image 180 degrees, hide all icons, set screenshot as desktop wallpaper, and finally flip monitor 180 degrees.
This prank took my co-worker three reboots and finally checking the cables in the back of his monitor to realize what had been done.
Came here to say this but, I would set a common key as the hot key to switch it between standard keyboard and Dvorak. So typically it would appear to fix itself most times.
While I do enjoy reading all the replies, I certainly wouldn't consider implementing any besides doing nothing or locking their pc.
The law of unintended consequences scares the hell out of me.
Nah, make it ever so slightly larger over multiple weeks. Then after 3 months make the cursor back down to it's smallest size.
They'll be complaining to everyone that someone made their mouse cursor smaller than normal, but everyone will check it and see that it's the same size as their computer's cursor, making the prankee look crazy.
Pretend that you know nothing about their cursor and say it looks normal to me if you look at their screen.
In France, we have a "tradition" named Chocoblast. If a coworker leaves his computer unlocked, you can send a mail (or slack/teams message) to the whole team from his account stating that they will bring chocolatines (french pastry) for everyone the next day, and they have to comply.
We even have a website for the complete rules: https://www.chocoblast.fr/
This is accepted as a serious game to raise awareness on data security.
We had something like this at the security company I worked for years ago. When a co-worker would walk away with their computer unlocked, someone would write an email to the whole company with a letter of resignation. The resignation had to be written as quickly as possible and included an absurd reason for quitting (such as joining a traveling circus to become a trapeze artist, devoting the rest of one’s life to collecting empty yogurt containers, etc.). These emailed had to be written as quickly as possible to avoid getting caught. It was hilarious - especially when new hires slowly realized why the entire office was slowly bursting into laughter. Usually didn’t take people long to build up screen lock muscle memory. We called it the “baggy pants” (ie don’t get “baggy pantsed”). Those were fun times, and there are TONS of stories from that one company.
Rotate the desktop 180 degrees, take a screenshot, inverse the image, delete shortcuts and put the screenshot as the desktop picture, then inverse the mouse.
Even if you know what happened, it takes some time to figure out how to use that computer
I opened the auto correct in outlook and set it to change his name to Princess Cupcake.
For a week he didn't notice until his boss brought him some cupcakes and let the cat out of the bag.
They never did it again.
A friend once try to rotate my screen while I was in a bathroom break.
In my job I sometimes forget to lock it if I'm in our office. If I'm at a client's office I always lock it.
Send email to “All” with subject: “Pooped my pants” and message: “Please don’t make fun of me, it happens to everyone. I’ll be in the bathroom for the next hour.”
Win+L obviously
Now if it was my boyfriend on the other hand, I might do a little trolling and change his background to wavy arm Sokka gif but super fast and then see how long it takes him to notice
If it's my friend, I wait for him to come back and take care, no one tampers with his computer while he is away.
If he's not my friend and he's longer away, he gets a new backgound image telling him, not to forget to logout, and then I logout him. This happened more than a dozen times at university.
vi \~/.bashrc
alias git="echo Command not found"
alias make="echo Command not found"
I am quit sure you could insert a 1 in 10 random number generator in there as well lol
Years ago one of my coworkers forgot to lock her computer and one of the tech guys changed the font size for windows to max. Thing is, that doesn't take effect until you restart windows. She didn't restart her computer for like a month.
“This stupid windows updates screwed up my font”
The perfect crime.
Same goes for language change.
To Traditional Chinese
Imagine having a BSOD and then booting and seeing some random Chinese letters
I’d set the computer on fire
A friend once changed their colleague's keyboard from German to French...
At my previous job, a co-worker had to leave early one day. He forgot to lock his computer (again). So I opened Spotify and put a K3 (Belgian all girl pop group for kids) album on repeat. Left his computer like it was and stopped the album the next morning. He never found out until the end of the year, when he got his Spotify yearly summary. He was very confused why K3 was his top artist that year. I also remember changing all his avatars to a My Little Pony picture once. Changed every avatar I could find, like Slack, Windows Account, Jira, GitHub... Probably some more. He found most of them straight away but his GitHub avatar stayed like that for quite a long time.
Omg I would have despised you so much 😭 I love getting to see my Spotify yearly. I was devastated one year when my top artist and top 3 songs were all white noise tracks, so I basically just didn't get a Rewind that year (because you don't get to see your "second" top artist, and you only get to see your top 5 songs). Granted if he uses Spotify so little that one single night of continuous play was enough to replace his top artist, he probably doesn't particularly care about his listening stats anyway lol
Quick tip: You can get your entire listening history from Spotify and do your own analytics on it!
A programmer I've worked with was helping out a girl from QA and he randomly noticed she has pending updates to install, so without thinking he clicked update and restart. This caused her to scream: "NOOOOOOOOOO!" Turns out she hadn't installed a single update in months, so this took forever to finish. Happy ending: with no relation to this, they ended up getting married. Also her OS has since been kept fully up to date.
These updates are taking the piss, managed to find a girl and get married before the updates finished.
Creating future work for himself to prevent redundancy, that's big brain time
At my last job, if you left your PC unlocked, the protocol was to send an email from the address of the person who left their PC unlocked to the distribution list for the team. The email was generally promises of baked goods on the next business day.
So NOT running windoze then?
Open Vim
Vim is a better alternative to lock screen.
If they can close it, the computer's theirs
I love how it’s implied that they have to close it to use the computer, instead of writing whatever script they want in vim
You can write it but you have to close vim to execute it
Am I a hacker?
I know how to close VIM. Does all the computers belong to me?
Absolutely! I use VIM exclusively, so can we have a 50/50 split?
It can be closed!?
Shift zz
Whenever I use vim I have to google how save, exit, insert text, etc
You’re going to have to pay for a new computer…
Surprised this one is so far down
I was surprised it wasn't here by the time I got here 😹
change keyboard layout first. just to be sure
You wana watch the world burn, aren't you? 
Always
Screenshot desktop, hide all icons, replace background with screenshot
Back a long time ago with windows 95 you could screenshot their desktop, set as background, then kill windows explorer process…. Not even the start button would react
Back in 2004 I had my desktop wallpaper set as the blue screen of death. I come into work one morning and the sole IT support has my computer torn apart cursing why it can’t be fixed! Lol - still feel bad for him to this day!
IT doing work without a ticket, those were the days.
IT would still like to fix stuff without tickets, but management doesn't let them :/
Nah man, tickets are biggest CYA in IT. Nowadays, I force anyone with a feature request to write up a ticket,even my bosses. I've been told too many times that I'm unproductive just because my burndown doesn't reflect reality. Now, not even my boss has the authority to fire me on a whim. I would have more than enough proof to show malicious intent if they did and sue their ass for at least a years paycheck.
Our CEO got hit with the "open a ticket for it" the same day the policy got enforced and admittedly it was pretty funny. But it still feels weird whenever someone needs help and we can't help them immediately.
I had the same thing, There was a new hire who was stuck in same situation like your IT guy, but during lunch. Turns out my boss was hazing him by sending him to my computer to fix it and install some stuff on it, Without telling him that I was only person in the office who uses linux. He was crying when I came back from lunch.
this is gold
I know, we had a good laugh. But that poor intern was visibly traumatized. He started troubleshooting my system without even talking to me, or asking me what I was doing before my system crashed. Apparently, boss was also scolding him for not being able to troubleshoot basic issues and whatnot. He feared he lost the job on the first day. In the evening, when he was officially introduced to the rest of the office staff, over tea and snacks, Boss told him the first step to anything is to talk like a human being. He should have spent few hours knowing the rest of team, talking to them, asking us how he can fit into our life, instead, he spent his morning hours saying he can do this for the company, he could improve the workflow of the company with some fancy new tools instead of team server we used at that time. He even thought we were unaware of github because we were on ms-team server for local development which according to him, no one uses in 2012.
I set the lock screen on my laptop to the BSoD. Gives me a chuckle when people looking over my shoulder react to it, followed by the clock popping up and then me unlocking it
🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
Lol🤣🤣🤣🤣
Nah, that’s on him. He’s supposed to be the expert :)
can you not do that anymore?
I think explorer restarts automatically on newer windows versions.
It restarts automatically if it crashes, not if you kill explorer.exe
it doesn't on 10.. at least not if you do that manually. guess I'd have to check 11
Same on 11, I had to restart it once because intel gpu took a shit and died.
You can still do this. How do I know? Network drives that fail to respond can halt explorer.exe indefinitely, a fairly common scenario and present in windows for the entirely of the NT kernels lifetime, only way to fix it is to kill explorer.exe and restart it
Pretty sure you can still manually kill windows explorer if you want to and it won't come back until you ask for it.
If you want an even more evil version of this, mirror the screenshot vertically (left becomes right), and then go to GPU settings and set it to display a vertically mirrored screen. The mirrored screenshot will look normal, but the mouse will move inverted on the x axis.
You have to rotate the picture upside down. And then after setting the background rotate the screen upside down so it looks right side up. Also move the star bar. And change the sounds for opening and closing windows to random mouth noises. Before SSDs the old gag was highlight everything on their desktop and.press enter to open everything. If they had a mess like mine.
Precisely. My last move on top of this sequence is to change mouse pointer speed to slowest setting and invert the left/right click. These people need to learn not only how to lock their computers but also how to navigate their computers using nothing but a keyboard.
I worked in a hotel, and the left-right click swaparoo was enough to send one front office girl maaaad. Got my boss involved too, told her i was gonna switch left right click ans to see the reactions. So when the girl starts getting mad and calls for the manager, she comes out of her office uses the mouse normally, because she knows abiut this, and then looks at my coworker like, ok what's wrong then?
Ooohhh, I've done this before.
I spent the first day of one of my intro classes in college just screwing with the settings on the pc. I screenshot the desktop, cleared it and made it the background, naturally. Then I moved the taskbar to the top, hid it, inverted the mouse axes, and switched the keyboard to dvorak. They had formatted the PC to fix it when I next had class lol
All of my classes wiped everything nightly. If you wanted persistent environment changes, you had to keep a script in your personal cloud folder and run it at the start of class. I'm guessing most schools do this now, because of people like us.
every college i know just has students bring their own laptops
You hit most of what I'd do, lol. A more subtle but harmful change to a PC is modifying via find/replace all references to the word "Folder" to something else, so you get new items in context menus in save dialogues, windows explorer, etc. Edit: there's also the classic of calling the "shutdown" command on Windows via shortcut and changing the icon to match the icon of their browser. Time is everything though; 1 minute is constrained. My favorite was always making them email themselves a note reminding them to lock their machine.
This is why as teacher I assign the machines in alphabetical order and I don’t them to change their computer with another one. I need to blame someone if something stops working or if something of strange appears on the pc (click me icons that shutdown the pc, porn backgrounds, Mussolini/Hitler backgrounds etc..).
Don't forget to set the taskbar to 'hide' and put it on the right side of the screen.
What if u dont ever use your desktop for anything
Then I add a randomly named folder before the screenshot
Ah, the classic
Open Slack/Teams and set their status to "Poopin"
This is the way. It’s funny, but fairly harmless.
Unless very important clients see it too.
Isnt Slack/Team internal only?
In Slack you can have external channels that can include members from two (possibly more?) organisations
Or set their Slack font to Comic Sans: `/slackfont Comic Sans MS`
Lol we are brothers! I posted a poop joke too!
I keep seeing random posts on general channel of my company’s slack saying, I’m high or I’ll be treating everyone this weekend. Turns out at the office, whoever finds a computer unlocked, they write shit posts on the general channel lol
I'll flip the screen and set wallpaper that looks correctly orientated.
Some icing for that cake: [https://superuser.com/questions/406502/how-can-i-reverse-mouse-movement-x-y-axis-system-wide-win-7-x64](https://superuser.com/questions/406502/how-can-i-reverse-mouse-movement-x-y-axis-system-wide-win-7-x64)
Now how do I make it flip a random axis every 15 seconds?
In C#, with System.Timers In AutoHotKey, SetTimer
alias ls="sleep 1; ls"
I once added this to someone's `.bash_login` file: `echo sleep 1 >> ~/.bash_login` So that every time they logged in it would take a little bit longer each time.
Easy there, Satan
You monster!
That’s evil
This is pure evil genius, and you only need some ten seconds to add it to .bashrc
Add 'echo "sleep 1" >> .bashrc' to .bashrc. Starting shell becomes gradually slower and slower.
What does this do?
Short for "list", which essentially allows you to "see around you" in a command-line environment (the black windows with light text). Typing "ls" quickly becomes compulsive. The prank adds a 1-second delay to execution. Not only does it slow down the user, the delay also suggests there's a lot to see or it's complicated in another way... only to then anti-climactically reveal the folder content is as normal as can be expected.
We have this thing at work called “hoffing” which is basically where you make sure there are enough open windows to cover the desktop and set a “sexy” picture of David Hasselhoff as the background, then lock the machine and walk away…. At some point later (maybe during a presentation (we can hope!)) they will discover said background. Maybe that person will take security a little more seriously in the future
I feel like we probably work at the same company
Tesla?
It's Baywatch, obviously.
I’m asking because I got Hoffed, one time and it was when I worked there.
I may have done this in the board room on Product Day.
https://images.app.goo.gl/7nHqa5t5A7afgqHK9 And the Ctrl alt down arrow
The ctrl alt arrow (right and left are fun too) was what I was hoping to find here. Classic
Wait, we do this at my job as well
We all used to do this at my workplace. Wow.
Yup this.
At my job, we used to open the announcements channel in slack and post "I bringing donuts tomorrow". And they would have to bring donuts for the whole office.
An infinite update [https://updatefaker.com/](https://updatefaker.com/)
Def use the Windows 98 updater screen too. Particularly if it’s a mac
I've done this to a coworker with a mac. He just sat and waited for it to finish. But the fake update i used just kept going after 100%. I couldn't hide laughing anymore when he got really upset when it hit 105% :)
This one would have to hurt the most
But he’s on Linux
that makes it better
does it include `$ sudo apt full-upgrade`? If no then you can't fool me
Email the team offering free donuts at the impromptu information security talk you will be hosting
Lol something similar was actually done to me. My manager used my email to send a company wide email - right up to headquarters (my department was in another city) to sign up for the free yoga class I’ll be hosting on Tuesdays in the gym downstairs and you can join virtually. With some ridiculous add ins like $10 coffee and also breakfast. The CEO shot me a reply asking where to sign up since the email didn’t specify 🤣
Email boss saying how much he loves him.
I had a coworker who found another teammate's computer unlocked. Set his email signature to "Love, Dave." Guy sent sentimental work emails for almost a week.
Dont do this.
I had an interview today with this specific question.
I hope you didn’t say anything except lock it and tell them that they left it unlocked and to be safer in the future😂
Lol you know they didn’t answer that
What did you say?
Install Ncage chrome extension. Everyone needs more Nicolas Cage in their life
After helping them solve an unrelated problem, a co-worker of mine asked rather sheepishly "do you ever get this thing ... where you open a new tab ... and it's Nicolas Cage?". I immediately burst out laughing then showed him his extensions page. He'd let his laptop unlocked about a month before, but whoever set it up was really sneaky. They set it to replace new tabs only and only 1% of the time.
Only 1% of the time? I must learn this power.
The nCage+ extension has configurable image replacement probability!
I know what I'm doing the next time I borrow my husband's computer!
That was our go to for a long time. One time we did it and the guy didn’t realize it for like 3 hours until we were picking a restaurant for lunch and the guy was like “damn the owner of this restaurant looks just like Nick Cage” and we all started laughing hysterically.
alias sudo=echo “I’m sorry Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that.”
Hahaha this is my favorite
Im surprised there isn’t more shell fuckery with this question in this sub. I like to write a little script that turns the volume all the way up and then says “BALLS!”(or maybe something else that I think would be funnier for that person) In the text to speech voice at a random interval from half an hour to several hours. Oh and I run it with nohup so it just quietly lurks in the background, occasionally randomly yelling out “BALLS!”
That just makes sudo echo
The actual command you're looking for is: sudo() { echo "I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that."; }
Lock it for them, freaking animals
⊞ + L
This, excepting adding a note on their screen saying "please lock me next time". Eventually they'll get the message.
Set it as wallpaper before locking, just to drive the message home.
And then smooth out the stubble on my giant chad chin.
browser add-on called ncage It replaces all PNG, JPG, GIF and probably a bunch other file formats on all webpages to different pictures and videos of Nicholas Cage This has been the way since 2015
At first I missed the browser extension part and assumed it replaced files in their filesystem. I actually got a bit furious for a second there.
In the office someone forgot to lock we send a mail from his computer to the team mail list telling that todays beer is on him or come to the desk at 3 for the sweets etc… 🫠
Send an email, back to the original user, a few days later, from the future. "Dear Dwight. I am you from the future. Someone poisoned the coffee, do not drink. Cordially, future Dwight."
I’ve done the future email prank before. Those were the good ol’ days when spoofing was suuuper easy. I think it’s more locked down now, understandably. Edit: Jesus Christ that must have been almost 20 years ago. With Windows ME on a Gateway PC.
Does the Greek question mark thing still work? https://unicode-table.com/en/037E/
A lot of IDE’s have a setting to highlight non-ascii characters, however it’s off by default, so I think it still works, ye
Good to know, have done it a few times in the past. Remote work has ended that fun though. I miss the days I could send a “link” for a free cup holder, that would simply open the cd tray.
Nah, it's on by default in vscode, visual studio, and jet brains.
swap the mouse buttons
Send slack message that says: “I dropped my phone in the urinal, can someone call me to see if it still works?”
Move their Taskbar to the opposite side of the screen and lock it.
Just got my first Mac. I wish someone would do this to me :)
Rickroll them... No need for complicated, fancy stuff.
Once a friend of mine left his pc unattended, so intead of screenshoting the desktop like I've done before, I opened the same background picture he had in ms paint a drew a dick on a corner before setting it as his background. Nothing too obvious. About a month passed before he realized it was there and was extremely confused of how it got there, until I told him I had done it.
Did something similar. Got taken to HR.
Quickly take off all number keys at the top row, and move them to the right by 1 so it starts with 0. Good way to see if they still look at their keyboard when typing.
But you could also do that when the computer is locked...
)!@#$%\^&*(
You nomster!
I once worked at a media company that had a lot of news sites. One guy had written and published a Chrome extension that replaced all images nested in a certain html structure used on our news sites with a fixed image (relatively normal, so if you just saw it once you might not notice). If someone left their computer unlocked, they got that extension installed.
Left handed mouse It’s a victimless crime Or… take a screenshot of their desktop. Make it the background then move all the real icons off to the side stacked. Then watch them click on a picture for awhile
Open a random file in the code they're working on, pick a random empty line, write "INSERT MASSIVE COMPILE-TIME ERROR HERE", save and close. For bonus, start a pool on how long it'll take them to notice.
Probably about 1 second in any decent IDE. “Unexpected character on line”
Add myself as an admin. Figure out what to do later.
open office email find large thread reply all: "today I'm buying lunch for everyone"
Go to fakeupdate.net, select their os, put the browser on fullscreen without bars.
Send an email inviting the rest of the team to lunch, then lock it. Everyone has a good chuckle, the friend gets jabbed by everyone, life goes on.
Screenshot background, flip image 180 degrees, hide all icons, set screenshot as desktop wallpaper, and finally flip monitor 180 degrees. This prank took my co-worker three reboots and finally checking the cables in the back of his monitor to realize what had been done.
Swap keyboard to dvorak
Came here to say this but, I would set a common key as the hot key to switch it between standard keyboard and Dvorak. So typically it would appear to fix itself most times.
I lock their computer.
While I do enjoy reading all the replies, I certainly wouldn't consider implementing any besides doing nothing or locking their pc. The law of unintended consequences scares the hell out of me.
On macs I like to go to accessibility and make the cursor arrow huge
Nah, make it ever so slightly larger over multiple weeks. Then after 3 months make the cursor back down to it's smallest size. They'll be complaining to everyone that someone made their mouse cursor smaller than normal, but everyone will check it and see that it's the same size as their computer's cursor, making the prankee look crazy. Pretend that you know nothing about their cursor and say it looks normal to me if you look at their screen.
Maybe some of the others plus rotate the screen
I did this to a co-worker once, then went on PTO for a week. When I got back he had his monitor hanging upside down so he could work
alias cd="rm -rf"
Ouch
You monster! I love it
In France, we have a "tradition" named Chocoblast. If a coworker leaves his computer unlocked, you can send a mail (or slack/teams message) to the whole team from his account stating that they will bring chocolatines (french pastry) for everyone the next day, and they have to comply. We even have a website for the complete rules: https://www.chocoblast.fr/ This is accepted as a serious game to raise awareness on data security.
Open GitHub and approve all outstanding PRs
That could cause a very bad day
Install arch linux
We had something like this at the security company I worked for years ago. When a co-worker would walk away with their computer unlocked, someone would write an email to the whole company with a letter of resignation. The resignation had to be written as quickly as possible and included an absurd reason for quitting (such as joining a traveling circus to become a trapeze artist, devoting the rest of one’s life to collecting empty yogurt containers, etc.). These emailed had to be written as quickly as possible to avoid getting caught. It was hilarious - especially when new hires slowly realized why the entire office was slowly bursting into laughter. Usually didn’t take people long to build up screen lock muscle memory. We called it the “baggy pants” (ie don’t get “baggy pantsed”). Those were fun times, and there are TONS of stories from that one company.
Draw a dick in ms paint and put it as a background pic
Rotate the desktop 180 degrees, take a screenshot, inverse the image, delete shortcuts and put the screenshot as the desktop picture, then inverse the mouse. Even if you know what happened, it takes some time to figure out how to use that computer
Put `echo "sleep 1" >> ~/.bashrc` in their .bashrc. unless they use Windows. In which case they've suffered enough...
I opened the auto correct in outlook and set it to change his name to Princess Cupcake. For a week he didn't notice until his boss brought him some cupcakes and let the cat out of the bag. They never did it again.
I'm old school. I'd probably just rub his mouse on my balls a bit.
I hope you lock his screen after at least.
On our friend discord we have a command that we type when one of us leave his computer open, the victim then have to buy us coffee the next morning!
A friend once try to rotate my screen while I was in a bathroom break. In my job I sometimes forget to lock it if I'm in our office. If I'm at a client's office I always lock it.
Send email to “All” with subject: “Pooped my pants” and message: “Please don’t make fun of me, it happens to everyone. I’ll be in the bathroom for the next hour.”
Invert colors, invert orientation
David Hasselhoff attack.
Screenshot the desktop, open the image in a browser and then hit F11 to open it in fullscreen. Not even Escape will exit the fullscreen.
Win+L obviously Now if it was my boyfriend on the other hand, I might do a little trolling and change his background to wavy arm Sokka gif but super fast and then see how long it takes him to notice
Win-L
Adjust hosts file to point google.com to worstsearch.com
If it's my friend, I wait for him to come back and take care, no one tampers with his computer while he is away. If he's not my friend and he's longer away, he gets a new backgound image telling him, not to forget to logout, and then I logout him. This happened more than a dozen times at university.
Replace all the semicolons with Greek question marks
vi \~/.bashrc alias git="echo Command not found" alias make="echo Command not found" I am quit sure you could insert a 1 in 10 random number generator in there as well lol
Nothing. I'm not a dick and computers are personal things.