Tech Geek Pranks
I once had a co-worker that kept getting severe signal degradation a few days after he would have a cable comapny rep out to see what the deal was. Rep would leave, the signal would be great, then turn to trash by the next day. Turns out that every house around him was tapping into his coax cable, so the signal had been split 3–4 times before it got to his house. Eventually he got sick of calling the cable repairman and disconnected the coax going to his house, attached a stun gun, and fried anyone still connected to his line.
Now, while quite possibly one of the more hilarious tech stories I’ve heard, I can’t recommend this, unless you want to end up buying people new TV’s for your vigilante justice. But there are a few less-lethal ways of pulling a technology-based prank or two.
With is a video blog (vidblog?) with a good idea: Have people pose for a picture, and videotape them until they give up. I’ve actually done this on accident before, but never thought of doing it on purpose. And why not? Most digital cameras can take video clips as well. I’d just be afraid that I would run out of recording time, but since my camera takes up to 30 seconds, I really hope my victim would get the idea by then.
Chat Bot
Oh man, did I ever use this back in the day. I can’t find the web site any more, but someone made an AOL chat bot where you could give it a target screen name, supply some innocuous detail about that person, and the chat bot would see how long it could keep them talking. It was surprisingly good, and would send you a transcript of the communication when it was done. Oh, and it would humiliate your friends for wasting time on the bot.
Fake Tests
These are actually pretty shady, but it was bound to happen. Basically what happens here is some geek is too afraid to talk to a girl (a real one), so you go to a web site and give it her email address. It’ll send her junk mail for an ‘free online coolness/dating preferences/iq test’. You get her answers in the email. There are a few of these out there, but I mean, come on. Just talk to them already, what is this, junior high?
Pranks of scale
We’ve all seen these. Cubicle filled with packing peanuts, cubicle covered with post-its. It’s been done, but is still hilarious.
Pure craziness
Working in an IT department breeds some weird stuff. The same guy who taser’ed his neighbor’s coax-connected devices also made a smooth 1/8-inch layer of parmesian cheese in the bottom of a drawer of someone’s workspace, then replaced all of their stuff. When this person came back into work, they were looking for the smell for a while, and were not amused.
Changing the wallpaper to something horribly inappropriate may not go over well at work. Switching a power supply to 230 volts is an explosive eye-opener (possibly in the form of solder shrapnel). I wouldn’t recommend trying either out on your co-workers, but I’m sure there are other not-so-destructive, appropriate-for-Friday jokes out there for those familiar with technology.
What’s your favorite Friday hijinks for Geeks? We all have a few stories from work, but like the Awkward Pose site shows, there are a host of devices in the consumer arena that are begging to be used for evil.
