[…] Oh, and also share your April Fools pranks and jokes. We already covered few good ones when we talked about office pranks. Feel free to share yours. […]

I had a boss once that was quite the Nazi, so I guess what we did was more like revenge than prank. We changed his desktop wallpaper in RegEdit with a picture of a guy called Hermann Göring in uniform. Hearing him screaming about this like a…well…Nazi brought tears to our eyes, especially when he replaced the picture, but for “some reason” the picture was back the next day. I don’t think he was a happy man, those types usually aren’t, but taking it out on the rest of us was not fair, so I guess he deserved it.

Anyway, thanks Luke, I always enjoy reading your stuff, especially when you go all apeshit about stupid end users. Your nemesis, Bob the Retard, has clones around the world. Yesterday, I explained to him why there was a Received column in his Inbox and a Sent column in his Sent Items folder, not the other way around (I kid you not). After I left him, I suspected he didn’t get it.

This made me laugh so much as it brought back many memories. I worked in small office environment where I was the IT support person. If I got bored (sometimes to frequently) pranks would happen, the desk movement was good value, likewise one guy I would take one screw out of his desk every day, mmm didn;t take too long for it to get unsteady. Another good one was to change font, background,foreground, every colour to black, that got a good reaction. Have also done the VNC bit and that is brilliant, just moving the mouse or typing the odd key just makes life fun. The screenshot one is great. The best part with my pranks is that they would come to me to fix them, thats the classic part !

In the computer locals in my school, all pcs were with the backs to each other.
We switched mouses / keyboards between two opposite computers and left.

Easily discovered when you are with two, but as teenagers, we found this fun :P

A good one is to place something under the ‘Del’-key of a keyboard, preferrably with a computer-literate person.
Every time the computer boots, it loads the BIOS setup :) hard time figuring that out.

the “tape in the optical mouse led” was a classic one where i worked :D

Some good stuff there :D

Another one to try is the broken monitor image – run the photo using a slideshow tool (or similar), unplug the mouse and keyboard, and wait… ;)

You could also take a screenshot of the current desktop, and overlay the above image using Photoshop so it looks even more realistic.

I haven’t done much in the way of computer pranks, but I shared a large table with someone else for a while. It was an IT shop sow we had tons of hardware lying all over. I plugged an extra keyboard into the back of my deskmate’s tower. Periodically I’d type, very quickly, “Get to work.” Took him most of the day before he figured it out. Months later I got him again with a mouse by periodically jiggling it.

When I worked at a software company, the guy in charge of IT did the fuzzy internet thing on april fools day. Basically he got on our firewall and played this trick,but made the images fuzzy rather than upside down. What was really funny was that he only changed jpgs, so all the gifs & pngs were fine, and he cycled it – on for 5 minutes, off for 15 minutes. Downstairs us code monkeys figured it out pretty quick, but management, the artists, and sales didn’t even complain until nearly 3pm.

Similar to your Ghost in the Machine prank…

Years ago, I worked at a government office that used OS Warp (or whatever it was called) and something called Saber Menus. Essentially, this was a pre-Windows 3.1.1 “gui” environment for DOS. As administrators, we could remotely connect to any user’s machine. I watched this woman open a program, remotely of course, and then she tried to scroll down the massive list of files…as she did so I kept hitting page down :) She then hit arrow up, and I hit page up. She kept trying this to zero in on the file. Finally, she stopped and exited the program. So I loaded WordPerfect and started typing Ha ha ha ha ha ha :0

Ah, yes – I corrected it. Oh well, I was close enough. :)

German layout is a good one since it is essentially QWERTY but with Z and Y swapped around [making it QWERTZ]

fixed