My favorite prank I pulled was in 1st or 2nd grade. We had to do these idiot tests on Apple IIes. But once we finished, we could play Oregon Trail and Word/Number Munchers, which was sweet. I had a computer at home and a brain, so I’d finish the tests quickly (and later figured out how to see than answer key) – save my answers on my personal disk (we all had disks) and put it back in the metal filing cabinet.

The “lab” teacher was always mad that I’d spend 5 minutes on her test and the remaining 40 on Oregon Trail, so she made a new rule – when you were done you could help her or sit quietly: no Oregon Trail. At the same time my friend’s older brother found/had an old stereo and smashed it up. My friend and I found the speaker magnet, and I hatched a plan. I knew putting a magnet by a computer was bad, so I figured it’d be really bad for floppies.

So to get revenge, I put the magnet on the underside of the metal filing cabinet drawer. It turned out that every time the floppies were put in the case in the drawer, they got scrambled. Data was gone, the formatting was gone, they were totally useless. The teacher couldn’t figure out what was going on, and she was furious. She never connected it to me, and ended up keeping the floppies on her desk after needed to format them several times. One of my finest pranks, and I was only 7.

@Victoria: LOL! No problem. I might still sneak it in somehow when people are not looking.

Oh, before I forget, here are translation notes:

Sowa literally means “Owl” in Polish but when I wrote it like that, it seemed awkward so I left it in original.

Similarly, Misiak means something among the lines of “Teddy Bear” or “Bear Cub” (it can be both) but it was also the guys actual last name so. So it loses something in translation.

Krasnal means Gnome/Dwarf and of course the guy with that nickname was the tallest, and fattest person in our class.

@mcai8sh4: Oh, hey – that would be a nice twist. That’s usually how stories like this end, no?

@Luke Maciak: Hey, I never intended to spoil your story :)

I liked – I must admit I thought SOWA may have been the head teacher (I always have to predict outcomes). I think in our early days, we all experienced some similar sort of mischief. When learning pascal, I made a quick program to check the free space on the server, and create a file the same size, thus knackering the system. Again, the techie was ammused (after I told him) but the clueless teacher was devastated (eventually leaving through ‘stress’ – not through me, she was useless).

I like the little personal posts every once in a while – keep it up.

@astine: LOL! You mean he ph34r3d my 1337 h4x0r skillz? Awesome! At the time we simply concluded that Sowa was just a total pussy. :P

@Victoria: We actually did the same thing once! LOL! Great minds think alike. :) But now I can’t tell that story. Thanks a lot!

@Mart: Well, nearly all of my stories are mostly true. I sometimes alter and embellish them to either protect the innocent, maximize the funny, or when I’m fuzzy on the exact details.

Oh, and also if I reveal something that puts me (or someone else) in a bad light, or someone gets really offended I can always go on public record and claim that this particular part is totally made up. So it’s like my safety valve.

These stories are awesome…keep ’em coming!

Great story. Mostly true, you say? I hope it was all true!

Hope to hear more of it soon. I’m now recalling a few hijinks in my uni days, as well as my current job. But I’ll need to do major refactoring to tell most of them on my own blog.

Reminds me of my university days, when we got angry with one of the professors who was teaching us MS-DOS (in times of Win98, BTW) and put smth like an endless loop exe file on start-up on every lab computer. Worked like a charm: he was reaaly busy for a couple of days :)

Very funny :)

Reminds me of my school years, where we overlooked the administrator password! (Just looking over the “admin”‘s shoulders ;)).
And then all the fun starts…

They spend quite a lot of time to track our class (indeed, the entire class) down. We weren’t allowed to touch a computer for the rest of the year, which was like a month or so :S…
A bit childish when you look at it, but we were just 14 or so.