Tech Humor

[Revenant]

Ok, since all the screw up posts keep reappearing, how about one almost related: What's your best story on pulling a prank on coworkers, users, etc? I know most of us have a sense of humor, buried somewhere under layers of griping about customers. My favorite was a variation on the old shock theme. I was working on a system, had my hands in the cabling, and another tech walks over and for some reason, turned the thing on. (Since I had it unplugged, I had no worries) So on a whim, I started shaking and jerking and man, the look on his face was classic. He was scrambling trying to hit the power cord, unplug the machine, whatever. I laughed at him for an hour. Needless to say, he never did that again.

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What's this button d--

[klenard]

I put the Shockwave program "Expedite.exe" (Flashes "I am Gay" in pink and black) on my bosses computer. whenever he got back on it, It starts flashing and making a "whoop-whoop" sound. it was soo funny watching him try to turn it off.

[Revenant]

'nother good one: At the last shop I worked at, I modified one of the salesman's shutdown screens to say, instead of "It is safe to Shut down your computer," to Error code 5635, It is NOT safe to shut down your computer!" It was funny to see him come running into the tech area- my computers broken!

and then, there was this one time, at band camp...

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What's this button d--

[klenard]

Revenant, you have to show me how to do that one.......

[CobraTekMax]

Heh heh heh! First off, let me say that my boss and I get along great. He's like a brother, father and best friend all in one. But he's NOT a computer guy. He can sell an ice maker to an Eskimo, but he knows only the very basics of how a computer actually works. So, needless to say, he relies on me for pretty much every thing.

I once painstakingly created a fake error dialog box that stated "ID10T Error! Windows Update has detected that you may be running a pirated version of Windows 2000. Another machine using this Product ID code has logged onto the Windows Update site at this time. Please click yes to erase the contents of this drive." "No" and the close button were both greyed out. Saved it as a bitmap, and made it my boss's wallpaper. It was beautiful. Dead center on the middle of the screen, and looked completely legit, especially since he always uses a plain black background. I knew he was coming in to do some paper work the next morning, so it would be the first thing he saw when he turned his monitor on. Just for giggles, I left my phone off the hook, and turned off my cell phone and pager. Finally became "available" to take calls after I figured he was there screwing around with it for about a half hour.

Sure enough, my cell phone wasn't on for more than a minute when it reported 20 missed calls, and more than a dozen voice mails from him. And 37 pages on my pager. He finally finally reached me, and the first thing he said was "Are you f*cking with me?!"
What are you talking about, I ask? "I've been trying to reach you for almost an hour! I need you down here right now! There's this message on my computer -" I wish I could have played it cool for a bit longer to string him along, but the fear and tension in his voice brought my mean streak, and I started laughing my head off. "Oh, you little son of a *****! You just remember, payback is hell!"

It's great to know that you're irreplacable.

Oh, BTW, has anyone ever seen the Flash file "careless whispers"? Run it, and a redneck loudly announces - "HEY EVERYBODY! I'M WATCHIN' PORNO OVER HERE!" That's another good one.

[Revenant]

Klenard: to change the shutdown screen:
In 95/98, there should be a file in the C:\windows directory called either logo.sys or logos.sys. (I can't recall specifically, and I'm on NT right now...) They may be hidden. Change the extension on them to bmp and you can view them in paint or whatever. You can modify them however you like, but just keep pixel width/height the same as the original files, and the rename them to their original .sys name. The startup screen is in the root (C:\) hidden as logo.sys. Modify them how you like, but remember: don't feed them after midnig... (s$*t, wrong warning) Always keep them the same hieght and width as the original. Plus make backups of the originals, just in case.

As a side note, someone else did this one to one of my friends, he was at the school computer lab so this really got him good. Someone sent him an EXE file. He ran it. It popped up a dialogue box that said: "do you have a small penis? The no button would run away if you tried to click on it, so he eventually conceded and hit yes... The next screen was loud noise, and bright red large letters that said something to the effect of "This Man Has A Small Penis" he couldn't get out of it so it ran its course and made fun of him for like a minute. The best part is, he's a jock... heheheh... The computer lab had some fun at his expense...

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What's this button d--

[Danrak]

I think the best one for me so far is when Back Orifice came aout before anyone knew about it. Lets say that all the computers on the network had cd draws opening up randomly, program starting and closing by themselves, and more.
I've also took a snap shot of a bosses computer screen, moved all icons I could on desktop (with a little help from regedit) to a folder, then made the screen shot i took earlier as a background and watched him try and open up his programs.

Changed startup and shutdown screens to say things like "Now formating c:", "Computer is infected with XYZ virus, please call for help".

I'm currently working on a way to get sounds to play on every computer on our network at once or in a randomly. I would also love to to make it so when a tech turns a computer out a puff of smoke comes out, but that might be going a bit too far.
Not really computer related but I love saying "No I will NOT touch you there" loud enough so the guys out front will hear.

.·°Danrak°·.
The box said "Requires Windows 95 or better" so I installed Linux

[This message has been edited by Danrak (edited September 15, 2000).]

[MAYHEM]

Let's just say that between testing modems by repeatedly dialing tha stores main line with Hyper-Terminal and accessing th A drives on both POSs, I keep the sales staff on there toes. Had one salesperson convinced for months that the store was haunted by a Mafia hit victim buried under the concrete floor.

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Who the hell is General Protection and why is he messing with my comuter?

[MAYHEM]

Another one not exactly related to computers:

One of my techs had been complaining that people were calling his house all through the night looking for someone who he never met. He later found out the phone co. had crossed some lines. But not before I could take advantage of his plight.

After listening to his ranting for an hour or so, I excused myself to go next door for coffee. I conspired with the manager of the bread shop. Twenty minutes after I return Evan is still ranting about people calling him at 4AM looking for "Lori" and wanting to know who he is and what he did with "Lori".

Then Suzi, from next door calls and Evan answers the phone, she says, "Hi, my name is Lori, do I have any mesages?"

The look on Evans face was PRICELESS! And the stuttering response of, "Wh-WHat... Wh-What???.... D D D Do you know how many people have called me looking for you?" I completely lost it, took ten minutes to stop laughing enough to get off the floor.

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Who the hell is General Protection and why is he messing with my comuter?

[RLD]

I have this exe file that opens the CD tray whenever it is executed. I put this on a friends computer and added it into the scheduled tasks to run at irritating times. When I went to laugh at them, I discovered that they had put masking tape around the whole machine to stop the CD tray from coming out. The tray was never the same after that - sort of shaky.

[pcshark]

Back in the DOS days, when you booted to a prompt, it was fun to load ansi.sys in the Config.sys, and then set the text color to black. Black text on black screen = looks like it's busted to me! What was really funny was that you'd sit down and say "Let me take a look." Type CLS and then enter, and the white text reappears. Then you go "Looks fine to me." And it would be, until the next time they rebooted. Good times, the DOS days (-:

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R. Bret Walker, CNE

Wondering what videos to rent this weekend? Check out The People's Reviews, movie reviews written for the people and by the people.

[RoboG4]

Several times I have changed the system.ini line shell=Explorer.exe to shell=progman.exe, effectively bringing up the windows 3.1 interface. The look on peoples faces when they can't find the start menu.

[TazNet]

Originally posted by Danrak:
I think the best one for me so far is when Back Orifice came aout before anyone knew about it. Lets say that all the computers on the network had cd draws opening up randomly, program starting and closing by themselves, and more.
I've also took a snap shot of a bosses computer screen, moved all icons I could on desktop (with a little help from regedit) to a folder, then made the screen shot i took earlier as a background and watched him try and open up his programs.

Changed startup and shutdown screens to say things like "Now formating c:", "Computer is infected with XYZ virus, please call for help".

I'm currently working on a way to get sounds to play on every computer on our network at once or in a randomly. I would also love to to make it so when a tech turns a computer out a puff of smoke comes out, but that might be going a bit too far.
Not really computer related but I love saying "No I will NOT touch you there" loud enough so the guys out front will hear.

.·°Danrak°·.
The box said "Requires Windows 95 or better" so I installed Linux

[This message has been edited by Danrak (edited September 15, 2000).]

There is a remote admin program like Back Orafice called NetBus. It has the ability to play wave files on the remote PC. You can even turn the volume up and down too. Try it...Lots of fun. I'm still working on the smoke. I want to see that one too.

[pcshark]

Just remembered another one from the DOS/Win3x days. I was messing around in assembler and I wrote a little 9 byte com file that warm-booted the PC from the command line. Well, I copied it onto a co-worker's PC, and just to be sure he saw it, because I was sure he'd love to see it, I put it in his Windows directory and called it win.com. So every time he tried to get into Windows, it rebooted his PC. Oh, the barrage of obscenities that flew from his cubicle that day! He musta stripped the PC down and put it back together twice before I finally, with tears in my eyes, told him what I did.

The last thing I remember was the keyboard flying toward my head...

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R. Bret Walker, CNE

Wondering what videos to rent this weekend? Check out The People's Reviews, movie reviews written for the people and by the people.

[Danrak]

Originally posted by TazNet:
There is a remote admin program like Back Orafice called NetBus. It has the ability to play wave files on the remote PC. You can even turn the volume up and down too. Try it...Lots of fun. I'm still working on the smoke. I want to see that one too.

Yup. played with netbus also. There is another program called girlfriend which is supposed to do the same thing, but it's picked up by virus scanners way to easily.
Another fun thing to do is create an icon on the desktop that shutsdown or restarts the computer. I had fun with that one shen my friend worked at circuit city. Used to make the buttons say, "WARNING do not touch", and of course they did.


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.·°Danrak°·.
The box said "Requires Windows 95 or better" so I installed Linux

[This message has been edited by Danrak (edited September 19, 2000).]