🚀 go-pugleaf

Since I haven't seen this mentioned, I'll give it a shot and hope people
will follow the thread...

Hardware Revenge

I realize that in a very real sense, there is more glory and satisfaction
associated with with software oriented revenges/pranks/hacks/whatever you
want to call it.  But there are times when you just want to get your grubby
little paws on something and mess with it.

I went to Rice University in Houston, which as a part of Apple's consortium,
was one of the first instutions to get Macintoshs.  We had a lab of them
set up in the computer center, next to a bunch of Visual 220 terminal which
were hooked up to the Vaxen.  In the early days, the Macs were mostly
treated as toys, a perception which was enhanced by the fact that the most
productive work being done on them were term papers by non-computer types.
(These are the people who type up 15 page papers from memory, don't ever
save their documents to disk, and wonder where the data went when the power
blinks and their Mac goes "bong!".)

Anyway, some of these people get really get on your nerves, especially if
you've been up half the night trying to decipher obscure bugs.  So one day,
some friends and I decided to mess with their minds a little.  We would
unplug the mouse from its port in the back of the Mac and arrange the cord
so it wasn't obvious.  This was pretty easy to figure out, so things got
back to normal fairly quickly.

Next, we took the mouse balls out and hid them.  (BTW, one of the best
places to hide an old style mouse ball (pre-SE) is in the handle space on
the top.  The grooves on either side gives just enough clearance for the
ball to go all the way in.  This worked pretty successfully for a while.
The problem was that with the old mice, the balls are so heave that you can
move one around and tell the problem.  The hard part was in finding the
darn ball.  We eventually figured out that we'd get better results if we
taped up the rollers inside the mouse and left the ball in.  By this time,
we got tired of the whole thing, and life went back to normal.

------
Heard about this one from a co-worker:
"For Joe's [not the real name] birthday, we decided to do something to his
computer.  The department had just gotten in a shipment of SE's and had
them sitting around.  So we took his SE and replaced it with a new one.  We
renamed the hard disk, and we moved all the post-it notes and stuff so it's
look exactly the same.  We put his SE in an empty cube nearby.  He came in
the next morning, and discovered that he only had a system folder on his
hard disk.  Calmly, he began to try to recover the lost data, using SUM and
Fedit and whatnot.  Of course, since the drive had never had any data on
it, none of the recovery programs would find anything.  After a while, he
came by cube with a dazed look and asked if I knew what happened to his SE.
I kept a straight face and said, 'Yeah, Joe.  It's in that cube over
there,' pointing to his machine."  :-)

Sigh.
------

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Paul Tien-Shih Lee              |cth...@claris.com
Claris Corporation, SQA Division|{ames,apple,sun,portal,voder}claris!cthulhu
Disclaimer: Dis is my claimer.  |AppleLink: CLARIS.SQA
If Claris wants one, it can get |America Online (ALPE):Paul Lee
its own.  All hail Discordia!   |(coming soon to a network near you)
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