Revenge or fun things to do to co-workers

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5 total messages Started by Gregd... Commander Krugannal Fri, 22 Dec 1989 03:37

#588

Author: Gregd... Commander Krugannal
Date: Fri, 22 Dec 1989 03:37

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      At work, I had a new manager who needed a good joke played
   on him. In the office, we had a font edit program for the IBM
   EGA monitors. He didn't know this. The program would allow you
   to edit fonts and then save them to a .COM file that when 
   executed, would load the font into memory.
     One day, while bored, I started to edit the standard font.
   With out going into details, suffice to say I made some of the
   characters interesting. Most importantly, I made the ! a space,
   so when it was typed, you would get a space on the screen.
   I then named the file !.COM (say this coming didn't you? :-)
   I then edited various batch files to include !.COM. The two most
   important ones were his AUTOEXEC.BAT and NET.BAT. So, as soon
   as he booted his screen would show funny characters. Quit by
   accident while looking through his autoexec.bat, he deleted the
   line containing !.COM (which of course looked like a blank line
   to him.) From then on, his computer booted ok, but everytime he
   logged onto the network, the screen would do funny things. Well,
   since his computer had been having trouble with the network for
   sometime now, he was convinced it was the network or hardware.
   I then one day removed the line in his NET.BAT file so things
   looked ok. But then, whenever he left his desk, I would reach
   over and type !.COM. So, it appeared to him that his computer
   was still acting funny. I finally let in and told him.
 
     He then surprised me with his creativity! (He had never struck
   me as THAT creative.) I booted my computer one day and started
   working. Everything was fine until I tried hitting the 'm' key.
   An 'n' appeared on the screen. I looked down at the keyboard,
   and hit 'm' and a 'm' appeared on the screen. But something looed
   awfully funny with they keyboard. I finally had to grab another
   keyboard and compare it key by key with mine. Sure enough 
   something was funny about mine. He had removed the 'm' and 'n'
   keycaps and switched them. He then used ANSI.SYS to edit swap
   the function of the keys. So, when I hit the newly appointed
   'm' and 'n' keys, they worked jsut fine, they were just in the
   wrong place. I fixed it immediately. I didn't let him on until
   a week later that I had found out...

Re: Revenge or fun things to do to co-workers

#589

Author: s... Steve Simmons
Date: Fri, 22 Dec 1989 13:57

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Greg_d...@mts.rpi.edu (Commander Krugannal) writes:

>      At work, I had a new manager who needed a good joke played
>   on him . . .

A friend (who shall remain nameless) reported this prank:

His supervisor, Judy, was a complete zero.  At one point Judy got a wild
hair and absolutely *insisted* that her host be placed on usenet.  Need
I say Judy was utterly incompetant to do this herself?  Anyway, the
person who took care of it noticed Judy hadn't set a host name (surely
a neccesary item) and took care of that, too.  Then they very very
carefully explained to Judy that her email address was (I quote)

   "foo exclaimation point bar exclaimation point gang exclaimation
    point judy"

He didn't know if anyone ever told her "exclaimation point" is
often pronounced "bang".

Re: Revenge or fun things to do to co-workers

#590

Author: shiffman... Hank Shiffman
Date: Fri, 22 Dec 1989 18:57

37 lines
2563 bytes

Some years ago I was working as a System Engineer for Data General in
the Rochester, NY sales office.  Our district office was in Albany and
there was a small rivalry going on between the two SEs in Rochester
and the crew in Albany.  Some of this had to do with the fact that we
had all the technical smarts but they had much newer and more
interesting machines to play with.  (For the time, anyway.  Can't
imagine wanting to bother with an Eclipse in these more enlightened
times.)

Anyway, one day I decided to have some fun.  We knew the password for
the operator account on the Albany machine.  I dialed in and added a
small patch to their Exec process, which handles user logins and batch
queues.  The patch would watch as each new user logged in.  If the
user's id was Brian (my coworker's name) it would flip the superuser
bit on.  However, the patch was *very* specific.  The user id had to
be typed as upper case "B", with the rest of the letters in lower
case.  (AOS is case insensitive, so it was highly unlikely that anyone
would ever type a user id in anything other than strict lower case.)

Once the patch was in, Brian logged into their system and pointed out
his new privileges.  They went crazy trying to figure out how he did
it.  The user profile editor said that he didn't have superuser
privilege.  If *they* logged in with his id the privilege wasn't
enabled.  Changing the password on the operator id didn't help either.

Don't think they ever figured it out.  If Brian hadn't spilled the
beans later they still wouldn't know.  (Hi, guys!)

-- 
Hank Shiffman                                     (415) 336-4658
Marketing Technical Specialist
Software Engineering Technologies               ...!sun!shiffman
Sun Microsystems, Inc.                          shif...@Sun.com

Zippy sez:
  Now I'm concentrating on a specific tank battle toward
 the end of World War II!

Re: Revenge or fun things to do to co-workers

#591

Author: cpho... Chris Phoenix
Date: Mon, 25 Dec 1989 01:50

10 lines
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Ah yes, switching key caps!  The IBM AT keyboard is great for this, since its
caps come off easily and it has a row of function keys across the top, on 
which you can spell out small phrases.  It was fine for the touch typists...
Luckily for the rest, we got tired of it after a few days.

-- 
Chris Phoenix              | A harp is a nude piano.
cpho...@csli.Stanford.EDU | "More input!  More input!"
Life is the only game in which the object of the game is to learn the rules.
Disclaimer:  I want a kinder, gentler net with a thousand pints of lite.

Re: Revenge or fun things to do to co-workers

#592

Author: d... William David Haas
Date: Tue, 26 Dec 1989 08:21

10 lines
1116 bytes

In article <11...@csli.Stanford.EDU> cpho...@csli.stanford.edu (Chris Phoenix) writes:
>Ah yes, switching key caps!  The IBM AT keyboard is great for this, since its
>caps come off easily and it has a row of function keys across the top, on 
>which you can spell out small phrases.  It was fine for the touch typists...
>Luckily for the rest, we got tired of it after a few days.

Try switching the left and right arrow keys and the up down
arrow keys.

Switching the keys on the numeric key pad works too.

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