The April Fools joke that might have got me fired

http://oldvcr.blogspot.com/2025/04/the-april-fools-joke-that-might-have.html

by goldenskye • 1 year ago

528 248 1 year ago

oldvcr.blogspot.com

tux3• 1 year ago

_tk_• 1 year ago

blueflow• 1 year ago

deadbabe• 1 year ago

xg15• 1 year ago

actionfromafar2• 1 year ago

HN is now a federal organization. Your account is marked for deletion in the next efficiency round.

tetris11• 1 year ago

Look, whilst I agree with you in principle, your metaphor on the sexual preferences of honey badgers really did not do you any favours.

aneutron• 1 year ago

While that may be the case, this subject is quite delicate and is best debated within the confines of informed animal sexology:

tdstein• 1 year ago

Can anyone tell me how to setup a premium account? I can’t figure it out.

mankyd• 1 year ago

You gotta start by typing your password into a comment. Like this: ****.

pwagland• 1 year ago

You have to insert 5c.

notfed• 1 year ago

Just log in with your Twitter account. It uses "Sign in With X" now.

kotaKat• 1 year ago

[preflagged for convienence]

alex1138• 1 year ago

We have detached this thread, as it was off-topic

as1mov• 1 year ago

(User was banned for this post)

Bluecobra• 1 year ago

Hope you got 10 bux!

datadrivenangel• 1 year ago

b8• 1 year ago

This comment has been redacted by the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation.

MadVikingGod• 1 year ago

distalx• 1 year ago

busyant2• 1 year ago

I worked at a biotech startup about 20 years ago.

- Two of the VPs at the company were named Jim Collinsworth and Peter Sachs (not their real names).

- For reasons I can't remember, I was able to send emails through the company's Windows email server under any name that I wanted.

- So, I merged the two VP names and I sent an email blast to the entire company from "Peter Collinsworth" (just swapping first and last names).

- "Peter" Collinsworth's email said something to the effect of "In honor of the 765th anniversary of the establishment of the Exchequer and the signing of the Magna Carta, <biotech-startup-x> is declaring April as 'English Unit' Celebration Month. All laboratory generated results will be reported using the following units: Instead of mg/kg/day, we will use pounds/stone/fortnight ...." etc. etc. etc.

- Well, Jim Collinsworth (real VP) saw the email and even he thought that the email had been sent under his own name.

- So, Jim fired off an email blast saying, "I did NOT send this. I don't know what this is about."

- Everyone soon realized it was an April Fool's joke.

- Jim eventually made his way to my office to say ... "That was really funny. Don't EVER do it again."

mschuster91• 1 year ago

For reasons I can't remember, I was able to send emails through the company's Windows email server under any name that I wanted.

The glorious days of open relays, back when spam was in its infancy. Today it's mostly done on a whitelist basis to let tools like JIRA or Gitlab send notifications under the name of users themselves instead of some noreply address.

LinuxBender4• 1 year ago

For reasons I can't remember, I was able to send emails through the company's Windows email server under any name that I wanted.

I know of several fortune 100 companies that still allow this due to the way they set up email protection with o365 and Proofpoint, ironically. not naming them. I've done similar pranks and got by with the skin of my teeth but would not recommend people do this early in their career especially if leadership are sensitive to embarrassment.

busyant2• 1 year ago

especially if leadership are sensitive to embarrassment.

Funny thing is that I cleared my prank with Peter Sachs because he was a bit of a stick-in-the-mud, but he told me to go for it and he thought it was hilarious.

I didn't clear it with Jim Collinsworth because he was a bit of a jokester himself so I (incorrectly) assumed he'd have no problem with it.

dennis_jeeves2• 1 year ago

leadership are sensitive to embarrassment

Or they don't want distractions that are too costly.

hobs• 1 year ago

I showed a new to IT guy about open relays and he was about to send an email from the CEO but thinking better, he sent the joke email from "JohnDoeTotallyTheCEO@gmail.com" (real name instead obviously) - the amount of people STILL thinking it was the real thing was embarrassing.

bee_rider• 1 year ago

Seems like a memorable way of showing them that the email system could be configured better.

zbentley• 1 year ago

When I was junior IT at a smaller place (150ish people), we set up DMARC for the first time in "quarantine" mode. Plan was to eventually set it to full reject but only if folks didn't report issues for a month or so.

While it was in quarantine mode, I asked my boss if we could use it for an object lesson in email trust at our next security training. He said sure, got permission from the CEO, and then an hour before the next quarterly IT security training meeting everyone in the company got an email from the CEO's address saying "URGENT all-hands company meeting, attendance mandatory!" (which came from a Postfix running under my desk, sans DKIM validation record).

In DKIM "quarantine" mode, everyone's Outlook flagged the message with a banner or popup or something saying it was suspicious, I think it also had a prompt to auto-spambox future validation failures. Plenty of folks saw that and/or the Nigerian-prince-style typos I put in the "CEO"'s message. They checked with him or IT, who told them congrats, feel free to head home 30min early after the security training.

The more credulous folks that came to the URGENT all-hands were surprised to find themselves in a regular IT security training, no CEO in attendance. We started off with "so today we are going to talk about phishing, sender forgery, and you...".

glimshe• 1 year ago

Hot take: workplace and social media April Fools jokes aren't funny and are often inappropriate and disrespectful to people's time.

It's cool to do these to your friends in High school, but I once wasted a good amount of time at work because of an April's fool joke. I already didn't want to do the work so I got really upset to have wasted time doing something boring and useless.

Additionally, the scale of social media can create situations where it wastes everybody's time several times per day... Including on HN.

Feel free to prank your friends, but don't bring it to work or the Internet, please.

johnisgood3• 1 year ago

"Don't bring it to work" I could agree with, not the whole Internet, however.

ghaff• 1 year ago

I probably wouldn't make it so absolute. But when I was doing some writing for CNET, there was invariably a warning leading up to April 1 that if you are considering an April Fool's joke in print, just don't.

fkyoureadthedoc2• 1 year ago

All jobs I have ever worked have collectively wasted more man hours through incompetence and the usual corporate BS than I could ever hope to with any conceivable April fools joke.

roenxi2• 1 year ago

The deal is they pay you a fair amount of money to put up with that. Whereas people such as the gentlemen in the article are causing people stress for no reason and with no compensation - and barely even an acknowledgement of misbehaviour.

There are worse crimes in the world, but it is bad.

wat100006• 1 year ago

That doesn't mean you go and deliberately make it worse for a laugh.

lynx97• 1 year ago

Haha, the times they are a changing. I still remember c't april fools joke from the 90s where they published a scencil (template) to indicate where you have to drill a hole into your pentium CPU to be able to overclock it. I still chuckle about the whole thing almost 30 years after the fact, still wondering how many morons actually destroyed their perfectly working CPU back then. At times, active thinking of your peers just needs to be challenged so they don't get too confident...

nyanpasu64• 1 year ago

Meanwhile the Xbox 360 kamikaze hack actually involved drilling a chip...

RandomBacon• 1 year ago

This reminds me of the joke videos where you could drill a hole into the iPhone to access the headphone jack or microwave it for wireless charging. I don't recall seeing any pictures of people actually doing those things though, just "angry" comments which were also probably jokes.

hulitu4• 1 year ago

wondering how many morons actually destroyed their perfectly working CPU back then.

Well, if they knew where the CPU is, and still drilled a hole through it, they deserved it.

causal• 1 year ago

Nah. I like the small things that remind us we're still humans, and a little inconvenience is a small price

Symbiote• 1 year ago

Small things are fine.

It's not fun when the corporate marketing team meets in September to start planning their April Fools jokes.

0x3444ac53• 1 year ago

jonstewart• 1 year ago

HP LaserJet 4s squarely date TFA’s prank in the early-mid 90s. I can agree with you that lame corporate April Fool’s Day jokes on the Internet are overdone; but 1990s-era campus sysadmin’ing ruled. Sysadmins kept a close eye on things to ensure no one (especially the servers) got hurt, but computer geeks were far from mainstream and a spirit of playful tolerance and taking-care-of-our-own prevailed. Well do I remember telneting to sendmail on port 25 and sending spoofed email to classmates…

The university-wide email was probably too much but displaying INSERT 5 CENTS on an HP LaserJet 4 for a day is great.

namenotrequired• 1 year ago

I feel the opposite. Work pranks are the best pranks because they only waste time that I was already selling anyway.

II2II• 1 year ago

My take is that April fools jokes cross the line when they affect people you do not know. Put in other terms: if you can't deliver a direct and sincere apology, you're being a jerk.

hackable_sand• 1 year ago

April 1st always falls on a weekend though

Cycl0ps2• 1 year ago

My brother in Christ it's Tuesday

wat100006• 1 year ago

I'm surprised this is being downvoted. Don't waste hours of other people's time for your fun.

Imagine being one of the people who had to field all of those phone calls. Probably quite a few of those callers were quite angry. Imagine being subject to that anger because some moron in IT you never met thought it would be funny to play a prank that lands on your head.

xxr• 1 year ago

Y’know, I’m inclined to agree here, but I don’t think it was always this way. Over the last few years I’ve been feeling really fatigued, I suppose, by April Fool’s Day, and I think feeling this way has coincided with the rise of fake everything on the web. Rather than one day a year where we get to be amused by pranks in good faith, we’re mentally on-guard every day trying to identify whether a story or (increasingly) an image is real or not. Rather than one day a year where you’ve got people sending you stuff like “ALIEN LABORATORY DISCOVERED UNDERNEATH PYRAMIDS” accompanied by obvious-to-you GenAI images, now it’s every day, and still not everyone is in on the joke (and a joke is the best-case scenario behind creator’s intent).

Suppafly2• 1 year ago

Feel free to prank your friends, but don't bring it to work or the Internet, please.

Hell don't even prank your friends, most of them don't appreciate it either.

dilyevsky• 1 year ago

haha, very funny!

glenstein• 1 year ago

I think the real value in this writeup up of a clever little prank is the way the author/prankster could map out the social reactions and how the spirit in which the prank was received cascades through a whole entire organization in ways that hinge on little cues, little things about who knows who and whether you're physically present before a particular impression crystallizes in people's minds.

It's just such a great example of how people could react either with uproarious laughter or by feeling that some boundary has been violated and can think that either reaction was the most self-evidently obvious one in the world and the reasons for it were entirely contingent. It's something where you can only really witness the irrationality of it if you're in the author's position.

I once heard it speculated that philosophy might have emerged in Greece because the circumstances of being merchants engaging in interstate trade, you could see the way that certain things regarded as received knowledge were really customs, peculiar to certain cultures and locations. When you're the prankster and you can see different people reacting in different ways that seem to be tied to patterns of the circumstances of how they experienced it, you can kind of witness the contingency of those reactions playing out in real time.

cnity• 1 year ago

Both the OP and your summary are very astutely written. Thank you.

jimmydddd• 1 year ago

Great comment! That's it.

dullcrisp• 1 year ago

Sounds like part of the problem was that they actually were considering introducing fees for printing, and this wasn’t their preferred method of communicating that.

ryandrake• 1 year ago

Yea, that’s what I thought, too. The prankster inadvertently floated a very unpopular plan that leadership had and proved it was unpopular before they could implement it. That was probably the root of what actually got admin pissed. Nobody gets disciplined for a harmless joke—you get in trouble when you make the boss’s boss’s boss look bad.

shadowgovt• 1 year ago

Oh yeah. That'll get you.

Back in college, they cut access to the printers for users off-campus, which had previously been a feature. Someone I knew wrote a printing service script in AppleScript that, when fed a PostScript doc, would ssh into one of the on-campus terminals with the user's credentials and feed the doc to the printer. He got in a bunch of trouble because apparently, computer services had cut off-campus access for data-tracking purposes as prelude to an as-yet-unannounced shift to pay-per-page printing (i.e., they wanted to see how much inconvenience the student body would tolerate), and having the inconvenience routed around in software fucked up their numbers.

... now that I tell this story, it occurs to me that nobody ever called computer services on the whole "Running an unsanctioned social experiment on the faculty and student body" part of all this...

(p.s: I think, perhaps, computer services learned the wrong lesson here, because when they rolled out the program at a uni with a massive computer science program, the techniques the students invented to route around paying for print jobs were legendary. Things like "wrap the PostScript job in a detector that tells the daemon tracking pagecount 'I am printing one blank page' and tells the daemon that feeds the job to the printer 'here are the actual pages'". Perhaps their takeaway should have been "If you add friction and cost to the process, bored students will volunteer time to reduce the friction and cost").

disqard• 1 year ago

What a beautiful bit of history! I had no idea.

You expanded my mind today, and I thank you for that!

refulgentis3• 1 year ago

Is this overstated?

i.e. I wonder about the gap between clever little prank and sending a dry email to everyone re: a new printing policy.

Much of this hinges on the gradient from the "uproarious laughter" they received from some, to the frustration from others...which I find hard to believe as self-reported, in what context would this be uproariously funny?

I see the value as a simplistic fable re: empathy, and in having it before, not after.

I almost feel like I missed something huge in the email that signals it's a joke, or adds another layer of humor, but after multiple readings, it looks identical to a janitor emailing everyone on campus to tell them keys will be required for bathrooms from now on. Although, that is significantly more implausible than the IT worker emailing everyone on campus to tell them there are charges for printing.

subroutine2• 1 year ago

I agree. It seems like hardly anyone got to experience the fun part of the prank - the number of people who actually saw INSERT 5 CENTS on their VFD panel was probably close to zero given "By 8:30am it was chaos". So for 99.9% of people the entirety of the prank was a dry email stating campus was going to start charging for printing, which was true.

travisjungroth• 1 year ago

As someone who makes dry sarcastic jokes pretty often, I’ve learned you have to really put some ridiculous stuff in there to signal it’s a joke. This also scales with audience size and delivery method.

With so many people, you’d actually have to make the price ridiculous or something like that. Because some people, once they read that the printing is five cents, are going to be upset enough to not read the rest of the email.

I wouldn’t actually do this prank, but if I like had to, it would be more like the “charge” was to sing a song and the email would actually say April Fools in it. Maybe less funny, but a lot more easily seen as a joke. Makes handling the calls to the admins much easier, too.

norir• 1 year ago

The trickster is indeed an ancient archetype that can bring both wisdom and chaos. Historically, however, my understanding is that prior to Plato, essentially all knowledge, including philosophy, was understood to be received from divine sources. It was through the Socratic dialogues that the idea of knowledge as being something gained through human reason gained a foothold.

One could easily argue then that Plato was essentially a prankster and what we know as western civilization is a consequence of his trickery.

kjellsbells• 1 year ago

essentially all knowledge

In one particular European tradition, maybe? But elsewhere the trickster may themselves be a divine source of insight. Hermes in Greek, the Southwest American Kokopelli, etc.

My point is that the trickster as philosophical root is an idea that has tendrils far beyond a Western viewpoint. I cant find the ref now but IIRC some Native American traditions have the viewpoint that connecting to the divine cannot be made without first laughing, as that opens the mind to the new experience. Reminds me of some Far Eastern traditions where you need a sharp break from your normal world view to achieve an enlightening breakthrough.

mvdtnz• 1 year ago

I think people who perform these kinds of pranks vastly overestimate the positive reactions they get.

FTA,

Having sent this out, I fielded a few anxious calls, who laughed uproariously when they realized, and I reset their printers manually afterwards. The people who knew me, knew I was a practical joker, took note of the date, and sent approving replies.

I doubt a single person "laughed uproariously". Most often they probably rolled their eyes and gave a sympathy chuckle. The people who knew he was a "practical joker" understood how much of this guy's ego was tied to his inaner sense of humor and laughed along to get out of the conversation with him.

anshumankmr• 1 year ago

A year ago on March 31st, was my ex's birthday - she told me she loved me. Today, I just don't know if that was the most elaborate prank I ever fell for.

Kudos to this guy, at least his prank email was kinda funny.

xandrius• 1 year ago

April Fools day is on the 1st, so no?

moduspol• 1 year ago

She called him from New Zealand.

paxys• 1 year ago

Goes to show that jokes are 50% about the material and 50% about the audience.

permo-w• 1 year ago

probably more like 20/80

antisthenes• 1 year ago

And 90% about the delivery ;)

cab11150904• 1 year ago

I won't read this as by rule I am against everything related to pranks, and especially today of all days. I will take this space however to say that we should really do away with this nonsense.

darkwater2• 1 year ago

swader999• 1 year ago

As a senior leader, I welcome the free boost to camaraderie and team spirit and I recognize the creativity that goes into some of these pranks.

keybored• 1 year ago

freehorse3• 1 year ago

Then you should be happy to learn that Trump just passed an executive order making workplace pranks a felony, so hopefully the world will be finally free of this plague on efficiency and profits.

sillyboi• 1 year ago

As they say, "With great power comes great responsibility." Or in this case, with great printer access comes great pranking potential!

ToddWBurgess• 1 year ago

I thought the joke was things were running on HP-UX (said the guy that had to use campus services running on HP-UX in the 90s).

Let the 90's Unix flame wars begin!

linsomniac3• 1 year ago

I tell you, I was an HP-UX sysadmin into the late '90s and the regional telco used a LOT of HP-UX.

Around '95 I spent a solid year setting up a pair of T520s worth about a million bucks, to be a HA cluster responsible for part of the billing process, which was being ported to Unix from the IBM mainframe by a team of 20 (mostly inept, a few smart cookies) programmers. Only to be cancelled at literally the last possible moment to keep on the mainframe. I highly suspect that it was all a ploy to get better mainframe upgrade terms.

Not on April 1st, but at one point management spent the last of their budget for the year on upgrading this pair of T520s from 2GB to 4GB of RAM. BUT they didn't buy extra drives to grow swap, and we were already WAY into the deployment so we couldn't just go repartitioning. HP-UX required all memory to be backed by swap to be able to use it, so the extra 2GB of RAM went entirely unused.

hylaride• 1 year ago

My first time on the internet was on HP-UX machines at my mom's work (BNR or Bell Northern Research - a large telecom research department that was one of the eventual precursors to Nortel). She often had to work weekends and would haul my brother and me in, where we'd surf the early 1990s internet or play netrek, so I have a soft spot for it.

I admin'd some HP-UX machines for a hot minute in the early 2000s. It pretty much cancelled out any goodwill, but I do sometimes think back with nostalgia for the workstations.

donatj• 1 year ago

I think the joke would have been funnier without the accompanying email. The fear I guess is people trying to jam change into the printers.

MBCook• 1 year ago

Throughout the whole story that’s what I expected to happen. The administration getting mad because people were trying to stick coins in the printers and breaking them costing a lot of money to fix.

blantonl• 1 year ago

Informix is the april fools joke.

Does anyone remember the Informix / Oracle wars? What a time to be alive that was.

gwbas1c• 1 year ago

TLDR: Just skip to the 7th paragraph where the story starts.

For reference, see the HN thread from a few days ago: "How to write blog posts that developers read": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43503872

Edit: A few section headers might help. For example, paragraphs 2-6 could be under "Background," then add a header "The Joke" before paragraph 7. "Aftermath" might be good towards the end, too.

---

BTW, taking a joke is an important life skill, too. The people who flipped out over a silly April Fool's email need to get a life.

darkwater2• 1 year ago

The whole post is very well written and worth reading. But maybe it's just me always liking a nice BOFH story.

jfengel• 1 year ago

The entire point of an AFJ is that they don't know it's a joke. As the name says, the goal is to "fool" them. They don't know it's a "silly April Fool's email".

Designing an AFJ is tricky, and the larger your audience the trickier it gets. Your friends know you're a jokester; they figure it out almost immediately. When you send it out to a bunch of people you don't know, somebody is going to forget the date and assume you're serious -- because it's supposed to look serious.

Further, if it looks like something that might be a problem they have to solve, somebody is going to start solving that problem immediately. You don't know what's going on in their day -- if they've already got six crises going, they're not going to "take a joke" well.

The wider your audience, the more obvious you have to be. Knowing how to deliver a joke is also an important life skill -- as is learning not to blame your failure on the target.

CivBase• 1 year ago

By 8:30am it was chaos in the main office and this filtered up to the head of HR, who most definitely did know me, and told me I'd better send a retraction before the CFO got in or I was in big trouble. That went wrong also, because my retraction said that campus administration was not considering charging per-page fees when in fact they actually were, so I had to retract it and send a new retraction that didn't call attention to that fact.

I wonder if the joke would have gone over better with the higher ups if it didn't coincide with their plans to implement an actual pay-to-print system. I'm sure they were none too happy about having attention drawn to an unpopular change they were already planning.

autarch3• 1 year ago

At my very first real job, back in 1997-98, I worked in tech support for an insurance company. We used Lotus Notes for email (initially just internally, with no Internet email). I had programmer access to Notes because I built some forms for user requests (Notes was more than email, it also had forms, a whole programming language, workflows, etc.).

Some Fridays (once a month?) were casual dress days where you could wear jeans instead of slacks (this was the distant past, when most professional workplaces still had real dress codes). This was an IT/Eng-wide thing, so we'd get an email reminder about this from an admin person in the department.

One time, I thought it would be funny to send my own email announcing pants-less Friday. So I took a copy of the email this admin sent and adjusted it accordingly. I did of course specify that you still had to wear underwear. I'm not a monster. Because I had programmer privileges in Notes, I was able to forge the sender so that it appeared to come from the department admin person, not me.

I _meant_ to send it to the small email group for just the other tech support folks (around 15 people or so). But I accidentally (?) sent it to all of IT/Eng, around 200-300 people, IIRC. Oops.

Needless to say, my boss's phone started ringing off the hook. I immediately went over to tell him what I'd done. He wasn't pleased, but I didn't get fired. I did have to write an apology email.

Of course, many folks in the department later told me it was the funniest thing they'd ever seen happen.

Soon after, I moved to programming at a different company. I think this was a good thing for many reasons, but one reason is that it was more challenging, so I wasn't bored with time on my hands to do stupid things like send prank emails to my coworkers.

oldgradstudent• 1 year ago

We used Lotus Notes for email

My condolences.

romanhn2• 1 year ago

To this day, 22 years after I have last used Lotus Notes, it remains the worst software product I have had to work with. It tried to be everything and ended up being bad at all of it.

martinsnow• 1 year ago

Nah. It was amazing back then.

enlightens• 1 year ago

I had a client (a national company with multiple locations and call centers!) that was using Lotus Notes for email in 2022, and for all I know they could still be using it. They had to run parallel calendars to work with external event invites, and apparently one of the calendars was backed by a system with a clock that was 5 minutes off because everyone was always getting to virtual meetings at the wrong time.

kspacewalk2• 1 year ago

So... Did everyone wear pants on the designated pants-less Friday?

autarch3• 1 year ago

Sadly, yes.

kypro• 1 year ago

If you did this on April 1st it would have been hilarious.

hnaccount_rng• 1 year ago

but one reason is that it was more challenging

I feel like that's the most relevant thing here. Bored people do ~stupid pranks. And under-challenge leads to boredom

autarch3• 1 year ago

Absolutely. I had the same problem through most of school until college.

empath75• 1 year ago

I think the email is what shifted it from being a funny joke to being super obnoxious to a lot of people. If it had just been the message on the printer, a lot of people wouldn't have noticed it and a lot of people that did would have had a quiet chuckle about it at worst.

The email is what turned it from being a speed bump to a major impediment to people, at least mentally.

locallost• 1 year ago

The funniest part

"...and told me I'd better send a retraction before the CFO got in or I was in big trouble. That went wrong also, because my retraction said that campus administration was not considering charging per-page fees when in fact they actually were"

rcarmo2• 1 year ago

I did something similar a long while ago, albeit less inspired: https://www.flickr.com/photos/ruicarmo/10493954496/in/album-...

(there's a photo of a Nokia "running" Linux in that album - https://www.flickr.com/photos/ruicarmo/16931940010/in/album-... - I got a lot of mileage out of that animated GIF)

genewitch• 1 year ago

I have a Nokia that runs Linux, what's the joke?

4ggr0• 1 year ago

the implication

russellbeattie• 1 year ago

Rui! That gif is fantastic! Wish I thought of it at the time! Maybe you did share it and I missed it, but that would have been great to flip people out. (Also, a long while ago is like two decades. Gah!)

rcarmo2• 1 year ago

I might have it around someplace… I think. I copied all my Zip disks for safekeeping, never really sorted out the contents. :)

jamesrat• 1 year ago

In high-school I replaced all the printers ready message to “Insert Coin”. I didn’t not check the parameters of the script and because of their network configuration, deployed to the whole district. Surprisingly this wasn’t the reason the banned me from the network.

lief79• 1 year ago

Ok, what was the reason?

beAbU• 1 year ago

Ah, the ol' change-printer-ready-message-to-insert-coin prank.

I did this in the early 10s on a fleet of hateful HP MFPs at my first job.

I think it's the only way that people who get the "printer guy" label can stay sane in the office.

dan_can_code• 1 year ago

This reminds me of the time I just learned how to write .bat scripts for Windows, when I was a teenager.

The power of being able to send this file via msn to a friend, convince them to open it, and then get a full message in capitals of "YOU HACKED ME! MY COMPUTER IS BROKEN!" Before watching them go offline (the script shut down their computer after 30 seconds) was a real heart racer. I am sure it contributed to my interest in computers in the following years.

This was a lot of fun to read and really tells the story well. I am thoroughly amused. Thanks for sharing this!

bitwize• 1 year ago

be me
start up BASIC
PLAY "l16ecececececececececececececececec"
thunderous footsteps as my dad RUNS to pick up the phone that isn't ringing

ge96• 1 year ago

Imgur was pretty good the negative points and comic sans

spacedcowboy2• 1 year ago

Waaay back in the mists of time, when behemoths roamed the plains and cell phones smaller than bricks had yet to be invented, I was an undergraduate student in Physics at Imperial College, London.

The physics teaching lab had a large number of BBC Micro computers, these were the precursor to the ARM RiscOS ones made by Acorn, and physics departments loved them because (a) they were full of ports that could be attached to experiments for data-gathering, and (b) they were easy to use and had a (for the time) fairly high-res screen for displaying results. One of those ports was the "econet" port, which linked all the computers together to a fileserver with (gasp) a hard disk on it, giving a primitive (by today's standards) networking ability.

So we were all given YR1.<letter><letter> usernames, and the letters more or less corresponded with our initials. I figured out that they'd actually just made all combinations of YR1.AA to YR1.ZZ, so I logged into a spare one for deniability using the supplied default password (it was a different age...), bought a copy of the "Advanced User Guide" and the "Econet user guide" and history was about to be made...

Myself and a couple of friends decided we'd write a networked virus - viruses weren't very common in those days, they mainly came on floppy disks for Amigas or Atari ST's and did something nasty to your computer. Networked computers were rare outside of government or big business, so the opportunity was there, and we took it :)

I probably ought to say that the virus didn't do anything destructive, it just appended "Copyright (c) The Virus, 1988" to the end of any directory listing (get a directory listing was one of the vectors).

[technical aside]

The BBC micro had two different "interrupt" type mechanisms ("events" and "interrupts"), and the OS was highly vectored (so on an interrupt or event, the 6502 would jump to the location provided by a table of 2-byte entries in RAM, with the event/interrupt being the index into that table).

Everything was vectored, "get a character", "write a byte to a device", "perform an OS call", ... And all the devices (floppy disk, network, ...) were implemented in a similar manner. It was a hackers dream of a computer, really.

[/aside]

What we also did was enable the virus from any event (key-press mainly) or interrupt (VBI, NMI,...), and the events enabled the interrupts, and the interrupts enabled the events. We also made it re-enable itself specifically when you typed "*." (which made the "get a directory listing on the current device" OS call) - this was sneaky, we thought, because if you'd somehow managed to disable the other code, you'd do a "*." to see if the virus was still there...

The virus wrote itself as !Boot in the root directory of the current media (and of course hid that entry from view, so you couldn't see it) which meant the next time you used that account, it would be activated on that machine.

Come April Fools day, we decided we were ready. We put the virus on one machine in the lab, one of the 10 machines that were in the "damn I need to get my lab-report written up" section that wasn't actually in the lab itself, but was still networked to your account.

We were sitting in the same section updating our own lab work, and heard the "WTF!" Students gathered round, the affected person logged out, went to a different machine (thinking there was a problem with the machine) and logged in there, infecting that second machine with the virus. Someone else logged into the first machine, and they were infected too... Since the !Boot file was on the account on the network server, turning the machine off/on and then logging in re-infected the machine...

It spread like wildfire.

We had built in a vulcan-death-grip-style "disable the virus" key combination, so we wouldn't be affected, and thought ourselves very clever. The idea was not to be affected, but soon after release it was necessary to ignore that because 3 accounts unaccountably (sorry!) uninfected would have stood out like a sore thumb.

A couple of days later, an all-students meeting was called. "Authority" was taking this very seriously, they shut down the network, turned off all the machines, and disinfected the network server by hand, removing the !Boot file from every account. They said something along the lines of "this was not funny, don't do it again or there'll be serious consequences". Everyone went back, and life went on.

About a week later, the virus again raced through the network, infecting every account in a matter of hours. We hadn't re-released it, and with some horror, realised what had happened - someone had done a "*." on their backup floppy disk, and then brought it back into the lab and booted from it, infecting the machine, and thereafter the network. The thing was too damn infectious for its own good.

If we thought "Authority" had no sense of humour last time, this time the meeting was very short, the message was "when we find who did this, we will expel them". Excrement and Fans were in close proximity. Hitting each other, one might say. We couldn't "own up", it was too late. We had no control over what people did with their floppy disks, and things had escalated way too far. We came up with a plan...

We wrote another virus. Hear me out. This one was silent, had a time-to-die (when it would delete itself) of about 2 months, and (virtually) "pressed" the key combination that deleted the old virus. We purposefully infected lots of machines with the new virus, waited, and prayed.

Things worked out fine. Everyone got infected with the new virus for a while, which destroyed the old one, without being aware of that fact, "Authority" thought they'd laid down the law and been taken seriously, and we managed to not get expelled.

And breathe

I have never written anything remotely like a virus ever since.

urbandw311er• 1 year ago

That’s a pretty wild ride. Thanks for sharing. You must have been absolutely terrified when it began again the second time !

spacedcowboy2• 1 year ago

Yep, it was sufficiently "up there" that I remember all the details many decades later.

It makes a good story now, though :)

myself2482• 1 year ago

In high school, we had a Netware 3.12 environment, and the Guest account was enabled, albeit with very limited privileges. But for some reason, Guest could still use NET SEND, which popped up a little message in the bottom row of the destination machine's display.

The whole district shared a T1 connection to the internet. Which was more than plenty for email, but as this world-wide-web thing started gaining traction, it became quite the bottleneck. And as some of us had discovered mp3 files, the slowness simply would not do.

One day there was some severe weather and a power hiccup during school hours, and every station got a message from ADMIN informing us that the server room was running on UPS power and we should save our files and log out immediately.

Hmmmm.

A few weeks later, one of the bright sparks in the technology program realized that having everyone log off would free up some bandwidth. So he logged onto the next machine over as GUEST, and used a NET SEND ALL "SERVER ROOM POWER FAILURE - 11 MIN OF BATTERY REMAIN - SAVE FILES AND LOG OFF" and sure enough, within about a minute, the whole T1 was his. Did what he needed to do (i.e. leeching an entire fserv) for about 8 minutes, then NET SEND ALL "POWER RESTORED - RESUME YOUR WORK".

A few weeks later some hot commodity had just dropped and he repeated the drill. It still worked.

Nobody noticed that these messages came from GUEST, even the district administrator, who eventually called an electrical contractor to figure out why the power in the server room was so flaky. Someone eventually pointed it out to him, which got a very red-faced "that's really clever but please knock it off", and no further punishment. The next day, the Guest account had a lot fewer privileges.

pests• 1 year ago

I had discovered the windows net send command as a highschooler too. We mainly just messaged jokes back and forth. One student later decided to try the wildcard to send to everyone, just a simple "Hi". It went out over the entire district hitting multiple schools. I forget why, but no one knew who did it at first. But we had some software installed that let the admin/teacher remotely blank screens or lock the computer, etc. I remember they blanked his screen remotely and once he complained they knew it was him. Didn't get in too much trouble, but I still felt bad for teaching everyone about net send.

xeromal3• 1 year ago

I just wrote a comment on this thread and I almost thought you were talking about me for a second. lol

BrainBacon• 1 year ago

I did the same thing by accident, except mine was "test", I heard murmors around about some strange message on computers in multiple schools in our district, so I fessed up immediately. Our network administrator was just mildly amused about the whole affair and no punishments were carried out.

linsomniac3• 1 year ago

Speaking of "feeling bad for teaching someone"... I must have been in 5th grade and this other kid was talking about shorting out a power outlet. I said "What I'd do is unfold a couple of paperclips, stick them into a rubber eraser, then plug that into the outlet and twist it to get the paperclips to touch."

A few days later the principal calls me in. "Did you tell him to do this?" "I didn't tell him to, we were just talking about how to do it." "... well, he's done it before. Don't do anything like this again. Dismissed." I still can't believe that I got out of it; petty tyrants love to flex their power.

snerbles2• 1 year ago

At least the district didn't send a runner, shouting "cyber terrorism, we traced it to this room!!!" at the top of their lungs [0].

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28846895

nraf• 1 year ago

I got a three day suspension from school for doing this. I sent something mundane like “hello” to entire school. Few minutes later, the IT admin came running down, told me off and took my details.

Made the mistake of telling a couple friends what happened. Said friends thought it would be hilarious to send swear words to the entire school (I was not there).

They played dumb saying they didn’t know what would happen and got off with one day each, I got suspended for three days.

I wouldn’t have minded so much except the next day was an inter-school chess tournament. Thankfully the sympathetic chess coach told me to wait behind the school the next morning and picked me up in the school bus.

xeromal3• 1 year ago

I have a very similar story. In high school, our library was using a windows environment and through some luck, I discovered NET SEND or something like that. I figured out my friend's computer names and I started sending them messages. We eventually communicated this way even under the strict librarian and I eventually hatched a plan to annoy everyone. I put together a crappy batch file that iterated through every computers name and just mass sent messages but screwed up the iterator and it went forever. I think we had to restart all the computers but no one figured out it was me except my friends.

Miss those days and also miss playing soldat on those crappy PCs.

shoozza• 1 year ago

Though no further work is being done on the original and the FLOSS forks aren't ready yet (soldank++ and opensoldat) the game is still playable on modern PCs and even free on steam ;) (Disclaimer: former maintainer)

gymbeaux5• 1 year ago

In high school a friend figured out you could map any network drive to your desktop and access it (Windows XP), and since everyone in the entire school district had a username of {last name}{first initial}, you could gain read/write access to anyone’s network drive (essentially “home folder”). He used it to get test answers from teachers, I used it to create (empty) folders named “porn”, “porn 2”, et al.

Anyway when he was caught (a fellow classmate ratted him out) he got 10 days out of school suspension. The VP threatened to call the police… for what offense I’m not really sure. There seems to be a fundamental misunderstanding of cybercrime and cybercrime laws. I mean was it really unauthorized access (they called it “hacking” of course) if his user account literally had permission to map network drives?

They removed the ability for student accounts to map network drives, but the district IT guy was not fired. I really don’t get that. Maybe the union saved him… but dog, everyone knows you can map network drives by right clicking on the desktop. I never thought to try it, but that doesn’t mean the district’s IT SME gets a pass.

alsetmusic• 1 year ago

I mean was it really unauthorized access (they called it “hacking” of course) if his user account literally had permission to map network drives?

My expectation is that laws probably specify that gaining access that you know you’re not supposed to be able to get is probably illegal, but I get your point.

Reminds me, however, of the pen-testers that got hired to infiltrate a court system and got harassed by a prosecutor despite having explicit approval to conduct an audit.

https://darknetdiaries.com/episode/59/

Our judicial system is ludicrous.

pathartl• 1 year ago

I did something similar in 7th grade, with the extra naughtiness of charging my peers 50 cents or so to drop the basic Windows games like pinball and Ski Free into their home drive. I created a couple of joke files in my favorite teachers' directories and then notified the IT admin before someone more nefarious saw what I was doing.

That admin became my mentor and is now a lifelong friend.

pavel_lishin• 1 year ago

Someone at my high school (late 90s/early 2000s) was apparently distributing something on CDRs.

I got called into the police station, where a cop asked me, verbatim: "Son, did you copywrite them there CDs?"

chungy• 1 year ago

I mean was it really unauthorized access (they called it “hacking” of course) if his user account literally had permission to map network drives?

It may not pass as hacking, but it certainly was unauthorized. Network policy in software should reflect reality, but the source of authority comes from humans. Your friend literally was not authorized to access teachers' files, regardless of poor software configuration permitting the capability.

Spooky232• 1 year ago

It sucks when school administrators are needlessly punitive.

In my school, some jackass kid made a photocopy of a $20 bill, on a little mid-1990s HP Officejet in the library. Even in those days, they were programmed to make bad copies of US currency (I think they were enlarged and the color messed up). It was more of an innocent “woah look at this thing”, there was no intent or effort to glue it together and try to use it.

The assistant principal, who was a petty drunk who was uniquely unsuited for her job, flipped out and called the secret service. The kid was arrested & had a lot of issues over nothing.

It always stuck in my mind and accelerated the development of my contempt for petty tyrants who experience joy from the pain of others.

dandelany• 1 year ago

Is it still trespassing if the door was unlocked? Yes. Not sure why so many people have trouble applying the same principles of unauthorized access to computers.

ummonk• 1 year ago

Is it really breaking and entering if they left their key under the flowerpot and you found it?

CodeMage• 1 year ago

Oh, wow, Novel Netware. That takes me back to high school.

Our computer lab had Novel Netware, I forget which version. Every once in a while, our regular programming classes (Pascal in first two years, C and Assembly Language in third year, Prolog and Theory of Relational Databases in fourth year) would be held in the lab, instead of the classroom, and we would get to put what we learned to use and do some actual programming.

Now, some of us had computers at home and had been using them since before the high school, so we tended to finish our work really fast and then get bored. And just like a lone sharpie cap is the most terrifying thing a parent can stumble upon, so a bored high school kid is the worst thing for your computer security.

Each student had their own account, but teachers shared a limited number of teacher accounts, with special privileges, such as monitoring other students' screens, having full write access to every student's files, etc.

For some reason, I don't remember why, teachers would occasionally go to a student's workstation and log in as a teacher there, to fix the problem. I honestly can't remember why, but it was a common enough problem that it wouldn't raise any brows even if one of us "advanced" kids did it.

So, of course, I eventually came up with the idea of writing a really small and simple program that would look exactly like the Netware login prompt, with one small difference: when you entered the password, it would write it to a file on the filesystem spit out whatever the "incorrect password, try again" reply was, and then execv the actual login program.

The ruse worked perfectly: I called the teacher, they tried to log in, thought they mistyped the password, tried again, succeeded, did whatever it was they were supposed to do, and logged out. Now I had the teacher account password, and so did my best friends in mischief.

We had some innocent fun by pulling a couple of very minor pranks on our fellow students that flew under the radar, so none of the teachers realized that the security was compromised.

But then the annual programming competitions came, and those went all the way from school level, to municipality, to city, to republic, to federal. I was one of the people who qualified to the city-level competition, and what do you know, that year it was hosted in our school's lab.

I finished all the problems with plenty of time to spare, which is how I came up with the "brilliant" idea of helping some of my peers by sharing my solutions with them using the teacher account. Now, one thing they neglected to teach us was the importance of testing, but I'll be honest, even if they did that, I was a typical teenage "gifted kid", which meant I was overconfident and lazy. As a result, everyone who I shared my solutions with happened to have the exact same bugs in them.

A few days later, they called me to the teachers' room in the computer lab, and said that they knew I cheated, that I was already disqualified, and that I should save myself some trouble and explain what I did. So naturally, I came clean and I thought that was the end of it.

Indeed, it was the end of it for me. Nothing else happened, at least nothing of consequence for me. Years later, I found out that I almost got expelled. They held a teacher assembly or conference or whatever it's called when you get all of them together to make a decision, and the decision was whether to kick me out of the school. Fortunately, they decided to let me off with a warning and the official reprimand from the headmaster.

My mom didn't think that was funny at all.

simmons• 1 year ago

In high school, we had a Netware 3.12 environment, and the Guest account was enabled, albeit with very limited privileges. But for some reason, Guest could still use NET SEND, which popped up a little message in the bottom row of the destination machine's display. ...Nobody noticed that these messages came from GUEST

You mention Netware, but as I recall the Netware function you describe was just "SEND" and "NET SEND" was a Microsoft networking thing. (But maybe there was some integration between the two after my experience with Netware, who knows.)

I mainly wanted to say, as someone who used/abused a Netware network in high school, I disassembled the SEND program and discovered that the username included in the message is not authenticated at all -- the IPX (or NETX, I forget which) software interrupt just took a string, and the SEND executable formatted the username into this string. So by crafting your own SEND program that used the software interrupt directly, you could easily forge any username you wanted. So you could very easily send a message from "ADMIN". :)

This should not be construed as a confession of any network shenanigans that may or may not have occurred at my high school. ;) :D :)

diroussel• 1 year ago

I believe that Netware had NET SEND before Microsoft had any networking at all. But maybe I’m wrong. Certainly NT had a netware compatible stack, but this was way after netware blazed the trail.

myself2482• 1 year ago

You mention Netware, but as I recall the Netware function you describe was just "SEND" and "NET SEND" was a Microsoft networking thing.

It's entirely possible that it wasn't part of Netware, I don't remember the hard details as it was a very long time ago. However, it worked in DOS text-mode (we rarely ran Windows), and my impression was that Microsoft didn't do much network-aware stuff until well into Windows. So that's why I thought of it as a Novell thing rather than a Microsoft thing.

the username included in the message is not authenticated at all

Oh.... oh dear.

jeffreygoesto• 1 year ago

Once swapped the system disc of a netware server live. Can't remember why exactly, I think it stared to count bad sectors as we watched and we needed to keep it alive copying the data to the new, to-be system disk. Then we made sure, nobody was logged in, it was about midnight, hit Alt-LeftShift-RightShift-Esc and while Netware paused in the kernel debugger, swapped the disks. Continued the debugger and - it worked :)

_bin_• 1 year ago

We used to pull similar shenanigans in middle school. Teacher computers were finally on wifi, So I'd pull out my little android tablet and USB Wi-Fi card. Run an evil AP, deauth, downgrade to HTTP, and put whatever I wanted on the web page. Good times.

formerly_proven• 1 year ago

On Windows these messages are created using SMB IPC and you'd think this would mean the "sender" (user and host) are authenticated, but nope, the sender name is just a string field that can be anything. You'd also think the host would be based on something like the client IP and a reverse DNS lookup, what with the whole Active Directory thing, but nope, it's also just a string field that can be anything. And with SMB IPC you'd think only some privileged component can invoke it, but nope, any user can send those message popup commands to any machine pretending to be anyone on any other machine. I did not make wise use of this knowledge back then.

VirusNewbie• 1 year ago

In my high school, we put SETI at home on the image used to ghost all the PCs, and set it to run at night. Our high school had a few hundred PCs so we were climbing the leaderboard for a while until the District IT department found out and did not approve of using that much bandwidth...

Cyphase• 1 year ago

A bunch of NET SEND stories in this old thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28844101

As I said there, back in the day I wrote a C++ program that was basically an IM interface on top of NET SEND. Fun times.

throwanem• 1 year ago

This was a better way to find out about NET SEND than attempting to use it for a somewhat vulgar in-joke to a work buddy one desk over, and instead popping a message on every single one of the about 10,000 PCs installed throughout the bank where you work.

Despite being phone support (think "cattle") I didn't get fired or indeed anything at all past a half-shocked, half-laughing "never ever do that again" sort of chat, and even that not from any of the floor mommies or daddies who were careful not to have to notice any of this, but just my line manager who might have been all of five years older than I was then. I assume this was slightly because I was extremely good at the job, and mainly for the sake of whoever in IT's job it was to make sure nobody could officially do what I, somehow, in the end turned out only unofficially to have done.

TRiG_Ireland• 1 year ago

My bother reports that he was once using the computer lab, and some other lads were in the room looking at things they ought not on a college computer. They were also being loud and annoying and distracting him from his work, so he sent them a message telling them to report to the head of department. They disappeared quickly and left him in peace. (This was using Net Send on Windows XP, I think.)

tempestn• 1 year ago

Best one I've ever heard was from my friend Bill March. (His real last name, not his real first.) He was relatively new to the company, came into the office on April 1, which also happened to be payday, and was handed a check addressed to Bill April.

The funny part is that it wasn't actually an April Fools joke.

ffitch• 1 year ago

somewhat unrelated to the topic, but I really liked this part of one of the sentences: “did not not only did not”. it does make sense in the sentence btw.

thruway516• 1 year ago

This was the most hilarious part to me:

  That went wrong also, because my retraction said that campus administration was not considering charging per-page fees when in fact they actually were, so I had to retract it and send a new retraction that didn't call attention to that fact

instagib• 1 year ago

Probably because they were considering more per page and 5 cents was too low.

whycome• 1 year ago

Right? It actually kinda makes it most believable!

pedrocr• 1 year ago

I learned of these in-band commands at Stanford and created a very short print file to be able to change the status message of any printer on campus. I couldn't push it centrally but I just queued the file into the global print queue and was able to change any printer by walking to it and asking for my print. To not be too disruptive and given the character limits I only ever put in something like "READY FOR CAL" in reference to the Bay area school rivalry. I don't think anyone was ever annoyed by it, or maybe even noticed it beyond the few people I showed it to, but hopefully the statute of limitations has also passed.

automationwiz• 1 year ago

Thought I'd drop my prank as well. In highschool early 2011-2013ish QR codes were just becoming a thing. We had a mild vendetta against the year book committee due to the pricing of the yearbooks and their cliquey group.

We copied their "Reserve a year book early poster and save". Then used photoshop to edit it to say "50% off your year books with this QR code". The QR code then linked to a gorilla eating a taco (google this its pretty funny), adding to confusion. The year book committee had a FREAK out and sent out a mass email that the QR code was fake and not to follow it and you COULD NOT GET 50% off a year book no matter what link you followed. Needless to say sparked more interest in said QR code and soon the whole school had loaded a gif of a gorilla eating a taco.

knowitnone• 1 year ago

searched google. nothing funny found. very disappointed.

cess11• 1 year ago

I think it's this one: https://www.pbh2.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/go...

kmoser2• 1 year ago

So many pranks, I didn't bother waiting until April 1st to pull them.

Prank 1: In high school we wrote a fake DOS for our Apple II+. It accepted commands and ran them, but occasionally would reply with a snarky message. Our teacher was not amused.

Prank 2: This was the late 1970s/early 1980s when laser printers cost many thousands of dollars, and neither me nor my high school peers had ever seen one. I found some CGI images in a computer magazine and Xeroxed them onto pin-feed paper for dot-matrix printers. I showed them to my friends and convinced them that I owned a laser printer. The pin-fed holes just added to the authenticity, since they had no idea how a real laser printer worked.

Prank 3: My parents changed checking accounts and had a whole book of unused checks. I told my father I wanted to do a prank and he agreed to write one of those checks for $600. I showed the check to one of my classmates at the beginning of the day and told him I was going to buy a computer after school, and he could come with me. When school ended and my classmate found me, I took out the check, declared I no longer wanted a computer, and ripped it up in his face. He was stunned.

Prank 4: The local library had an Atari 400 with a coin-operated TV screen ($0.25 for 15 minutes). Without the use of the screen, I wrote a simple BASIC program to emit a beep randomly every few minutes, started it running, and walked out the door.

snerbles2• 1 year ago

I wrote a simple BASIC program to emit a beep randomly every few minutes, started it running, and walked out the door.

Some 15+ years ago ThinkGeek productized this as the Annoy-a-Tron, a small magnetic circuit board which could run on a coin cell for weeks. Tuck one of these into a well-hidden place and it will dismantle the sanity of anyone spending enough time around it.

Other more refined versions exist now from a plethora of vendors, I will refrain from linking them here.

flakes• 1 year ago

On one of my internships there was a small handheld radio floating around the office. I changed it to some local AM jazz station, set it to the lowest possible volume (such that it was barely audible), and hid the radio inside another interns desktop. I told the other interns about it, and we agreed that whenever he asked anyone if they could hear music, that we would tell him we couldn't hear anything.

At first he seemed mildly annoyed but mostly ignored it. You couldn't always hear it depending on what song was playing, so that helped keep it hidden for a while. Fast forward one week, we came back from lunch to find that the guy had disassembled almost everything in his cubicle before finding it. He angrily held up the radio and called us all jackasses. I have a little chuckle every time I remember this!

kmoser2• 1 year ago

More pranks, this time after I got a job in the corporate world working for Big Company in the late 1980s:

Corporate Prank #1: Back in the DOS days, when the standard office computer was an IBM AT with a small built-in speaker capable of being programmed to beep, I set up the autoexec.bat file for several workstations to play (quickly, and at low volume) the first eight notes from the melody from "Brazil." The movie had just come out, and I thought the tune would be a fitting commentary on the parallels to the corporate life.

Corporate Prank #2: Every year or so the cafeteria would print surveys on blue cardstock and put them on all the tables asking questions like "Were the cashiers friendly?" and "How was the temperature of the food?" My friend and I found matching cardstock and mocked up copies, but changed the questions subtly, e.g. "How was the temperature of the cashiers?" and "Was the food friendly?" and distributed them to all the tables. Never found out what happened, but I'm sure management wasn't happy.

Corporate Prank #3: One day I went with my friends "B" and "C" to a different corporate cafeteria where you paid a flat rate just before exiting. "B" managed to find an emergency exit door just before the cashiers which let him make his way to the elevators without paying. Now the setup for the prank: every few months one of the departments would distribute company-wide security memos (on paper) which would get distributed to every desk. Me and "C" mocked up one of those security memos (complete with a police artist style sketch of "B", who had skipped out without paying) which warned everybody to be on the lookout for the suspect who was last seen exiting the cafeteria through an unmarked door, and should be considered dangerous. We made photocopies and put them on every desk.

jsphweid• 1 year ago

I pranked someone (probably not on April Fools) at an office job I had in High School decades ago. I had a summer job digitizing documents.

I discovered that I could access the Startup folder on other employee's machines on the network via Windows Explorer. I put a script in one of my very rule-following co-worker's folder that was something like: dir dir dir dir (x100) echo All files have been deleted.

I watched them from around the corner when they booted up, saw the flood of file names flash across the screen, and flipped out when they read the message at the bottom. They reached for phone immediately to call the IT admin and I rushed out from around the corner explaining the joke. Never got in trouble. Good times.

Civitello• 1 year ago

The email was a bit much, just altering the ready message should have been sufficient.

mywittyname• 1 year ago

I guess I'll contribute my best prank.

In the late '00s I was working at a small ed tech company that had recently moved into a nice new HQ with a large kitchen. They got this pretty fancy popcorn maker and the IT team put it together (I was a dev, so I was not on this team). People kept burning the popcorn, so it became the office/facilities manager, Tim's duty to make the popcorn (which he was not exactly happy about).

I was in the IT closet looking for some cables and noticed a bunch of spare networking equipment laying around. So I grabbed an old four-port switch, an external wifi antenna, and some cables, then I stayed late one night and "installed" them on the popcorn machine in a manner that was surprisingly convincing. IoT Popcorn machine before IoT was a thing.

I also wrote up a script that would connect to our Outlook server, and send an email to Tim, "FROM: TECH-POP <techpop-machine@companyname>" with "SUBJECT: TECH-POP IS READY TO BE REFILLED" and some techy-sounding status updates in the body of the email. I even kept track of the number of popcorn bags remaining in the cabinet.

Once every few hours, I'd run the script, and Tim would dutifully get up and make some popcorn. After about a day, I ran the script and heard loud, "GOD FUCKING DAMNIT", and the slamming of a chair. Tim went over and ripped all of the networking stuff off of the popcorn machine and threw it in the trash. He then paid a visit to the IT manager to clarify who it was that thought it was his job to "refill the fucking popcorn". The IT manager, with a completely straight face, gets up and I see them walking my direction.

They get to my desk, and the guy is coming down from being piss-pissed. His face is all red and eyes are watering. The IT manager tells him, "it was this fool's idea." They laugh and say it was a funny prank and Tim playfully grabs my collar and shakes me a little.

After that, I get a message from the IT manager to avoid pranking Tim in the future.

zootski2• 1 year ago

"....could have got me fired"

zootski2• 1 year ago

"....could have got me fired" not "...might have got me fired".

geocrasher2• 1 year ago

Early 90's, 386/16's in the computer lab in high school. I wasn't taking any of the classes but had access to the computers at lunch. I was teaching myself Borland Turbo C++ at home. Guess what these computers had installed?

Growing bored with playing Gorilla.bas, I wrote a program that let out a several second long, <100hz tone, a "Fart" if you will, and then printed "oh, sorry, I couldn't contain myself!".

I backed up autoexec.bat as autoexec.old, wrote a new autoexec that ran my program, deleted it, and then restored the original autoexec.bat to cover its tracks.

We weren't present when it did its thing, but the next day I was informed that if it happened again, I'd lose access, and that was it. No "hacking" accusations or anything.

geocrasher2• 1 year ago

EDIT: I left out an important detail! The teacher of the programming class was actually a student who was apparently quite gifted, and guess whose computer the program was installed on? Right.

I also remembered another detail: Apparently the same fellow, who had a reputation for smart but also extremely difficult to deal with (I wouldn't know, never met them) also had their fingers in one of the first dialup Internet services in the area, cleverly named DNIS (Desert Network Internet Service, I think? It was basically an Internet connected Linux shell if I recall) but everyone locally called it PNIS. Poor guy.

ycombinatrix• 1 year ago

That went wrong also, because my retraction said that campus administration was not considering charging per-page fees when in fact they actually were, so I had to retract it and send a new retraction that didn't call attention to that fact.

oof

lopatin• 1 year ago

I always thought a fun but fireable April Fools joke would be to sprinkle the words "probably" and "likely" to key parts in technical documentations.

mortar• 1 year ago

Very tame in the scheme of things, but my go to prank was on a Windows machine, take a screenshot of the desktop with all of its icons, and then disable the icons. Doing it in a whole computer lab caught far more people double clicking in confusion than I expected.

miningape• 1 year ago

I became a lot engaged more in class after realising I could remotely shutdown the teacher's computer with a custom message.

In middle school our entire school network was running some strange windows server p2p setup. What this means is that any computer could issue commands across the network to other computers, purely by knowing the name of the port. Luckily, every ethernet "outlet" had a label stating the port's name. This made it stupidly simple to issue a `shutdown \M <PORT>` in the middle of class.

ALLTaken• 1 year ago

Omg, I know I did this, but throw a double proxy. I thought a special education pupil howto remote shutdown and wrote a script. I told him they'd know it's him. So we scripted the Internet Explorer icon with a pre-exec command script, that basically did a network-scan for IPs and shutdown each one remotely. Poor fella sitting there didn't even know what's happening. Was a bully, but still. They interrogated him and he didn't even know what happened.

We sat there and saw every computer at the school turn off with a custom message. Except his computer. He really looked dumbfounded.. I get a smile when I think of it.. it wasn't anything evil or bad, but just fun.

Good 'ol times. He didn't get into any trouble, just disciplinary extra curricular work. Which I think was good for that bully anways.. he was lacking behind.

Also I remember accesing everyone $C drive and copy a counter-strike map of the school I was modeling into. So, the next time anyone went to a LAN-Party (THOSE were GOOD Times), everyone would see the school name as a map and nobody would know who made it. Obviously no violence intended. I just wanted to play in an environment that I spent most of my day and have fun afterwards at they way we could have some fun. Asking everyone to download it would've just led to trouble. Of course I heard of school shootings, but counter-strike was harmless. Those who did think of worse had this in mind anyways.

philsnow• 1 year ago

Fortuitously I had learned Perl in, appropriately enough, a computational linguistics course

This sentence increases the likelihood that I have crossed paths with the author by something like a factor of a million, as I estimate that the number of people who have ever taken that class is certainly lower than 100k and quite likely lower than 10k.

dexen• 1 year ago

At my old uni there were a couple public terminals running DOS, most of the time sitting idle at the prompt. It was bespoke kiosk cabinets only exposing keyboard and screen. One April Fool's I had the bright idea to change PROMPT to something along the lines of "This terminal out of service." - and to increase the confusion, also to change PATH to a non-existent directory, so that most commands wouldn't work and instead flash "Bad command or file name.".

For a couple minutes observed people coming up to a terminal, trying a few things, and stepping away in frustration.

I sure hope administration did restart the terminals overnight to return regular function; normal users were unable to access the power & reset controls.

temporallobe• 1 year ago

This reminds me of a prank that almost got me fired from a federal government contract. Our team was working on a modern web UI replacement for a legacy green screen system written in back in the 80s. One day I was messing with the CSS and created a style that made the interface look EXACTLY like the green screen system it replaced, which was activated by a hidden button on the screen. It was a joke I shared with a few of my trusted developer friends who thought it was hilarious. I never meant for it to get pushed to PROD, but that’s exactly what happened. One of the end-user testers stumbled on it (I guess the button was as hidden as I thought) and was confused as to why this new feature was present. I probably could have passed it off as a testing or comparison feature if I hadn’t ALSO displayed a silly and somewhat sarcastic pop-up message when that mode was activated. For the first tine in my professional career I was actually written up and I had to submit a written apology to the client. The client nearly had me removed from the contract, but I happened to be a very important key engineer at the time so they gave me a second chance. I was also placed on a PIP for a while and I never quite lived that incident down. I’m no longer with that company but I’m sure the incident is still in their HR files!

kittikitti• 1 year ago

Subject: You're hired! Body: April Fools!

that_guy_iain• 1 year ago

To me, the administration clearly screwed up. They were thinking about implementing something that was done as a prank. They could have just told everyone it was a prank and not to worry but instead, they reacted like the backlash was too bad and then told everyone we might be doing it anyway but not just now. This would have been an easy way for them to see the reaction and be thankful that they didn't do it and could just say it was a prank.

noisy_boy• 1 year ago

sl is installed in /usr/games so that can be a check. Otherwise, I think this is quite reliable:

    $ grep -q --binary-files=text ACCIDENT `which sl`
    $ echo $?
    0

tracker1• 1 year ago

The most I've done, is sneak a mouse dongle into a neighbor/cube's computer... throughout the day I'd just move the mouse in one direction, frustrating the user across the partition.

anotherevan• 1 year ago

I changed the display on the printers in our office to read, "Needs Chocolate".

lynchjac000• 1 year ago

if you want t o kidnap me here'ss my address 5463

The April Fools joke that might have got me fired

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