Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ah, but do you get to have fun at the cost of others? That is the question.
Of course! I'm doing it right now!
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The April Fools joke that might have got me fired
181–190 of 268 posts
Re: The April Fools joke that might have got me fired
#182The email was a bit much, just altering the ready message should have been sufficient.
Re: The April Fools joke that might have got me fired
#183In 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,…
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…
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.
Re: The April Fools joke that might have got me fired
#184In 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,…
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 co…
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)
Re: The April Fools joke that might have got me fired
#185In 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,…
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…
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?"
Re: The April Fools joke that might have got me fired
#186I 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 " 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.
Re: The April Fools joke that might have got me fired
#187I 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)
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!)
Re: The April Fools joke that might have got me fired
#188Re: The April Fools joke that might have got me fired
#189Re: The April Fools joke that might have got me fired
#190Hot 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 medi…
haha, very funny!