PC Pranks

Scott Adams:

I heard this prank that happened in a typing class. (Or keyboarding class if you prefer.) The prankster switched keyboards with his victim and when she tried typing, he would type messages to her screen as if her computer was a sentient being. Apparently she started asking it for advice, thinking it might be God. This prank would work even better with a wireless keyboard. You could control your co-worker’s computer from across the next cube.

I have a similar prank that myself and a couple of coworkers played years ago in one of those godawful ISP call center tech support environments. One day, I noticed that a new icon had appeared in the system tray, and being more tech savvy than most of the agents in the building (I'm not trying to brag, it's just the fact of it - most people there came from generic "customer service call center" backgrounds, not technical backgrounds), I recognized it as a VNC server. This seemed odd, and the next day, on a different computer (it was a 24/7 operation, so we all "hotdesked"), I noticed it was on that computer too - those sneeky buggers in management must have installed it on every computer in the building so that the supervisors could randomly check in on what we we up to.

Naturally, my first instinct (after disabling it on my machine) was "what can we do to have fun with this?" The most obvious thing to do, it seemed, was to download the VNC client program, get the IP address of the guy sitting opposite me (who didn't know what VNC was) while he was in the rest room, reset the password on his VNC server, and set VNC into its "disable local keyboard while under remote control mode." When he got back, I waited until he was on a call, then took control of his PC, opened a notepad window (at this point he physically jumps) and started to very slowly type (this was late 1999) "Martin ... The matrix has you..." His eyes grew WIDE...