Pranks

Pranks are pretty common in the help desk. We are always trying to “get” one another and one up one another. There haven’t been any pranks for quite awhile but this prank I learned at college in my web design class was pretty awesome.  The teacher came in and said one of the students in his other class pulled a prank on him,  he thought it was good enough to share with the class. Evidently what this student did was that they took a screen shot of the desktop and saved it has the background and then hid all of the  actual icons on the desktop so that the person would click and click on the icons and nothing would work. Simple  but brilliant right? So at Work on the Help Desk I decided to try it.  I waited until one of my buddies at work was away from his desk at lunch and was not on a call or working on a call. I took a screen shot, saved the image as a jpeg and then set it as the background. I hid all of the icons, and then took it one step further.  I set the task-bar to auto hide.  Then I went back to my desk and acted like nothing had happened.  The person came back and could not figure why none of their icons were working  on so they restarted their computer. It came back up with all the icons and The previously opened programs. It took a second (hum maybe longer then that) and then he realized that it was a screen shot. So they changed the background, it took even  longer to get the icons and task-bar back but they did eventually.

There has been variations of this up at work ever since.  A good friend of mine decided to do this on another coworker but changed the mouse setting to slow and inverted the action so if the mouse moved right it would go left and if they moved it left it would go right. That was funny to watch!   The person get madder and madder. I did not get blamed for that but the good friend did do the prank on another coworker and I did get blamed for that one  also wrote up for it GRRRR!   It is off my record now (its been a while) but I was a little annoyed at that one, sometimes pranks can go too far!   The long version of that story was that they decided to pull the above prank on a new girl in the department. She was clueless and just rebooted the computer.  It came up with the same problems (go figure lol)  so she rebooted her computer again and again and again  until she got so frustrated that she went to the supervisor. Well the supervisor knew what happened (like I said we are a bunch of pranksters) and said it was probably her initiation on the help desk. She did not buy that explanation and was really upset so she the supervisor made me fix it. Latter on when she was still upset, to appease her,  I go the write up. I have not played this prank since.  Except for one last time, on another employee when she forgot to log out when she went home one night so I closed out all of the programs and took a screen shot with the task-bar and icons, hid all the icons and set the task-bar to auto hide. What I did not know was that it would be a week before I would see her again because she went on vacation so in the mean time, I forgot I did that. I worked with her on the day she came back and she spent two hours working before she said anything and it was not to me it was to another coworker.  He tried to help her and did not get to far. That was when I realized what they were talking about and I laughed and explained what I had done. From that day on she will tell me she locks her computer just so I do not mess with it of course that is only if we are talking and she gets up while I am standing close by.   This is just a taste of the pranks that have occurred….. stay tuned for more!