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So, I had a few minutes free time at work today. My thoughts turned toward the new guy. Now, New Guy has five monitors, and the most he does with them is set up fancy rendered wallpapers across all of them that look like they've been split up to actually go across multiple monitors like they're designed to be split across multiple computers like that. I feel like there are more productive uses for the monitors than that, like actually using them to do things with the computers they're connected to. Needless to say, the misappropriation of resources by someone other than me offended me.

And I had free time.

We have a hostlist at work out on our private wiki that has everyone's IP addresses/hostnames on it. Great. I look for his. Two boxes. He only has one monitor with a linux box connected to it, so it's either socrates or aristotle. So I ssh into socrates and run who.

root :0 2011-04-14 05:29
root pts/4 2011-05-03 21:28
root pts/5 2011-05-04 21:20

Awesome, he's running X on this one. From what I've seen of his desktop, he runs GNOME, so I get to work. A few minutes later, I have the following in a hidden script on his desktop:

#!/bin/bash

RAND=`cat /proc/sys/kernel/random/uuid | cut -c1-4 | od -d | head -1 | cut -d' ' -f2`
echo $RAND
LINES=`ls /root/.pictures | wc -l`
echo $LINES
LINE=`expr $RAND % $LINES + 1`
echo $LINE
PICTURE=`ls /root/.pictures | head -$LINE | tail -1`
gconftool-2 --type string --set /desktop/gnome/background/picture_filename /root/.pictures/$PICTURE

I've also racked up a decent amount of pretty picutres from GIS with such classic search queries as "Lisa Frank wallpaper", "Care Bears", and (remembering the madness from OT a few weeks ago) "My Little Pony".

I copy these pictures over to the specified directory and fire off the script. He looks very confused and glares back at me. I know it's worked.

I then set up a script in cron to run hourly, cycling the list of pictures, and I sit back and wait, knowing that he lacks the acumen to find the script and remove it.


Anyone else have fun messing with coworkers?

I used to mess with "new guys" all the time.
I once had a younger helper searching for a " Bucket of grinding sparks" for almost an hour.

Being unaware of the woman's works I just googled Lisa Frank. I'm worried that I might now have type 2 diabetes.

Sadly, my job allows little oppurtunity for messing with the littl'uns, as I am in charge of making up for the littl'uns mistakes. It would be a bit of a conflict of interest. So you stories hearten my blackened soul.

I hear that, I can't be a supervisor because I don't work full time but they feel oligated to make me train the new employees all of the time.

Although watching them ring up a customer and then saying "You should've watched the screen better." while shaking my head makes them nervous, especially when I pretend to get on the phone and dial the front desk to tell them to stop the customer because they didn't pay for an item is pretty fun.

...Last New Years one of the shop managers ended up with a load of left over "party poppers" ( these little party favors that explode and shoot streamers and confetti when you pull a string) after his New Years eve party.

He went around the shop "booby trapping" everything he could...for weeks,every time some one opened a toolbox,parts locker...bathroom door...lunch box...there would be a loud bang and confetti and streamers filling the air...
...That got anoying real quick.

halonachos wrote:I hear that, I can't be a supervisor because I don't work full time but they feel oligated to make me train the new employees all of the time.

Although watching them ring up a customer and then saying "You should've watched the screen better." while shaking my head makes them nervous, especially when I pretend to get on the phone and dial the front desk to tell them to stop the customer because they didn't pay for an item is pretty fun.

Eeenteresting. You may have just lightened my job a little, brother retailer.

When I worked at the Aiwa HiFi QA department, we used to send new guys to the parts department to get a long weight for a tone arm.

This was 30 years ago when record players were still widely used.

I love doing stuff like this at work. I am not proficient enough with computers to do stuff like what was presented in the OP, but I am capable of finding stuff that helps me irritiate people.

I usually spend a couple hundred a year at thinkgeek.com

Last December I bought these gadgets:



http://www.thinkgeek.com/gadgets/electronic/c427/





http://www.thinkgeek.com/gadgets/electronic/9a06/





http://www.thinkgeek.com/gadgets/electronic/8c52/


Man these are hilarious. I actually put one under a co-workers desk for about 2 months. He was seriously about to quit because he thought the office was haunted.

FITZZ wrote: He went around the shop "booby trapping" everything he could...for weeks,every time some one opened a toolbox,parts locker...bathroom door...lunch box...there would be a loud bang and confetti and streamers filling the air...
...That got anoying real quick.

Off topic, but my wife is being sweet today and this reminds me.

A different way to have fun hiding stuff (particularly at Valentine's Day) is to buy a pack of the little valentine's cards kids give away at school, address them to your wife or girlfriend, and hide them around the house (her apartment, for folks still dating).

omg I love think geek...



My favorite toy ever...

USB controlled with webcam sight nerf dart turret!

I was an intern at an industrial electronics company during college. Back then I was very motivated and went above and beyond to try and land my first real job once I was done with school. One of my many jobs was to help around the stockroom. I had been there about a year when the full time stock guy left for a better job. Naturally instead of offering the postition to methey hired someone else. He was a nice enough sort, but he was alittle slow on the uptake.

He had been there for about a month when he comes to me one day and says something along the lines of; Hey Patrick, the boss is crawling down my ass because I can't find this cabeling. Do you know where it is? I'm standing infront of this guy who makes much more money then i do, and of coruse I know exactly where the cabeling is since I put it on the shelf where its supposed to go the day before. I notice the boss across the production floor from me laughing with some of the techs, he winks at me and points at the new guy. I put two and two together and tell him its on the green shelf in the basement. He looks at me alittle uncertain, and I'm assuming since he doesnt want to look any dumber he says, Ohhh yeah, I forgot to look there. He scurries off. Turns out he spent the rest of the day, 6 hours looking for the basement... The boss told him not to come back the next day and took me out for a drink after work.

Did I forget to mention that the building this occured in was a steel framed building with a solid concrete floor?

@Lord Scythican:

Those noise generators look pretty awesome. I'm going to have to pick myself up a couple of them.

Something else I always enjoyed was charging capacitors and leaving them for people to pick up.

Back in the military days we used to send new recruits looking for I D 10 Tango forms and bulkhead removers.

daedalus wrote:@Lord Scythican:

Those noise generators look pretty awesome. I'm going to have to pick myself up a couple of them.

Something else I always enjoyed was charging capacitors and leaving them for people to pick up.

Not cool, that gak hurts.

daedalus wrote:@Lord Scythican:

Those noise generators look pretty awesome. I'm going to have to pick myself up a couple of them.

Something else I always enjoyed was charging capacitors and leaving them for people to pick up.

They are pretty sweet. They have one that makes crikket noises. Set it about 2 feet off the ground and they will never find it. They cycle a random noise or a chosen noise somewhere between 2-8 minutes. So it isn't constant which makes it hard to find.

The TV remote is pretty crazy too. I use it all the time at wal-mart. They have a $50.00 version that kind turn off hundreds at once!

ShivanAngel wrote:

Not cool, that gak hurts.

What can I say? I guess I'm just not a people person.

daedalus wrote:So, I had a few minutes free time at work today. My thoughts turned toward the new guy. Now, New Guy has five monitors, and the most he does with them is set up fancy rendered wallpapers across all of them that look like they've been split up to actually go across multiple monitors like they're designed to be split across multiple computers like that. I feel like there are more productive uses for the monitors than that, like actually using them to do things with the computers they're connected to. Needless to say, the misappropriation of resources by someone other than me offended me.

And I had free time.

We have a hostlist at work out on our private wiki that has everyone's IP addresses/hostnames on it. Great. I look for his. Two boxes. He only has one monitor with a linux box connected to it, so it's either socrates or aristotle. So I ssh into socrates and run who.

root :0 2011-04-14 05:29
root pts/4 2011-05-03 21:28
root pts/5 2011-05-04 21:20

Awesome, he's running X on this one. From what I've seen of his desktop, he runs GNOME, so I get to work. A few minutes later, I have the following in a hidden script on his desktop:

#!/bin/bash

RAND=`cat /proc/sys/kernel/random/uuid | cut -c1-4 | od -d | head -1 | cut -d' ' -f2`
echo $RAND
LINES=`ls /root/.pictures | wc -l`
echo $LINES
LINE=`expr $RAND % $LINES + 1`
echo $LINE
PICTURE=`ls /root/.pictures | head -$LINE | tail -1`
gconftool-2 --type string --set /desktop/gnome/background/picture_filename /root/.pictures/$PICTURE

I've also racked up a decent amount of pretty picutres from GIS with such classic search queries as "Lisa Frank wallpaper", "Care Bears", and (remembering the madness from OT a few weeks ago) "My Little Pony".

I copy these pictures over to the specified directory and fire off the script. He looks very confused and glares back at me. I know it's worked.

I then set up a script in cron to run hourly, cycling the list of pictures, and I sit back and wait, knowing that he lacks the acumen to find the script and remove it.


Anyone else have fun messing with coworkers?

Can you translate that to English?

daedalus wrote:
Anyone else have fun messing with coworkers?

One of the other PhD candidates and I proposed a joint dissertation to our adviser. In it we hypothesized that the effectiveness of any given authoritarian could be predicted by the prominence of his facial hair, which we planned to assess using facial recognition software, and anthropological measure of robustness. We also noted that there appeared at first glance to be an "Asian Exception" whereby facial hair was not the driving variable, but rather the relative neatness of one's hairstyle.

The guy actually took us seriously for about a week. That, or neither side wanted to be the first to break the joke.

thedude wrote:Back in the military days we used to send new recruits looking for I D 10 Tango forms and bulkhead removers.

Also popular: buckets of prop wash, boxes of grid squares, yards of flight line. Gotta be careful with telling someone to get you flight line. As the story goes, there was a fresh out of basic Airman on a base in Texas IIRC. His Chief ordered him to bring him 100 yards of flight line. The Airman was smart enough to know that he was being sent on a snipehunt, and he tried to argue with his Chief that there was no such thing and that he was smart enough to know he was being slapped around. His Chief demanded that he search and return with 100 yards of flightline, so off the baby-Airman went. Well, this Airman happened to worked a construction job before entering into the service, and there happened to be ongoing construction on one of the bases flightlines (runways). So, this Airman commandeered a backhoe, tore up about 100 yards of the freshly installed flightline, loaded it into a dumptruck, and drove it back to the hangar that his shop was located in. Naturally the Chief was PISSED and tried to have the Airman court-martialed, unfortunately, the Airman was smart enough to make the point that he was under orders, and threatened into obeying those orders however unlawful, to retrieve the flightline for the Chief. The charges against the Airman were dropped, and the Chief was promptly dismissed. I don't know how true this story is, but I've heard it repeated many times.

Another good one is one that a buddy and me pulled on one of his friends. The brakelights on his car were out even though he had just replaced them, and he isn't exactly a gearhead so he wasn't sure how to take care of it. My buddy and I told him to let us take a look at it first, maybe it was just a loose wire or whatever. Well, we take a look at it, and sure enough the wiring is messed up. I jokingly say, "Oh! Well theres your problem, your brakelight fluid is low" and the guy believes me. My buddy and I played along and convinced him to go to Autozone to buy some fluid, and we would do the fluid change for him free of charge. So off we go to Autozone. He looks around, can't find the brakelight fluid, so he asks the clerk. The clerk tells him that they are sold out, and to try the other one across town. So off we go, rinse repeat 2 or 3 times. Finally about 4 hours later we get to another Autozone, and the guy asks the clerk where they keep the brakelight fluid. The clerk looks at him and says "Oh sorry man we don't carry that. You'll have to go to Pep Boys." At this point, my buddy and I have had enough of watching this idiot drive around making a fool of himself, so we convince him to drop us off at home on his way to Pep Boys, which he did... and then continued to drive to the nearest Pep Boys... over an hour away...

We usually just insult each other over twitter.

Oh and I switch out my cube-mates name badges all the time, usually with people that don't work here any more.

dogma wrote:

daedalus wrote:
Anyone else have fun messing with coworkers?

One of the other PhD candidates and I proposed a joint dissertation to our adviser. In it we hypothesized that the effectiveness of any given authoritarian could be predicted by the prominence of his facial hair, which we planned to assess using facial recognition software, and anthropological measure of robustness. We also noted that there appeared at first glance to be an "Asian Exception" whereby facial hair was not the driving variable, but rather the relative neatness of one's hairstyle.

The guy actually took us seriously for about a week. That, or neither side wanted to be the first to break the joke.

That story is definitely being told to all my friends now. Legend.

You totally lost me after "and I had free time" you crazy computer people and your techno-sorcerey.

If I had to guess, you put silly images onto his many monitors?...Woudn't that be easier to say than a bunch of robot-code...

I spit in some guys food, the...

Oh! Co-workers! Right...

I once kidnapped the owner of the deli's dog (His wife knew, of course) and chilled in the deli with a Saint Bernard for the night. Guy comes in, 20 minutes late, panting, and goes:

"Matt, have you seen Loki?"

"Loki.. Oh! The pillow!"

The look on his face when the dog came out was priceless. I was forced to do dishwashing, but hey, I slept on a Saint Bernard!

A group of "troublemakers" and I frequently pull pranks at work. We've attached electricians ties to drive-shafts, put grease under doorhandles and the reverse of steering-wheels, and attached wires from coil to seatbelt buckles.

By far the DUMBEST thing we've done was to spray mold release (aerosol silicone *very slick*) onto a fellas liquor-cycle (moped?). When he hit his brakes for the stop sign, he slid off the seat and dropped the bike.... we left that alone after that.

"Hey, we need some pricky sixes, go ask SSG Gautier and SSG Moore if they've seen any."

...I just read when I got free time at work...

Just finished a Biography on David Bowie. Gonna start Neuromancer tomorrow.

...nothing too interesting, but then again, as a summer intern, I don't really have the security to do too much down the line of crazy.

Da Boss wrote:

dogma wrote:

daedalus wrote:
Anyone else have fun messing with coworkers?

One of the other PhD candidates and I proposed a joint dissertation to our adviser. In it we hypothesized that the effectiveness of any given authoritarian could be predicted by the prominence of his facial hair, which we planned to assess using facial recognition software, and anthropological measure of robustness. We also noted that there appeared at first glance to be an "Asian Exception" whereby facial hair was not the driving variable, but rather the relative neatness of one's hairstyle.

The guy actually took us seriously for about a week. That, or neither side wanted to be the first to break the joke.

That story is definitely being told to all my friends now. Legend.

I'm thinking about doing the research in my free time anyway. I mean, Alex Wendt (a really prominent political scientist) was able to publish a paper entitled Sovereignty and the UFO.

There's a whole thing about beards early in Cryptonomicon. Also a passing mention in Friday.

I went to the bathroom in the back of the store in the warehouse area. When I went to open the door, it wouldn't budge and kept hitting something. About 15 minutes later a manager and some co-workers show up to move the pallet they had placed there

dogma wrote:

daedalus wrote:
Anyone else have fun messing with coworkers?

One of the other PhD candidates and I proposed a joint dissertation to our adviser. In it we hypothesized that the effectiveness of any given authoritarian could be predicted by the prominence of his facial hair, which we planned to assess using facial recognition software, and anthropological measure of robustness. We also noted that there appeared at first glance to be an "Asian Exception" whereby facial hair was not the driving variable, but rather the relative neatness of one's hairstyle.

The guy actually took us seriously for about a week. That, or neither side wanted to be the first to break the joke.

These types of articles are always fun. There's even a (legal) journal dedicated to this type of nonsense. A good one was "The Common Law Origins of the Infield Fly Rule."

One of my favories. (Necessary background reading)