What’s your most cruel prank so far?
Hi. Have you ever woken up just feeling malicious, with a mood of “Man, I just wish to ruin someone’s day for shits and giggles”? And what do you do in those situations?
I wonder, what’s the best, meanest, cruelest prank you pulled on your friends or foes so far.
@[email protected] @[email protected] back in school some poor soul forgot a windows netbook in the room, bios unlocked, us bored and having a usb stick with arch.
made him a very pretty desktop totally filled with random bat script references iirc.
back at uni nohup yes > /tmp/foo & was everyone’s favourite
Not pulling out when I was banging your mom
@southsamurai *pistol hands*
@asklemmy Not a prank, just a story. Back at the Uni, we had a hall in the building, and that was where all of the administration was sitting. This was also one of two spots students hung out during breaks.
In there, there was an “Internet kiosk”. In practice, the damned thing was just a crappy WinXP PC with a touch screen and a metal keyboard. It was useless, actually, almost nobody ever touched it, because there were better alternatives in the computer class. The speakers were loud, though.
By default, it opened a browser with a Uni’s website as a homepage.
I loved how amazingly useless it was. So It was my primary target.
We ran Doom on it, we replaced the browser with MS Paint (boosting the usefulness 100-fold), replaced the homepage (at this point the whole administration learned what the fox said and that Rick Astley was never gonna give them up by heart, because it was 2013 and Internet was still cool).
On a year 3 I had to stop, though, because the dean was after my blood.
I found a cinder block on the sidewalk, and moved it to the road. Hid behind a tree and watched some poor guy in a van run over it, blowing a front tyre and doing some body damage. Thought it was funny at the time.
Teenage me was an asshole.
Aight this is a wild one, so buckle up. My old roommate always ate an orange in the morning. So get this, I went up the fruit bowl and switched an orange and an apple around. The next morning, he almost grabbed an apple! So funny!
@drq Once I put a CO2 fire extinguisher under my colleague chair. He had a habit to really drop into his chair with all his weight so it was supposed to trigger a partial discharge - which was very loud with the stream of CO2 knocking things around but then it would dissipate without much trace so not much harm done.
The guy always came earlier than everyone else and spent some time watching YouTube before work so he supposed to be alone.
It worked. Except that morning our boss also came very early and was sleeping at his desk right in front of the setup. He also was a very toxic person and was going through his divorce which made him even greater asshole than usual. So the blast startled them both and threw some papers off his desk which resulted in all Hell breaking loose even though no one understood what the fuck happened and my colleague got all the blame in the moment.
@drq My colleague suspected me immediately so I had to come clean :) The boss wasn’t interested as he had habit of blowing up at anyone he saw first no matter the situation and then forgetting (or “forgetting” and sending someone else to mend things he fucked up as people didn’t took it well - one time we almost lost our primary ISP as he managed to piss off all their managers because of major outage which wasn’t their fault even).
@drq Usually my pranks quickly went to “oh, it is you, IT IS YOU AGAiN” moment so I didn’t really have to come clean except saying “well… yes”.
There was one time when I had to come clean and confess and it took some hesitation. One guy at work had Ford. His car had that usual oval Ford emblem on the front but it could be flipped upside down revealing a keyhole to open the hood. So when we went to smoke or something sometimes we flipped it. He always noticed and smiled or was slightly annoyed but that’s it.
One day I flipped it upside down and he didn’t notice it this time. Next morning I came and there was heavy atmosphere in the room. He was walking around all sulky saying “Who did it, why don’t you leave it alone… yesterday I noticed it when I parked at home so I had been driving through half of Moscow like an idiot… everyone saw it on the road…”. I had no idea why he took it so close to the heart (maybe because he was kind of classy guy and cared about his looks). I thought it was no big thing but when it continued on the next day. He just couldn’t shake it off. I had to confess to give him some closure and we stopped doing it.
@drq I think it was not about the car but looking like a fool which he turned out to be really sensitive for. Maybe he was a bit insecure behind that facade of real ladies man who did manage to get in his bed half of the office including some married women :)
I guess everyone can have weird weak spots.
@asklemmy Here’s one more from me, also computer-related:
If you’re in a non-English speaking country and your machines use layout switch function, add *one* more keyboard layout on every system you touch. Doesn’t matter which one, but bonus points if it’s as similar to ones present as possible, but different enough to matter - for example some letters are “switched”. I used German, French and even Bulgarian.
Lock the session and watch the reaction.
You are welcome.
@drq Somewhat related pranks we did sometime:
- If you are mail admin (or can create recipients) make an account mimicking someone important (maybe not CEO unless you want your ass fired but your boss or their boss will do) replacing one letter from another layout or just using similar ones (I and l being usual favorites). Hide it from the address book and initiate some correspondence involving that account and some pranksters about something sensitive involving your victim. Then “accidentally” leak it. The victim won’t go to the boss (hopefully) because they are not supposed to see it but they’ll get all squirmy and start asking around about salary cuts or whatever.
Or they will go to the boss or the boss above that boss and then the prank is on you :)
- Make a computer account mimicking your victim in the same way. When they leave the room, log with that very similar account and lock it up. Watch them trying to enter password. Help them reset it multiple times because you don’t know why it doesn’t work, is your keyboard ok? Let’s test it on my PC, look, you can log in just fine, go and type your new password, it must work. Look, it works on your phone. Maybe try to reset your password yourself from my PC? Oh, bummer… No, I didn’t do anything, let’s reboot your computer, must be Windows glitch.
@shuro Here’s one more.
If you have a Unix-using friend who relies on the command history just a lil bit too much - like scrolling a dozen lines just to find an “ls” command, replace .bash_history file with a poem of your choosing with lines ordered backwards next time they forget to lock their session.
Don’t forget to back up the old file, though.
I did when I was a little kid, but not as an adult… cmon now
Get help
@Valmond Get stories to tell
@[email protected] @[email protected] well, it’s not as crazy as everyone else’s pranks but it was still funny to me when I was 12
I had Bashqort classes in school as a kid, but we weren’t actually taught the language, it was just a required-by-law-but-nobody-cares class (which is really sad, I think). we just spent time looking for words in the dictionary or reading texts nobody understood aloud
one day we were given some adjective-noun pairs to translate with the dictionary, and a classmate was too busy playing a game on his phone to write it down, so he asked me. the pairs were quite generic, something like “beautiful flower” but I decided to have a little fun and told him the pairs were “dead child”, “cold-blooded murder” etc. I was really obsessed with death and murders as a kid
unfortunately, he asked the teacher if she actually asked us to translate this and she was a bit shocked :neofox_laugh_sweat:
@wonderfox_dev Not bad, if lil bit morbid.
I *thought* to use mistranslations some time, but nah.
Pooped in a toilet, the toilet never forgave me
You asked, I’ll answer.
Find someone who thinks they are getting promoted. Tell them they’ve got the job. That when their boss left for lunch… That the boss actually just got fired. Convince them to pack up bosses office.
Don’t do this unless you want to lose a friend
@andrewta Takes a hell of a charisma check to convince to pack up someone else’s office, I suppose. But if you did pull it off - whoa, you got a silver tongue, my friend. I hope you reconciled later.
Never did this.
@andrewta Never did what, reconcile?
Never pulled that prank
A prank that I did pull. Was one where I knew a guy who couldn’t keep from speaking Or repeating what he hears. So I used that to my advantage. I started out with actually really funny jokes which I knew he would repeat. Then I started telling jokes that were somewhat funny but not hilarious. And I knew he would repeat them. Then I just started saying crazier and crazier stuff to see if he would repeat it.
Had this going for about three or four months. Then one day he figured out what I was doing. Now he doesn’t repeat stuff. It was fun while it lasted. Good times.
> Never pulled that prank
Wrong answer then. I’m looking for life stories, not some theoretical constructs.
> A prank that I did pull.
Well, that’s what I’m after.
And you know what? I love this! I’d totally fall for that. I always steal phrases from here and there, ha-ha-ha-ha.
Oh my god, three months. You’re a snake.
Nice one. I hope you are both doing alright.
@asklemmy Okay, I’ll start.
I don’t know if it was my worst - but it was notable.
Back in school, I wrote a worm using nothing but bat files. It were Windows 9x days, so it was fairly easy if you know your way around file shares. It removed most of the files and replaced autoexac.bat with a blinking message. I let it loose in the informatics classroom.
It was a huge scandal, the whole week of informatics curriculum was ruined, my parents got a call, I was made to reinstall everything. But after all the dust settled, I got a lifelong A+ from the informatics teacher. She also offered me and my gang to learn C after class, on a promise I put my nasty mind to good use.
Then everyone clapped
We once did a collective book in class where everyone contributed something. My contribution was a simple DOS “virus” that would format the victims C drive.
The worst part was that since everyone’s contribution was read out loud some poor kid had to read my bat script. Back then we didn’t know how the @ sign is pronounced. We settled on alpha although I knew that was wrong.
@bjoern_tantau Lil bit of Cryptonomicon vibes, the collision of code and literature nice.
