Hopefully there isn’t already a thread for this…
Post any good, bad or indifferent April Fools jokes you come across here… To kick things off:
There is one in the gaming forum, but it’s specifically for gaming related stuff, I believe.
Leprechaun leader Hairy Twinkletoes O’Shaughnessy said: 'Top of the morning to ya. Bejaysus and Begorrah. ‘Tis a soft day afterall.’
Strewth, me ol’ cobber! Is that how the Irish speak?
Do any of you have any favorite office pranks? I’ve done a couple that involved screwing with other peoples’ computers. There’s the classic Ctrl-Alt-Down arrow trick that turns the image on the monitor upside-down.
Then there’s my favorite: Take a screen shot of someone’s desktop. Then create a folder on the desktop and put all the person’s icons in the folder. Then replace the desktop wallpaper with the screenshot you just took.
Ineffectual clicking hilarity ensues.
At my first job (law firm) they had had a Halloween party where one of the help desk workers had shown up as a pregnant Catholic schoolgirl. There were lots of pictures taken of her posting being sexy while drinking from beer bottles.
So we had the server admin set up a site that went to hotsexypregnantcatholicteens and I put together a couple pages and put the pictures up. Like a really awful porn site with big blinking yellow XXXs on a black background and everything. HOT, READY, AND RELIGIOUS!
Then we had the head of the networking team take her aside during the day to give her a serious talk about how what she did on her spare time was none of our business but that the guy who maintained the spam filter kept catching these emails trying to come through and she needed to keep her personal life out of the office.
She was so mortified trying to explain that that was just the Halloween party and she had no idea who would have taken those pictures and used them like that and we were dying laughing on the other side of the wall. When we all came around and yelled April Fools, she gave us death glares for the rest of the day. But it’s still the best office prank I’ve seen pulled.
Not at the office, but one year I replaced the front page of my blog with a official-looking ISP-themed page that said that my account had been suspended for a long list of reasons that started out reasonable and quickly turned to the extremely ludicrous, with a slightly-obscured link to the real front page. Caught at least one friend with it.
Do any of you have any favorite office pranks? I’ve done a couple that involved screwing with other peoples’ computers. There’s the classic Ctrl-Alt-Down arrow trick that turns the image on the monitor upside-down.
Then there’s my favorite: Take a screen shot of someone’s desktop. Then create a folder on the desktop and put all the person’s icons in the folder. Then replace the desktop wallpaper with the screenshot you just took.
Ineffectual clicking hilarity ensues.
That sort of thing used to go on a lot, including stuff like putting tape over the bottom of people’s optical mice so they stopped working, unplugging keyboards, etc.
Then management got pissed and decided that losing an hour of someone’s work day wasn’t worth the giggles and banned fucking with anyone’s computers anymore. :)
A few years back when we were looking at new marketing initiatives, vendors would send us all sorts of samples. One of which was a card that when you opened it, made a little phone-ringing noise. Simple thin-film speaker, battery, chip combo with a plastic pull-tab that when pulled would make a pair of metal prongs connect and complete the circuit, very basic.
So I did a bit of surgery and removed that bit from the card and it’s been sitting in a desk drawer for two years now. Of course, today someone decided to take it out, affix it to the bottom of a co-worker’s drawer with double-sided tape, and use a rubber band to fashion a makeshift pull tripwire.
Co-worker opens the drawer, hears phone ringing. Shuts drawer, looks at her cell, still hears ringing, and proceeds to look through EVERY drawer, pocket, folder, etc for about thirty minutes before she shakes the file cabinet and the little doohickey falls down.
Why does everyone blame the engineer for these pranks? It’s not like it was going to explode or anything…
As the IT guy, I fucking hate April fools day. That shit isn’t funny when you spend most of the day fixing people’s desktops, putting keyboard keys back in order and pulling tape off optical mice.
Google voice
Really?
You know you miss voicemail the way it used to be. In fact, you probably miss answering machines too!
:)
My favorite April Fools day joke from years past: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9dfWzp7rYR4 (Penguins)
I’m laughing really hard at that because I’m right now on a project to refresh my company’s voice mail technologies. Technologies which haven’t been updated since the stuff on that Google Voice page was cutting edge. As the icing on the hilarious cake, we’ve been analyzing Google Voice to see which features we should stea^H^H^H^Hoffer our customers.
I’m definitely going to send the link to my team and to the product owner suggesting we update the development backlog to ensure we offer feature parity with Google Voice.
There is a “space ship” that has “crashed” into Bloomberg (the Physics building) and an “alien body” on the ground.
Very well-done, large-scale prank. I approve.
I’m only partly joking when I say I wonder how much April Fools Day will fuck with archeologists 1000 years from now.
I don’t do them that often, and I generally don’t like them to go on too long and outstay their welcome. My most successful (and it’s fairly gentle I admit) was a couple of years ago. Google-fu fails me now, but at the time I discovered some fairly long and complicated-looking bit of code. When you pasted this into the address bar in IE, it popped up a dialogue box with a customisable message, asking you to press OK. When you pressed OK, it reappeared, with a counter showing how many times it had been clicked. It’s easily dismissed by closing the browser with Alt-F4.
I nailed the person next to me with this and they clicked 87 times in five minutes before asking for help. Chuckles.