I can be annoying
Last week I linked to Ask The Admin when they answered the question:
How can I ANNOY the hell out of someone in my office legally?
I loved their solution, but it got me to thinking, how have I answered this in the past? There’s the obvious little annoyances, subtle rearranging of a desk and so forth. I suppose I’d list things like lowering chairs, shortening mouse cords, and rotating the monitor image under minor annoyances too.
Slightly more annoying to geeks like me, there is rearranging of desktop icons. That is particularly annoying to me when only one or two key icons are moved, or swapped. If more are moved, I realize that something is wrong, and I fix it. If it’s just one or two, it takes me a while to catch on that someone is messing with me.
I’ve personally always been a fan of computer wallpaper edits. There are two ways to go here, subtle or obvious. With subtle, as you might expect, the idea is to keep the changes so minor that they don’t see them. Subtle is best done with a series of extremely small changes each day for a period of time. It works best when the victim subject uses a personal photo for their wallpaper. Always save the original, no need to be cruel by destroying their only copy of a favorite photo. A good place to start might be to make someone’s hair a little bigger, or shave a few pounds off their best friend in the photo. Making them grow shorter each day would also work. My favorite prank along these lines was making the victim’s hairline recede a little more each day. By the end of the week he knew I was messing with him, so I gave him a mohawk and a Born to Advertise scalp tattoo.
And then there are obvious changes. A picture of you smiling back at them works well for instance. An embarrassing Christmas party photo is always funny. If you’d like something a bit more obscure, take a screen shot of their desktop, icons and all, and replace their wallpaper with it. Again, always save the original. Then I’d recommend moving some, but not all, of their icons. Now some of their icons are real, and some of them are just pictures of icons on their desktop. You can also move the real icons so that they stack one over the other, essentially hiding all but the uppermost.
I think Ask The Admin’s prank is the best I’ve heard of though. I know it’s much more annoying than anything I’ve thought up.
When I was a GA at school I installed VNC on one of the machines in our office. I fired up the client on the other machine, minimized it and waited for someone else to show up. When the other GA came in and started to use the computer I would wait till she was about to press a button or and icon and I would nudge the mouse just slightly so that she would miss.
I would also type random characters while she was typing. Poor girl couldn’t figure out what was going on. This lasted for few hours where I would mess with her on and off while doing my own work.
Then for the grand finale I just started opening random applications, minimizing and maximizing windows and moving things on the screen which made her scream out: “OMG, my computer was hacked!”
Fun times.
At another time one guy explained to us that he had to chmod his home directory to 777 to get his program working working. This was a NFS setup, and we were all essentially on the same machine. So it was trivial for us to go into his home dir, create the following set of directories and then copy all his files into it:
/home/username/you/should/not/give/everyone/access/to/your/home_dir/
A guy I worked with also had some good ones from his last job. Not particularly geeky things but still good ones:
- every day they would push a guys desk closer to the wall by half an inch or so (so he would have less and less space behind it)
- one guy would always brown bag his lunch, and had a schedule: Monday it was a ham and cheese sandwich and and apple, Tuseday it was a tuna salad and an orange – and etc.. It was always some sandwich and a fruit. Every few days they would switch his fruit of the day with a different one and then watch his expression of shock and disbelief at lunch hour
- one manager had a very ugly yellow tie that he would wear almost every single day. Someone found that same tie at a store bought the whole rack, and handed it out the next day. At the next meeting half the room was wearing the same funky tie as the manager.
- Someone found a box of sugar packets that actually contained salt at one of those stores with joke items. No one saw this coming.
Comment by Luke Maciak — October 10, 2007 @ 10:22 am
Those are great! I love the moving the desk gag. I always like the pranks where the victim isn’t quite sure if someone’s messing with them or not.
Comment by HDW — October 10, 2007 @ 10:27 am
[...] letting everyone know that I can be annoying, how could I pass up 101 Ways to Annoy Your Co-workers? 22. Make a screenshot of their desktop and [...]
Pingback by High Desert Wanderer » You can be annoying too — October 11, 2007 @ 8:35 am
They gave us some cheap plastic watches at work, a special thank you for something. Anyway they had an alarm on them so I set mine for 2:15 PM and hid it in the rafters above the suspended ceiling in the office.
Every day for months it would go off! You’d see the office staff just freeze and wait then dash around looking for it! I had a great view of them from the warehouse.
It ran till the battery died, eventually they stopped looking for it.
I wonder if it had a setting to go off once an hour?
Comment by Peter — August 17, 2009 @ 2:41 am
Very nice. That would be seriously annoying.
Comment by HDW — August 17, 2009 @ 7:22 am