Mike's Bike Blog

Exhibit #1
I like a good April Fools joke, ok I'll be honest I like a good prank anytime. This one I'm about to relay took place back in the late 90's, probably around 1998. I was working as a software developer for a small company specializing in CD-ROM and Web based delivery, at the time it was called multimedia. One of my fellow developers, we'll call her Patty, because that's the name her mother gave her, had a big thing for Tom Cruise.

Nick, also his real name, who did video for the company and myself would like to tease Patty that Tom Cruise was gay. Not that there's a problem if he is or anybody who is, but it seemed to really get under her skin and she would argue viciously almost to a point where blood vessels behind her eyes would pop. Great fun.

Nick was leaving the company, or so we thought, to go to LA or Phoenix to pursue a film career so we wanted a grand finale, a prank of all pranks. This next part might be a little technical but follow along as best you can. I came in early, real early one morning. I set up a DNS server (DNS is what resolves domain names like CNN.com to the actual computer that the files live on, it tells the web browser where to go) on Nick's computer and set up an entry for msnbc.com and pointed it to my computer. At the time and in our office at least MSNBC.com was the place most people went to get their daily news.

On my computer I ran a web server, for local development and I downloaded the front page to msnbc.com and a few of the main articles. Nick and me wrote an article worthy of publication on the coming out of Tom Cruise. As fake news goes this was premo! Now we had a web site that looked like MSNBC.com with our fake news on the front page and when clicked it would take you to the fake story. Nick went around to a few of the computers in the office and set them up to use the DNS server we had set up. Now when these people typed in www.msnbc.com in their browser it would take them to our version.

While Nick was doing this we needed something else to really pull this off. Patty had a little desktop application she had downloaded from MSNBC.com, it would pull the latest news headlines from their site and display it in a small box in the system tray. I quickly replicated this application. I built my own knock off desktop app, and programmed it to pop up with our news story around 10:30, about the time Patty usually got in to work.

The trap had been set and all we had to do was wait and try to keep a straight face. At 10:30 right on cue the application I wrote fires off the notice with the fake headline and with it sends Patty into a screaming fit. At first it was "No, No! I don't believe it!" She instantly started blaming me and Nick like we had some hand in this. She clicked the headline to go to MSNBC.com for the full story and voila the full fake article was displayed. Her acquisitions against us stopped. Coworkers came running into our office area to see what the commotion was. There were skeptics in the crowd, telling Patty that it must have been Nick and me somehow. A group of nonbelievers ran back to the reception area and went to MSNBC.com. That computer was one that we strategically changed the DNS settings on so it to brought them to our fake news server. A silence fell over the crowd of woman. We had crushed many a fantasies that day.

We really had no plan for the second part, the first part really wasn't through through either. So after lunch we changed out the MSNBC.com site with another fake story, this one was 2 men were wanted in questioning for hacking the MSNBC.com website with our pictures.

That was one of my better office pranks. Is it one of my best one? I'll let you be the judge.

Exhibit #2
When I worked at Keller Williams Realty International in their corporate IT department there was a running joke. If you walked away from your computer and left it unlocked somebody would walk by and mess with it. That somebody was usually Kurt. In all my past work environments I wasn't exposed to these types of shenanigans so I would get up and forget to lock my computer. There was the time I walked down the hall to get a VP level executive and other high ranking stakeholders to demo an application I had been working on. You can imagine my dismay when I returned to have my desktop background and everything else set to a teletubby theme. The execs got a good laugh as well as everyone else in IT. At that point I started plotting my revenge. It wasn't going to be simple, Kurt ran Linux so even the times he walked away and left his computer vulnerable all I could do is sit there not knowing how to use Pine to send an email on his behalf, or change any of his desktop. Plus I needed to take it to the next level in hopes to prevent any further pranks.

One night I wrote a little surveillance application, all it did was detect motion on my web cam and record it. Then whenever the mouse or a key was pressed it would mimic the blue screen of death and prompt that it was reformatting the hard drive. I built this as a screen saver with the background that looked like my desktop, so to the unsuspecting fool walking by it looked like my computer was unlocked when it fact it was not only locked but had a booby trap waiting.

For the next week I would leave my computer "vulnerable" waiting for Kurt to jump at the chance to get to his hijinks. For 4 days he didn't take the bait, in fact on the 3rd day he told me how I left my computer unlocked and he could have gotten me big time if he had wanted to. I kind of egged him on in hopes to spur him to. On the 5th day, April Fools day of all days. I caught him in my trap.

When I came back to my cube he and Charles had a worried look and were apologetic. They were worried that they had really messed up my computer. I quickly sat down and reviewed the video. It was quite funny you see Charles in the background acting as a lookout while Kurt is sitting at my computer. You don't see much except the top of his head, but then when the blue screen of death is displayed he backs away from the computer and he has a look of fear and Oh Crap on his face.

I sent out an email, with a link to the video, to all of the IT department to be on the look out for the suspects in the video. I was never pranked again while at Keller Williams. A month or so later, unable to top me Kurt left the company and moved to Switzerland. Charles also departed the company as well. I did have a couple other ideas I could have pulled in case we got into a prank war, I'll keep those in case an occasion ever arises.

So you be the judge, which one is better? Or do you have one that can top these?