From davidv@sco.COM Sat Dec 2 09:57:42 1989 From: davidv@sco.COM (David Vangerov) Subject: Super Collection of Practical Jokes (part 4 of 4) ********** Odd that no-one mentioned the fun to be had with all the new and wonderful phone features available now. None of the below are truly destructive. Adjust gender as appropriate (women's lib be damned, I'm not going to type his/her, s/he every time). Switching these on/off from time to time can drive people nuts trying to figure out what is going on. 1) If call forwarding is available at your company, forward the victims calls to an "appropriate" number (Highly moral people get dial-a-sex, bosses get dial-a-joke, boring people get time/weather, flamboyant ones get dial-a-prayer, etc). Victim may go days without figuring it out. Spouse may get interested in what's going o at office as well. Forwarding to a VP makes for interesting reactions as well. 2) Variation on above is to get an answering machine, record an imitation of victim's with outragous comments (busy right now with X-rated move sound track going in background, inviting all callers out on dates, denouncing whatever private beliefs they have, etc). Forward calls OR splice into phone line so only happens on occasion. 3) If someone is silly enough to put call waiting onto a line used for modems, call it EVERY time they use it. Vicitm will complain to phone compnay about "line noise". 4) Reprogram all their speed calling to dial-a-sex, etc numbers (as appropriate for victim). Love to watch the face of someone who thinks he is calling his wife and a sexy girl comes on the line demanding a credit card so she can "talk dirty" to him... 5) If victim is out of office for an extend period (week+), answer his phone and say "Oh, Mark doesn't work here anymore. I think that the company caught him stealing equipment/supplies/money; using drugs; sleeping on the job; sexually harrassing the boss; etc." 6) If the phone system depends on * or # pound keys, reverse them. Most confusing. Even better, rewire 0-9 as well! Interchange only 2 keys for continuing wrong numbers. 7) Replace answering tape messages with something "more exiting". Effects records make good backgrounds. Barmaids and dancers will often help you out on this one as well. 8) Call victim's answering machine. Leave what sounds to be an important message and, 3 digits into the phone number, end the message. 9) If the company tracks every phone call, have everyone in the office make long distance calls from the victims phone whenever victim leaves the room. You need a spotter to keep from getting caught at this one. 900 numbers that charge 0.50 per call are good for this. 10) One of my favorites works best in large office buildings: Stay late one night. Go through the building and forward EVERY phone to victim's line. Be sure to do yours also to avoid being suspected. 11) If victim keeps phone numbers online and you have write access to database, scramble the numbers (Be sure not to mess with medical or other emergency numbers. You can't play as many pranks on dead/maimed victims). 12) Turn off bell on victims phone. On AT&T phones this requires a bit of disassembly to implement but may be corrected by just adjusting the volume (there is a stop to keep bell from going off but lifting a lever permits the dial to rotate past the stop. Rotate back and no-one can tell that it was done. This is a design feature of the phones). ********* This is a good one for school or business. It's probably been used in movies and TV. It was used at this site, to the embarassment of one of our department heads. While he was chairing a rather boring department meeting, the Manager (referred heretofore as Mr. Pid) Wanted to emphasize a point using the conference room blackboard. Several meetings had been recently held in the same room, and the last had used the pull-down projector screen, which was now covering much of the blackboard. With chalk in hand, Mr. Pid gave the screen a little tug, and released it, sending it straight up and out of reach. The entire department almost immediately broke into uncontrollable laughter. Mr. Pid was at first surprised, thinking the group to be amused by the action of the screen. When he turned around to start writing, we were told he turned the most lovely shade of beet red, as taped to the blackboard was a luscious and smiling Playboy centerfold. To this day, the identity of the perpetrator is unknown. ********* Several years ago at our site I had an argument with a co-worker about the use of menu screens. I argued that they are fine for a while, but that soon become tedious and that direct verb commands were preferable. His argument was that menus were the ultimate in user- friendliness, and that he would always prefer them. A few days later I heard him holler from his office. Seems he started up the local editor, which gave him a menu selection to a)insert b)modify c)delete a character It was talked about for some time. ********* One of my favorites is to go into somebody's room and turn EVERYTHING upside down. This was done to the cook at a summer camp I worked at (she was a lousy cook; this was revenge for hamburger in white sauce for breakfast). We invertedeverything in the kitchen; the stove, the refrigerator (both previously disconnected) and everything in the refrigerator; everything on the shelves and which (i.e., top, bottom, middle) shelf it was on. Best of all, there was a table in the middle of the room with large JARS of ketchup, mustard, etc.; the tops of all of these were hidden and they were inverted (place waxed paper over mouth of jar, invert, remove paper) and the table rested on top. We also inverted several posters on the walls. Of course, the cook wasn't very happy about this; after she'd gotten it cleaned up she demanded that whever did it apologize and wash dishes for a week. If nobody claimed responsibility, she said, she would quit. We cheered. ********* On the other hand: one day some friends of mine and I were going to 7-11. There were several parking spaces open along the wall of the store. We were in two cars: a 14 year old chevy wagon and an 10 year old dodge dart. As the first car was about to pull in to the lot, a brand new cadillac pulled in from another entrance and PARALELL parked accross 3 perpendicular spaces. Needless to say we were not amused, and quickly retaliated. Before the driver (a man in his 60's) could open the door, my friend and I (in the wagon) drove up and paralell parked alongside him 6 inches from his door. The other car pulled up so that he couldn't pull up past us. This left him hemmed in by brick walls on two sides and cars on two sides. Of course, he could have slammed his way out, but since his car had just cost 10 times the combined values of our cars, he didn't try it. We left both cars parked there (with doors locked, brakes set, etc.) while we picked up some party supplies and left him there fuming. ********* Forget about phenothaline, coat the inside of the cup with Nitrogen tri- iodide, when it dries, don't move the cup! When the owner attempts to do anyhting with the cup, even breathe on it, it will probably exsplode! Don't use to much or the mug will shatter very viontley! ********* There was a computer operator at a certain college (I don't know where), who had been fired for something (I don't know what). He acquired one of the ten platter disk packs that the university was using on its mainframe computer system, and took it home. He disassembled the pack and replaced the disk platters with phonograph records. He then sneaked back into the computer center one night, placed his new pack on the shelves, and wrote a script that would prompt the operator to mount the pack. Later, when the new operator came in to do his job, he saw the message to mount the pack, so he did so. Being new, he didn't know how heavy the disk packs actually were so he didn't suspect anything, until he powered up the drive. The phono records literally exploded inside the drive and sent the spindle straight through the drive door. ********* One time a group of friends were working on an assignment for their artificial intelligence class. It was the first machine problem, it was due that day, and they hadn't started it yet. Their task was to implement an expression analyzer - nothing fancy, just a conversational calculator. Their teacher had said many times in class that a program exhibits "artificial intelligence" if you cannot distinguish it's reponses >from those of a human being. They were asking me to help them do it the other way around. They would type in the expressions and I would use a calculator to simulate their homework problem and type back the answers. The first few problems were easy ones. Their teacher remarked that their program seemed to be one of the slowest ones (I am not notorious for my speed with a calculator). The last expression was some really long thing involving lots of parentheses and somewhere along the way I made a mistake and so their "program" got the wrong answer. You would think the gig would be up, but, being fast on his feet, one of my friends typed in TRY AGAIN. So, I did, and this time typed the correct number. Not to be outdone, my other friend said "We still have a few bugs yet. We haven't taught it about long division." (Of course their teacher didn't buy any of this, but he was so amused he gave them an extra week to work on the problem.) ********* Everyone's heard about filling the victim's room with balloons, right? (balloons are great, especially if the victim is your SO and you come by later, acting innocently, and suggest...well, you get the idea.) Unfortunately, inflated balloons are bulky to carry, and it can take a dangerously long time to inflate them in the victims room. There is a solution. (I've actually done this, it really *does* work, even if it sounds ridiculous) Go out and get 2 or 3 styrofoam beer coolers. Inflate the balloons in the privacy of your own room. Fill the beer coolers with liquid nitrogen. (at 77 K it can liquify air) Stuff all 2 thousand or so inflated balloons into the beer coolers. (don't worry, they will fit, liquified air occupies *very* little space) You may need a refill or 3 of liquid nitrogen. Get a friend or 3 to help carry the coolers to the victims room. Make sure there isn't any paper or other water-damagable stuff on the floor. Strain out the majority of the LN2 and dump the inflated balloons onto the floor. Close the door. (if there is a window or transom, it's great fun to watch the balloons reinflate to fill the room) ********* During my freshman year at OSU, Some of the guys in my floor "discovered" this (on about the second day 8-). The doors in the "Tower" dorms have a lever shaped door handle, but the pennies still work if the person has locked their door (for instance, to sleep). I discovered that if you flip the flashplate for the door over, and re-install it, then the pennies only place pressure on the door handle latch, not the deadbolt. You should have seen the look on Chucks face when I opened the door in the morning after he pennied it in... As a parting gift to the dorm staff, we turned our bathroom into a pool/sauna, but that's another story... ********* I had a UNIX practical joke pulled on me that was absolutely insidious: the perpetrator simply changed my .profile to include a stty call to change my wake-up character from a newline to a space. The effect was that if I typed a command in correctly everything worked, but if I 'kill'ed the line or tried to delete characters, only the last parameter would be deleted. He had me going for WEEKS trying to figure out what was wrong with the system... ********* the dept administrator is somewhat of an msdos jock, and one day, he changed my adviser's rainbow prompt to be something like: fatal disk error so everytime the return was pressed, this was displayed... now seeing that we have been having various hardware and software problems, one after the other with the little trash machine rainbow, my adviser was very upset... when he realized that it was a joke, he thought that maybe i had done it... (i don't know why, because i don't normally do this type of thing). once we had sorted out what had happened, we set up the administrator's account of the vax to behave in a similar, but more frustrating way... i am a bit worried about this, though, because he rarely uses the vax... it has been about two months, and still no screaming... (just redefine some symbols in his login.com... important ones, like: $ dir*ectory :== type $ type :== directory $ show :== logout ********* An OSU Architecture prof (I'll call him Dr. Jones) had a habit of telling his students to "Go take a flying leap" when they gave dumb answers. One student decided to take the prof to task; the class was taught in a second floor room so the student practiced jumping out the window (with the help of an assistant who would catch his arms as he jumped). The two got this down to an art, and one day provoked the "flying leap" comment from Dr. Jones. The student said, "Okay, if you say so," turned around, and leapt out the window. His partner (who was supposed to grab him but say, "oh God, I missed him !") *did* miss, and the jumper fell and broke his ankle. No, this is not a cut on stupid practical jokes. The humor follows: As a result of this episode, the department chairman had to file an accident report. One line of the form requires the DC to outline "What actions will be taken to prevent future recurrences of this accident ?" The Department Chief answered, "In the future, all of Dr. Jones's courses will be taught in the basement." ********* Last year I had a job teaching an officeful of secretaries to use their IBM XT. Well, for April Fools Day, I inserted a Pascal program at the beginning of the AUTOEXEC.BAT file (runs on startup). The program essentially said "Hello, Department of Defense Missile Network..." and gave instructions which led to "Missiles Launched", and "congratulations, you have just launched World War III. Say goodbye to everything you love." I slowed down the printing to match 300 baud, so it looked quite threatening. After the "say good-bye message", I had it tell the user to hit RETURN, after which the program said APRIL FOOL and went on to the normal programs. The results were interesting. The people who were comfortable with the computer loved it. The real computerphobe registered only that this wasn't her database program, and (as usual) demanded key-by-key instruction, ignoring the prefectly good instructions on the screen. No-one really was startled, they didn't have the background. ********* Get a thin sheet of lead, cut out the outline of a reclining nude (trace from a magazine if you wish), tape it onto an inside wall of your suitcase. If you're really artsy, glue or sew on a cover sheet, such that the deception is non-obvious when the people check it. Other shapes, or messages (taped onto cardboard) work too. Don't do something that suggests a hijack attempt. ********* A few months ago I was flying down to L.A. from San Francisco with a friend. He had stayed up too late the night before and promptly fell fast asleep as soon as we were airborne. The airline magazines soon paled, so I looked around for some way to entertain myself until we reached L.A. I went up the steward and asked if I could borrow one of the oxygen masks that they use in their little speech just before take-off. He looked puzzled and said that they didn't work and were just for demonstration. I said I didn't care, and much to my surprise, he gave it to me. I took it back to my seat, put it on, and strung the hose to the up just above my head. Then I reached down and shook my friend furiously. As he groggily woke up, I yelled, "Quick, put on your mask, we're falling fast!" The look on his face was pretty classic! Interestingly enough, he didn't fall back asleep on the plane. ********* This is a simple, harmless, and hilarious practical joke, that has claimed me as a victim. The setting is a pool hall, bar, or anyplace else with a pool (billiards) table. Place any ball at one end of the table and give your victim the cue ball. Challenge the victim to focus on the cue ball while walking around the pool table three times. At the end of the third time, the victim is to place the cue ball on the table, take a cue stick and hit the cue ball so that it stikes the ball at the other end of the table. This is very difficult to do; not because of a loss of coordination from walking and staring at the ball, but because while the victim is concentrating on the ball, you lick your finger and wipe chalk off the end of the cue stick. The victim will miscue almost every time. It gets funnier, because if the victim is like me, he/she will be determined and try it again. ********* Speaking of fun practical jokes with a car, I have a couple of interesting ones. 1) Give the victims car an oil change, to 70 wieght oil. This should work very well in places where it gets cold because when it is cold enough, the oil should more resemble a brick the oil, and the car should be unable to crank. I wonder how long it would take even a good mechanic to figure out what has been done. 2) A Classic. Stones in the hubcaps. If done correctly, the driver will hear something rattling in the hupcaps and check to see if it is the wheel nuts, finding nothing, they will continue , only to hear the sound again. 3) When expressway driving becomes boring. This trick is been done with a radar detector and a very fast (looking) car. While driving on the expressway, look for a fast car that looks like it may not have a radar detector. Accelerate hard to about 70 and see if the other car follows. If it does, bring your car up as fast as you feel safe and pretend to be racing him. This should get the other car's driver to start going very fast. Continue this "race" until you come on a turn or hill. After going through the turn, hit your brakes hard and bring the car to exactly 55.00 mph. The effect is to make every one on the road start doing 55.00 because they assume that if you are going that fast, youmust have a radar detector, and it must have just gone off. (I hope I don't need to mention the illigalities with this joke, and the need for a radar detector.) ********* When my girlfriend and I were in our early teens (the age is important) we used to go to the local department store clock department. We would set all the clocks that had alarms to go off within minutes of each other a few minutes later. From a vantage point behind a rack of clothing we always got a chuckle when the alarms started going off and the poor sales clerk was trying to find out which ones were going off! (now, having been a sales clerk for a brief period during my college days, I don't think that would have been particularly funny!) ********* While in grad school, I was an "assistant" in a lab which contained two pdp-11/23's running UNIX System 3. Much of my education came from jokes played on me by my more knowledgeable friends. I'm sure I deserved them; I was into writing multi-player games, and I got a kick out of writing special caveats that only I knew about; these caveats could give other players invisible handicaps. (Don't ask me for the games; they're very terminal dependent and I don't even know where they are anymore.) We once wrote a multi-player version of Walter Bright's empire from scratch. I added H-bombs (like fighters, but when they hit a city it goes neutral, and when they hit a neutral city it goes away, etc) Only, the program was rigged so that when a certain friend completed an H-bomb, he got this dialogue that ended with the H-bomb developers testing the bomb in his own city! It was VERY funny. [1] The lab contained two kinds of terminals; Zenith-something-or-other for one pdp and TVI-something-or-other for the other. The console for each pdp was some other type (e.g., vt100 or somesuch). I normally logged in on a Zenith in a particular spot. One day my first attempt to login failed and my second succeeded. I thought nothing of it, and continued. Later, I happened to be on the console when I did a ps and noticed a program running in the background belonging to one of my friends, B. Although it was not uncommon for real work to be done this way (and the program had an innocent sounding name), I poked around in B's directory to see if I could figure out what it was doing (I was root; what a feeling of power!). An ls revealed a very strange directory name; under that directory lived some interesting looking programs and files. It turned out that B had written one of those password-catching programs, and had run it on my favorite terminal, apparently hoping that I'd login as root there. The directory name was an escape sequence that caused an "up-cursor, carriage-return", so an ls on a Zenith would overwrite the funny directory name with the next file/directory. I had done the ls on the console (different escape sequences) by pure luck. I figured out the file in which B was writing the login name and password, and replaced my login and password (yes, his program worked!) with: "B is a bad boy". Eventually he came in. I casually asked him about the background process, and he had a simple explanation ready. I then left him to the "Zenith" room, and went to the adjoining "console" room and waited. His reaction was quite rewarding. [2] B waited almost a year to try again, and this time he was nasty. I was working on a huge program, a dbms, for my Master's thesis. I was having some trouble debugging, and looking at the prospect of spending yet another semester finishing it. During a particularly frustrating session, another friend stopped in to mention that B had done something to my ..profile; I thanked him and checked it out. It was a very subtle change; I don't remember how I happened to notice it. My PATH was set with /usr/bin in front of /bin (default on our system was /bin in front of /usr/bin). I looked at /usr/bin, and found an executable cc, owned by B. Further exploration revealed that B had written new read() and write() primitives; his cc arranged that the resulting a.out would get the bogus primitives. These primitives read or wrote garbage about 1/6 of the time. Can you imagine debugging a dbms with this handicap? So, how to get back at him? I figured the first step was to pretend I hadn't discovered his little trick, so I modified my makefile to run /bin/cc directly. After a day or so, B stopped in to ask how I was doing, and I told him everything was going well. He happened to notice my /bin/cc lines, and asked why I did that. I told him I had some simple shell scripts named "cc" scattered about, and didn't want to accidentally pick one up (this was before aliases). He swallowed it. The next day, /usr/bin had an executable make to go with the cc. B's make made a backup copy of the makefile, changed all the /bin/cc's to /usr/bin/cc's, and ran the real make; when the make finished, it moved the original makefile back. I was amazed at the trouble he had gone to -- and got a good lesson in shell programming as well! ********* Joke 1 It all started with a girlfriend's birthday party. Her boyfriend, who I had known since elementary school, wanted to give her a suprize party. So he asked me what should we do. I came up with a plan to kidnap her during dinner. But this wasn't any kidnapping. What we did was to get three people that she didn't know to arrive while we where having dinner. Of course all of these people were speaking a foreign language that she didn't understand. She was bound, gagged and blindfolded. Then while everyone drove to the resturant, she was driven around in a car with three people speaking a foreign language. BTW-she new something was up and wasn't scared, because she knew something was up. Anyway, they bring her into this very nice resturant. We're all waiting at the table, about 15 of us, and we proceed to start dinner. Her food was in front of her, but she was still bound gagged, and blindfolded. After a few moments we untied her, she was really embarrassed, because everyone in the place was staring at our table, which was in the middle of the room. She vowed revenge. Joke 2 She wanted revenge. So I came up with the idea of getting a baby picture of my friend, her boyfriend, from his mother, and printing up posters of it and putting it up all over campus. Out side of his classes, labs, and work. His mother gave me the most adorable picture of him when he was a baby with his teddy bear. His features hadn't changed that much and the way the picture was set up he looked as though he was in a police line up. So we made it into a "Most Wanted" poster, with a concise discription, and his name across the top in 40 point type. I printed up about 150 posters which we put up all over campus. The next day every where he looked and turned there was a poster, even in some of the men's rooms around campus. It took him weeks to find all of the posters. Joke 3 If you are wondering what all of this is building up to. Here is the ultimate joke that was pulled. After several more *practical* jokes which I was the ring leader on. My friends realized that at the hub of each of the jokes I was the organizer and brains behind the opperation. So it was my turn. I really liked this one upper division Economics class that I was taking that quarter. I was the VP of one of the Econ clubs on campus and everyone knew who I was including the professor. Well, one Friday afternoon while this class was meeting. One of those warm afternoons where everyone in the class is dozing, including the professor. All of a sudden three people enter the class in surgical grab, masks, protective gloves, boots, green suits, the works and a wheelchair.(I learned later that they had *borrowed* all of these items from the medical school.) Anyway, the looked like the real thing. They went up to the professor and told him that they were looking for me because I had contracted a infectious disease, and needed to be removed from class immediately. They handed him a very official looking document and started for me with the wheel chair. You could have seen the people around me move, them my *friends* wheeled me across the length of the campus screaming "out of the way infectious person." When I went back to class the next week, the professor looked at me oddly and asked if I was OK to be out. He really believed the whole thing. ********** and that's it. hope you enjoyed it... -- David <"I really was just a Theater Arts major, honest!"> Vangerov Disclaimer: These are my opinions, all mine!!! Not SCO's, got that? Sysmom of the night: keeping the system safe for the everyday user. E-mail: davidv@sco.COM || ...!uunet!sco!davidv || ...!attctc!sco!davidv