The Scary DBA

  • Magnetizing a CRT monitor is always fun if the owner doesn't understand degaussing. Less fun when you realise that the monitor has no degauss button.

    Nothing beats shoe polish on the earpiece of a phone though, mostly the recipient doesn't even realise what has happened until some time after you have called them.

  • matt stockham (11/1/2007)Magnetizing a CRT monitor is always fun if the owner doesn't understand degaussing. Less fun when you realise that the monitor has no degauss button.

    LOL!

  • In Forth you could redefine integers as different values (as well as redefine all operators etc, nothing was sacred).

    Swapping wireless mice between adjacent cubicals provides some harmless fun.

    ...

    -- FORTRAN manual for Xerox Computers --

  • jay holovacs (11/2/2007)


    Swapping wireless mice between adjacent cubicals provides some harmless fun.

    We have a big conference table where we do EXTREME programming. Being Microsoft partners was a big deal. We have a whole box of their mice. Extras wind up on the table when no one is looking.:Whistling:

    ATBCharles Kincaid

  • Long before the Internet, one had to read magazines for fun and profit. While I was in the military, I use to collect all the military recruiting business reply cards and store them up for a while. After I gathered about 20 or 30 of them, I would pick a friend back home, (especially one with long hair) and fill out the cards with his name and address on them. Yes, he wanted to be a nuclear physicist on a Navy submarine. Yes, he wanted to fly Air Force fighter jets. Yes, he wanted to drive Army tanks. You get the idea.

    About 6 weeks later, he would start getting calls and visits from all the branches about his request. Multiple calls and visits. For about a week or two. Day and night.

    He finally figured it out.

    The second time around, anyway... :hehe:

  • About 6 weeks later, he would start getting calls and visits from all the branches about his request. Multiple calls and visits. For about a week or two. Day and night.

    Cruel, yet funny, Bob!

    When I was in college I roomed with two other knuckleheads. One afternoon we were all hanging around the place having a beer when there's a knock on the door. Roomie #1 answers it, and I can hear someone ask for me. "Sure, he's right here." I go to the door with my beer in my hand and there're four neatly dressed people standing there smiling. The head guy sticks his hand out and says something like, "Hi, I'm Ted and we're here to see if Jesus can help you to quit drinking." Say what? He goes on to remind me that one of the other guys in his party was there earlier in the week, and I had asked them to come back today because I was worried about my drinking. I spent a few minutes trying to convince them that no, they had the wrong apartment or guy or both, and they are all smiling and humoring me like when you are trying to deal with a crazy person. Then I realize that my roomates have collapsed in laughter in the kitchen. It turns out that Roomie #1 was at home earlier in the week, having a few cocktails, when these folks came along looking for souls that needed saving. So he said he was very interested, maybe they could help him quit drinking, and they should come back. He gave them my name. I told them they had been pranked (punk'd not yet being in the lexicon) and they didn't believe me. I was obviously in denial. I finally had to shut the door on them.

    There is no "i" in team, but idiot has two.
  • Charles Kincaid (11/2/2007)


    jay holovacs (11/2/2007)


    We have a whole box of their mice. Extras wind up on the table when no one is looking.:Whistling:

    ROTFL!

  • On release days I have to be in work early and as a deployment involves a whole team of people we exchange mobile phone numbers. No-one wants to turn up at 04:00 to find out that a deployment has been cancelled.

    Our office is noisy and as I have trouble hearing I handed my mobile to the release manager so he could take down my number and enter his into my phone.

    Didn't think any more about it until I leant my wife my phone only to have her ask who "Hot Luvin" was.

  • Didn't think any more about it until I leant my wife my phone only to have her ask who "Hot Luvin" was.

    At a luncheon one day, a fellow I knew siting next to me got up and went to the restroom leaving his cell phone on the table.

    I entered in a (made up) 1-900 for a good time number and left it alone for awhile.

    During church the next week, I told his wife to borrow his phone and ask him about any numbers she happened to find.

    She found it.

    Never saw him turn so many shades of red and wiggle so much while seated as she pointed it out to him. :w00t:

  • remember that rpc virus a few years ago? it had that 60 second countown then would shut down the pc. one night the network guys worked all night to manually patch every pc. took me about 5 minutes to make an imitation that looked exactly the same...countdown and everything...except it just kept counting, no reboot, and put it in the startup directory. they really freaked when they saw it. alas the joke was on me as they took me out of the admins group for a few hours when they figured out what i'd done...

    email is always good fun if u have some real green programmers/net admins around. we had two buildings about a mile apart and i'd occasionally send an email that looked like it came from the receptionist of the other building, telling someone they had a package waiting.

  • Variation on the theme: In school, a goup of us turned the entire classroom one hundren eighty degrees. The blackboard, the desks, the furniture, the art on the walls, everything!!! The prof kept it loike that for 2 weeks but had to chnage it when the failities manger complained.

    Anothe one was when I worked a govenrment contractor, another group of us physically moved everything from one person's cube and exchanged it with another. The one part that made it all fun was that we connected the machines they each worked on to the monitor on the others desk. Then mapped the phones to only be able to call each other. The people affected were not so impressed. The rest of us were dying.

  • Back in early 2001 I worked at this place where the new boss's middle initial was a "W". He seemed real proud of it. So did his aides. So I went around all the keyboards and removed all the W keys and stuck them to the top of doors. Sometimes I'd just make the spring under the W go bad, so they couldn't type in the boss's name. Hilarious!

    Random Technical Stuff[/url]

  • Katie Walker (10/31/2007)


    ... I've also had fun Remotely logging in to someone's computer and watching them type and then start typing more. Then they come running to me and swear that a ghost is taking over. Or making dragging their mouse to different parts of the screen. It is also fun to move files around as they sit there unable to figure out what has happened.

    Had dinner with a friend last week. He installs Unix boxes plus his company's software and made an interesting discovery recently. Their standard root password is an alpha sequence plus their phone number. My friend is at a client's site and for whatever reason, isn't certain if the phone number is the main voice line or the fax line, so he types in the fax number and he's logged in to the system.

    He later realizes that it was supposed to be the voice number, but it shares the same prefix as the fax number. So he decides to do some experimenting and determines that the system takes the first ten digits and ignores the rest.

    He swears that the next time he's at a client site he's going to type in the correct part of the password and then just pound on the keyboard.

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    [font="Arial"]Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves or we know where we can find information upon it. --Samuel Johnson[/font]

  • Please tell me it isn't a friend at a government agency or other place where security should be taken a bit more seriously.

  • Nope, not an industry that should have a seriously high level of security. Personally I think that root password should be longer than 10 characters, but it would be amusing to do a hidden camera and see people's reactions (and to see if they try the same thing later!)

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    [font="Arial"]Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves or we know where we can find information upon it. --Samuel Johnson[/font]

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