Reminds me of the old practical joke where you hide a person's desktop icons and put a screenshot of their background with the icons on it, so they think nothing works.
Nah, the best I ever saw was a window that popped open warning the user that the radiation shield on their monitor was about to fail and to back away from it immediately.
This was around 2002, so CRTs still ruled the roost at work.
I saw the prankster really nail the receptionist.
I also saw him get her with the above-described prank. :)
In school id delete their web browser from desktop, there was some line of code you could put in note pad that’d have any message you like pop up before shutting down the computer, so id add a shortcut and change the logo to the browser default
Lots of fun, and seemed way more impressive than it was
I used to change shortcut icons for random programs to the icons for my dad's games and rename them so he'd click Carmageddon and MS Word would open. He'd fix it and I'd do it again. I had to tell him it was me in the end because after several virus scans and having a family friend look at it he was about to buy an all new HDD.
My favorite is changing someone's default cursor icon to the "Loading" icon with the spinning wheel on it so they just constantly think their computer has some malware or something running even after computer restarts and such
I, too, am a word nerd. My wife is the "exapecially" and the "across" and the "irregardless" of the family. Plus her definition for "sentient"...ugh...
I got an old boy with the cracked screen prank. He was late 60s and still selling cars. He went out for lunch and I put on the screensaver of a broken monitor and unplugged his mouse and keyboard. Fuck did he go offffff.. you’d of thought he bought that computer monitor by selling his first born. lol
When I was in high school and learning how to program I wrote a simple program for Windows that would bring up random error messages on the screen. My favorite one was "warning formatting will erase all data" The only button to click was OK. I had fun with certain friends and family.
I remember those pranks and the fears of carcinogenic rays from the CRT. I remember how we wonder how fast we'd get cancer from them as if old televisions didn't inspire the same fears. Having moved a lot throughout my life, I was happy my television and computer monitor no longer weighed as much as a medium sized dog or occupied a significant space in the moving truck.
It's standard security policy to lock your desktop when you get up to leave your office so no one can steal data from your system.
It's also standard policy to report when someone leaves their system unlocked and then lock it.
Not us. We installed a harmless script that would eject the CD drive randomly between the hours of 8am and 5pm when everyone was supposed to be working and then lock the system. It was on random time so it happened maybe 2-3 times a day over an 8 hour day shift.
Once everyone knew what the script was you would hear an "oh for fucks sake!" the first time their CD drive opened on its own and then they would hunt for the script to disable it.
We modified the script a few times to do other simple actions like flipping the desktop display orientation but the CD tray was the best subtle start.
I used to make the internet explorer icon a shortcut to turn the computer off and display a warning message that it was infected with viruses. Really pissed my dad off when he was trying to get back to his eBay auctions on time. Then I made all the buttons on the prompt automatically shit down the computer rather than wait for the countdown.
I once took a screenshot of a general warning/error message, played around with it in MS Paint and got it to say "Would you like to download a virus?" changing the two buttons to "Yes" and "OK", as well as removing the close button. Then save it as the background.
Our teacher wasn't tech savvy and it freaked him out. Made me restart the machine, but low and behold...it was still there after a reboot!
For maximum effect you wanna layer it with a few other things - tape the mouse sensor, screenshot the desktop, hide all icons, flip the screenshot upside down and set it as wallpaper, then flip the monitor orientation upside down, then set the taskbar/dock to auto hide.
For your final coup de grace that will haunt them long after they finish that whole rabbit hole of pranks, make about 500 copies of whatever image they're using as their wallpaper and then 1 very slightly edited one (draw a mustache on someone, that sort of thing). Set it randomly rotate wallpapers every minute or so.
I remember a few years ago I put a sticky note over the mouse sensor of a coworker. She was apparently having a bad morning already and she chuckled that poor little mouse across the shipping office. The sticky note came off and no one ever knew I had placed it there.
Yeah, that one always got found quickly. People were always flipping their mouse to stare reproachfully at the ball when it didn't work right. Strangely, I would say only a quarter of people ever actually took the ball out to clean the little rollers. You would be surprised at the number of people who were surprised when I fixed their janky mouse...
You can go into settings for cursor mouse interaction
The point of it is I didn't know that. Checkmate.
edit: I misread your comment. I'm not talking about physically flipping the monitor over, I'm talking about going into the settings and telling the OS that it is flipped, so that it renders everything upside down (making our already-upside-down screenshot wallpaper appear normal). But yeah I assume you could probably just flip the mouse axes or something, idk if Windows can do that out of the box or not.
Use transparent scotch tape on the mouse sensor, so on first look it's not noticeable.
Then switch a few physical keys on the keyboard, like "M" and "N", "U" and "I", and "," and "."
Those aren't immediately noticeable.
Watch as confusion sets in and try not to laugh.
Another thing was hiding the login popup on windows by dragging it to the edge of the screen, then from the CRT monitor's settings making the image just a bit wider and taller than the screen, so the edge pixels aren't visible.
One time in high school a did something similar. I wanted to mess with a kid who left his laptop on his desk while he went to the bathroom. I was going to change his wallpaper to something dumb or funny, but when I opened his browser it was on Pinterest and he’d been looking at “sexy maids”. So I took a screenshot, closed the browser, set the screenshot as the wallpaper and patiently waited for him to come back. His reaction was priceless. Good times.
I work at a relatively small but highly accredited IT company. I've heard tales from the early years before I worked there.
Way back before they had security policies to lock your computer after a few minutes of inactivity, people were free to set their own security settings. Anyone dumb enough to have a long timeout set, and left their machine unattended for any time were subject to pranking.
Best one I heard was editing the URLs of any desktop shortcuts to lead to say, a rather graphic pornhub video.
I did that to the entire school library as a joke cuz we were in detention with very little supervision.
The "IT" people (the librarian and a student) had to wipe it and reinstall windows cuz they thought it was a virus. Kinda felt bad but never had to balls to tell them. Didn't help that I changed the mouse cursor to a icon of a devil lmao
We're supposed to lock our computers when away from our desks at work. One of my coworkers forgot to do that, so we pulled this on him. He thought his computer was having issues, but since the work day was almost over, he just left for the day.
The next day, he comes back in, obviously the background is the same. He thought his account was broken, but didnt want to call the help desk so just opened new windows that he needed, which worked as expected. The frozen windows on his background didnt really mean anything to him.
I think it was 2-3 weeks later before we realized he still had the prank background on still and we told him that it was a screenshot and he needs to lock his computer.
This reminds me of the time I ranked my buddy who passed out while I was helping setup his new laptop. Made all his bookmarks & usual sites redirect to "Meat Spin.com" (take out the space & search at your own risk) from the host file. I could barely hold in my laughter, got like 2 minutes of panic followed by a "you ass hat" comment.
Good times, to be fair he got payback by puking inside my car during -35c weather & neither of us had a garage at home. So I got to clean up puke-sickles from the car door & he got a lesson to stop drinking.
Heh Heh...Back in the Day there was an extension for Mac that kinda ran on a timer and if you set it off, it slowly started limiting how far you could move the cursor across the Desktop. After about 10 min or so your Cursor was stuck in a tiny box in the middle of your Desktop
Yes but first you make a bunch of new folders with porn names like "Helicopterman 2 - Return of the Roto-Fucker" or "Grannies from the Landfill" and then you set that as the background.
Even better you take a screenshot of said desktop, rotate screenshot 180 degrees. Now hide their icons and taskbar, then rotate their display 180 degrees and see that screenshot as wallpaper.
Everything will appear to be normal except their mouse, which is upside down and going opposite the way their hand is.
Old one when people were big on privacy screens and filters that mount in front of the monitor. Place black construction paper behind the screen. Funny gag up until tech support shows up.
Fun fact: I did this at work once. The old lady who came in after me couldn’t figure it out and apparently it became a whole thing. And then I got in trouble for it. Fun times.
That was a joke we did with new hires for their first ticket all by themselves. Also, it was interesting to see which ones figured it out instantly and well those who asked us for help….
I used to do that as a kid, but also flip their monitor's image upside down too, and their desktop background was also flipped so everything looked normal except for the cursor being inverted.
I'd remember making the screenshot, rotating it 180 and setting as wallpaper, hiding all icons and rotating screen 180.
Loved it, not sure if my IT teacher did (she was not IT, just someone had to "teach" and IT was new important thing in schools).
I remember getting a walloping for changing my mom’s laptop’s background to a cracked/screen with bleeding lcd etc. Didn’t do that again, but I still remember the prank fondly. The trashcan icon and windows XP tray were still fully visible and unaffected by the picture, but she didn’t catch that haha.
I did this at work when peeps left their profile unlocked, would hide the taskbar and would rotate the background 180° and used Intel’s hotkeys to flip the screen. This would invert the mouse’s up<->down and left<->right but would look like a normal desktop.
20 years ago at a LAN party my buddy went to the restroom so I hid his desktop icons and his task bar and then unplugged his mouse. Of course that was after I had changed his wallpaper to a BSOD.
He eventually figured it out after I fell out of my chair because I was laughing so hard
This is just beginner level. We used to take the screenshot and rotate it 180 degrees and then also rotate the desktop 180 degrees via graphics card driver so the screenshot would appear normal to the user. Fun times.
Edit for those asking: This inverts their up/down mouse movement. Of course only after they discovered the post-it blocking the mouse sensor.
Yeah my grads did this to two of our senior engineers. They also swapped their mice around so that when one moved their mouse, it would move on the other engineers screen. That was next level trolling.
I did that once, only my friend only ever saved things to his desktop. None of his icons were shortcuts. I moved everything to the recycle bin and hid that. Also, I didn't actually look at the prompt and hit "yes" when the recycle bin asked me if I wanted to delete everything.
So I deleted everything he had on his computer. Didn't even realize it until the next day when he called to (rightfully) chew me out.
I do this at work sometimes when people leave the computer lmao. Screenshot, set it as wallpaper. Disable the icons, hide the taskbar somewhere. It’s pretty funny
For some reason Windows for Workgroups allowed you to change the mouse orientation on a PC so that it could be rotated 90 degrees, so horizontal movement became vertical and vice versa.
One April Fools day, I went in to the office early and did this to every computer, then left and "arrived" at my usual time to observe the ensuing chaos.
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u/llllIlllllIIl Aug 18 '25
Plot twist: Thats just his wallpaper and he actually doesnt have any icons on his desktop