In high school, we had a Netware 3.12 environment, and the Guest account was enabled, albeit with very limited privileges. But for some reason, Guest could still use NET SEND, which popped up a little message in the bottom row of the destination machine's display.

The whole district shared a T1 connection to the internet. Which was more than plenty for email, but as this world-wide-web thing started gaining traction, it became quite the bottleneck. And as some of us had discovered mp3 files, the slowness simply would not do.

One day there was some severe weather and a power hiccup during school hours, and every station got a message from ADMIN informing us that the server room was running on UPS power and we should save our files and log out immediately.

Hmmmm.

A few weeks later, one of the bright sparks in the technology program realized that having everyone log off would free up some bandwidth. So he logged onto the next machine over as GUEST, and used a NET SEND ALL "SERVER ROOM POWER FAILURE - 11 MIN OF BATTERY REMAIN - SAVE FILES AND LOG OFF" and sure enough, within about a minute, the whole T1 was his. Did what he needed to do (i.e. leeching an entire fserv) for about 8 minutes, then NET SEND ALL "POWER RESTORED - RESUME YOUR WORK".

A few weeks later some hot commodity had just dropped and he repeated the drill. It still worked.

Nobody noticed that these messages came from GUEST, even the district administrator, who eventually called an electrical contractor to figure out why the power in the server room was so flaky. Someone eventually pointed it out to him, which got a very red-faced "that's really clever but please knock it off", and no further punishment. The next day, the Guest account had a lot fewer privileges.

I think the real value in this writeup up of a clever little prank is the way the author/prankster could map out the social reactions and how the spirit in which the prank was received cascades through a whole entire organization in ways that hinge on little cues, little things about who knows who and whether you're physically present before a particular impression crystallizes in people's minds.

It's just such a great example of how people could react either with uproarious laughter or by feeling that some boundary has been violated and can think that either reaction was the most self-evidently obvious one in the world and the reasons for it were entirely contingent. It's something where you can only really witness the irrationality of it if you're in the author's position.

I once heard it speculated that philosophy might have emerged in Greece because the circumstances of being merchants engaging in interstate trade, you could see the way that certain things regarded as received knowledge were really customs, peculiar to certain cultures and locations. When you're the prankster and you can see different people reacting in different ways that seem to be tied to patterns of the circumstances of how they experienced it, you can kind of witness the contingency of those reactions playing out in real time.

At my very first real job, back in 1997-98, I worked in tech support for an insurance company. We used Lotus Notes for email (initially just internally, with no Internet email). I had programmer access to Notes because I built some forms for user requests (Notes was more than email, it also had forms, a whole programming language, workflows, etc.).

Some Fridays (once a month?) were casual dress days where you could wear jeans instead of slacks (this was the distant past, when most professional workplaces still had real dress codes). This was an IT/Eng-wide thing, so we'd get an email reminder about this from an admin person in the department.

One time, I thought it would be funny to send my own email announcing pants-less Friday. So I took a copy of the email this admin sent and adjusted it accordingly. I did of course specify that you still had to wear underwear. I'm not a monster. Because I had programmer privileges in Notes, I was able to forge the sender so that it appeared to come from the department admin person, not me.

I _meant_ to send it to the small email group for just the other tech support folks (around 15 people or so). But I accidentally (?) sent it to all of IT/Eng, around 200-300 people, IIRC. Oops.

Needless to say, my boss's phone started ringing off the hook. I immediately went over to tell him what I'd done. He wasn't pleased, but I didn't get fired. I did have to write an apology email.

Of course, many folks in the department later told me it was the funniest thing they'd ever seen happen.

Soon after, I moved to programming at a different company. I think this was a good thing for many reasons, but one reason is that it was more challenging, so I wasn't bored with time on my hands to do stupid things like send prank emails to my coworkers.

This was the most hilarious part to me:

  That went wrong also, because my retraction said that campus administration was not considering charging per-page fees when in fact they actually were, so I had to retract it and send a new retraction that didn't call attention to that fact

In high-school I replaced all the printers ready message to “Insert Coin”. I didn’t not check the parameters of the script and because of their network configuration, deployed to the whole district. Surprisingly this wasn’t the reason the banned me from the network.

So many pranks, I didn't bother waiting until April 1st to pull them.

Prank 1: In high school we wrote a fake DOS for our Apple II+. It accepted commands and ran them, but occasionally would reply with a snarky message. Our teacher was not amused.

Prank 2: This was the late 1970s/early 1980s when laser printers cost many thousands of dollars, and neither me nor my high school peers had ever seen one. I found some CGI images in a computer magazine and Xeroxed them onto pin-feed paper for dot-matrix printers. I showed them to my friends and convinced them that I owned a laser printer. The pin-fed holes just added to the authenticity, since they had no idea how a real laser printer worked.

Prank 3: My parents changed checking accounts and had a whole book of unused checks. I told my father I wanted to do a prank and he agreed to write one of those checks for $600. I showed the check to one of my classmates at the beginning of the day and told him I was going to buy a computer after school, and he could come with me. When school ended and my classmate found me, I took out the check, declared I no longer wanted a computer, and ripped it up in his face. He was stunned.

Prank 4: The local library had an Atari 400 with a coin-operated TV screen ($0.25 for 15 minutes). Without the use of the screen, I wrote a simple BASIC program to emit a beep randomly every few minutes, started it running, and walked out the door.

I think the joke would have been funnier without the accompanying email. The fear I guess is people trying to jam change into the printers.

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Best one I've ever heard was from my friend Bill March. (His real last name, not his real first.) He was relatively new to the company, came into the office on April 1, which also happened to be payday, and was handed a check addressed to Bill April.

The funny part is that it wasn't actually an April Fools joke.

I pranked someone (probably not on April Fools) at an office job I had in High School decades ago. I had a summer job digitizing documents.

I discovered that I could access the Startup folder on other employee's machines on the network via Windows Explorer. I put a script in one of my very rule-following co-worker's folder that was something like: dir dir dir dir (x100) echo All files have been deleted.

I watched them from around the corner when they booted up, saw the flood of file names flash across the screen, and flipped out when they read the message at the bottom. They reached for phone immediately to call the IT admin and I rushed out from around the corner explaining the joke. Never got in trouble. Good times.

Thought I'd drop my prank as well. In highschool early 2011-2013ish QR codes were just becoming a thing. We had a mild vendetta against the year book committee due to the pricing of the yearbooks and their cliquey group.

We copied their "Reserve a year book early poster and save". Then used photoshop to edit it to say "50% off your year books with this QR code". The QR code then linked to a gorilla eating a taco (google this its pretty funny), adding to confusion. The year book committee had a FREAK out and sent out a mass email that the QR code was fake and not to follow it and you COULD NOT GET 50% off a year book no matter what link you followed. Needless to say sparked more interest in said QR code and soon the whole school had loaded a gif of a gorilla eating a taco.

This reminds me of a prank that almost got me fired from a federal government contract. Our team was working on a modern web UI replacement for a legacy green screen system written in back in the 80s. One day I was messing with the CSS and created a style that made the interface look EXACTLY like the green screen system it replaced, which was activated by a hidden button on the screen. It was a joke I shared with a few of my trusted developer friends who thought it was hilarious. I never meant for it to get pushed to PROD, but that’s exactly what happened. One of the end-user testers stumbled on it (I guess the button was as hidden as I thought) and was confused as to why this new feature was present. I probably could have passed it off as a testing or comparison feature if I hadn’t ALSO displayed a silly and somewhat sarcastic pop-up message when that mode was activated. For the first tine in my professional career I was actually written up and I had to submit a written apology to the client. The client nearly had me removed from the contract, but I happened to be a very important key engineer at the time so they gave me a second chance. I was also placed on a PIP for a while and I never quite lived that incident down. I’m no longer with that company but I’m sure the incident is still in their HR files!

The funniest part was that he also got in trouble for, in his retraction, saying the admins weren’t considering per page fees when in fact they were.

Some people get fired for making their bosses look bad. He screwed up by making them look good.

I worked at a biotech startup about 20 years ago.

- Two of the VPs at the company were named Jim Collinsworth and Peter Sachs (not their real names).

- For reasons I can't remember, I was able to send emails through the company's Windows email server under any name that I wanted.

- So, I merged the two VP names and I sent an email blast to the entire company from "Peter Collinsworth" (just swapping first and last names).

- "Peter" Collinsworth's email said something to the effect of "In honor of the 765th anniversary of the establishment of the Exchequer and the signing of the Magna Carta, <biotech-startup-x> is declaring April as 'English Unit' Celebration Month. All laboratory generated results will be reported using the following units: Instead of mg/kg/day, we will use pounds/stone/fortnight ...." etc. etc. etc.

- Well, Jim Collinsworth (real VP) saw the email and even he thought that the email had been sent under his own name.

- So, Jim fired off an email blast saying, "I did NOT send this. I don't know what this is about."

- Everyone soon realized it was an April Fool's joke.

- Jim eventually made his way to my office to say ... "That was really funny. Don't EVER do it again."

A year ago on March 31st, was my ex's birthday - she told me she loved me. Today, I just don't know if that was the most elaborate prank I ever fell for.

Kudos to this guy, at least his prank email was kinda funny.

Early 90's, 386/16's in the computer lab in high school. I wasn't taking any of the classes but had access to the computers at lunch. I was teaching myself Borland Turbo C++ at home. Guess what these computers had installed?

Growing bored with playing Gorilla.bas, I wrote a program that let out a several second long, <100hz tone, a "Fart" if you will, and then printed "oh, sorry, I couldn't contain myself!".

I backed up autoexec.bat as autoexec.old, wrote a new autoexec that ran my program, deleted it, and then restored the original autoexec.bat to cover its tracks.

We weren't present when it did its thing, but the next day I was informed that if it happened again, I'd lose access, and that was it. No "hacking" accusations or anything.

Goes to show that jokes are 50% about the material and 50% about the audience.

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I became a lot engaged more in class after realising I could remotely shutdown the teacher's computer with a custom message.

In middle school our entire school network was running some strange windows server p2p setup. What this means is that any computer could issue commands across the network to other computers, purely by knowing the name of the port. Luckily, every ethernet "outlet" had a label stating the port's name. This made it stupidly simple to issue a `shutdown \M <PORT>` in the middle of class.

I did something similar a long while ago, albeit less inspired: https://www.flickr.com/photos/ruicarmo/10493954496/in/album-...

(there's a photo of a Nokia "running" Linux in that album - https://www.flickr.com/photos/ruicarmo/16931940010/in/album-... - I got a lot of mileage out of that animated GIF)

Ah, the ol' change-printer-ready-message-to-insert-coin prank.

I did this in the early 10s on a fleet of hateful HP MFPs at my first job.

I think it's the only way that people who get the "printer guy" label can stay sane in the office.

At my old uni there were a couple public terminals running DOS, most of the time sitting idle at the prompt. It was bespoke kiosk cabinets only exposing keyboard and screen. One April Fool's I had the bright idea to change PROMPT to something along the lines of "This terminal out of service." - and to increase the confusion, also to change PATH to a non-existent directory, so that most commands wouldn't work and instead flash "Bad command or file name.".

For a couple minutes observed people coming up to a terminal, trying a few things, and stepping away in frustration.

I sure hope administration did restart the terminals overnight to return regular function; normal users were unable to access the power & reset controls.

I guess I'll contribute my best prank.

In the late '00s I was working at a small ed tech company that had recently moved into a nice new HQ with a large kitchen. They got this pretty fancy popcorn maker and the IT team put it together (I was a dev, so I was not on this team). People kept burning the popcorn, so it became the office/facilities manager, Tim's duty to make the popcorn (which he was not exactly happy about).

I was in the IT closet looking for some cables and noticed a bunch of spare networking equipment laying around. So I grabbed an old four-port switch, an external wifi antenna, and some cables, then I stayed late one night and "installed" them on the popcorn machine in a manner that was surprisingly convincing. IoT Popcorn machine before IoT was a thing.

I also wrote up a script that would connect to our Outlook server, and send an email to Tim, "FROM: TECH-POP <techpop-machine@companyname>" with "SUBJECT: TECH-POP IS READY TO BE REFILLED" and some techy-sounding status updates in the body of the email. I even kept track of the number of popcorn bags remaining in the cabinet.

Once every few hours, I'd run the script, and Tim would dutifully get up and make some popcorn. After about a day, I ran the script and heard loud, "GOD FUCKING DAMNIT", and the slamming of a chair. Tim went over and ripped all of the networking stuff off of the popcorn machine and threw it in the trash. He then paid a visit to the IT manager to clarify who it was that thought it was his job to "refill the fucking popcorn". The IT manager, with a completely straight face, gets up and I see them walking my direction.

They get to my desk, and the guy is coming down from being piss-pissed. His face is all red and eyes are watering. The IT manager tells him, "it was this fool's idea." They laugh and say it was a funny prank and Tim playfully grabs my collar and shakes me a little.

After that, I get a message from the IT manager to avoid pranking Tim in the future.

The most I've done, is sneak a mouse dongle into a neighbor/cube's computer... throughout the day I'd just move the mouse in one direction, frustrating the user across the partition.

I thought the joke was things were running on HP-UX (said the guy that had to use campus services running on HP-UX in the 90s).

Let the 90's Unix flame wars begin!

I always thought a fun but fireable April Fools joke would be to sprinkle the words "probably" and "likely" to key parts in technical documentations.

>That went wrong also, because my retraction said that campus administration was not considering charging per-page fees when in fact they actually were, so I had to retract it and send a new retraction that didn't call attention to that fact.

oof

I learned of these in-band commands at Stanford and created a very short print file to be able to change the status message of any printer on campus. I couldn't push it centrally but I just queued the file into the global print queue and was able to change any printer by walking to it and asking for my print. To not be too disruptive and given the character limits I only ever put in something like "READY FOR CAL" in reference to the Bay area school rivalry. I don't think anyone was ever annoyed by it, or maybe even noticed it beyond the few people I showed it to, but hopefully the statute of limitations has also passed.

Informix is the april fools joke.

Does anyone remember the Informix / Oracle wars? What a time to be alive that was.

sl is installed in /usr/games so that can be a check. Otherwise, I think this is quite reliable:

    $ grep -q --binary-files=text ACCIDENT `which sl`
    $ echo $?
    0

This reminds me of the time I just learned how to write .bat scripts for Windows, when I was a teenager.

The power of being able to send this file via msn to a friend, convince them to open it, and then get a full message in capitals of "YOU HACKED ME! MY COMPUTER IS BROKEN!" Before watching them go offline (the script shut down their computer after 30 seconds) was a real heart racer. I am sure it contributed to my interest in computers in the following years.

This was a lot of fun to read and really tells the story well. I am thoroughly amused. Thanks for sharing this!

> Fortuitously I had learned Perl in, appropriately enough, a computational linguistics course

This sentence increases the likelihood that I have crossed paths with the author by something like a factor of a million, as I estimate that the number of people who have ever taken that class is certainly lower than 100k and quite likely lower than 10k.

> By 8:30am it was chaos in the main office and this filtered up to the head of HR, who most definitely did know me, and told me I'd better send a retraction before the CFO got in or I was in big trouble. That went wrong also, because my retraction said that campus administration was not considering charging per-page fees when in fact they actually were, so I had to retract it and send a new retraction that didn't call attention to that fact.

I wonder if the joke would have gone over better with the higher ups if it didn't coincide with their plans to implement an actual pay-to-print system. I'm sure they were none too happy about having attention drawn to an unpopular change they were already planning.

somewhat unrelated to the topic, but I really liked this part of one of the sentences: “did not not only did not”. it does make sense in the sentence btw.

Very tame in the scheme of things, but my go to prank was on a Windows machine, take a screenshot of the desktop with all of its icons, and then disable the icons. Doing it in a whole computer lab caught far more people double clicking in confusion than I expected.

As they say, "With great power comes great responsibility." Or in this case, with great printer access comes great pranking potential!

The funniest part

"...and told me I'd better send a retraction before the CFO got in or I was in big trouble. That went wrong also, because my retraction said that campus administration was not considering charging per-page fees when in fact they actually were"

The email was a bit much, just altering the ready message should have been sufficient.

I think the email is what shifted it from being a funny joke to being super obnoxious to a lot of people. If it had just been the message on the printer, a lot of people wouldn't have noticed it and a lot of people that did would have had a quiet chuckle about it at worst.

The email is what turned it from being a speed bump to a major impediment to people, at least mentally.

Waaay back in the mists of time, when behemoths roamed the plains and cell phones smaller than bricks had yet to be invented, I was an undergraduate student in Physics at Imperial College, London.

The physics teaching lab had a large number of BBC Micro computers, these were the precursor to the ARM RiscOS ones made by Acorn, and physics departments loved them because (a) they were full of ports that could be attached to experiments for data-gathering, and (b) they were easy to use and had a (for the time) fairly high-res screen for displaying results. One of those ports was the "econet" port, which linked all the computers together to a fileserver with (gasp) a hard disk on it, giving a primitive (by today's standards) networking ability.

So we were all given YR1.<letter><letter> usernames, and the letters more or less corresponded with our initials. I figured out that they'd actually just made all combinations of YR1.AA to YR1.ZZ, so I logged into a spare one for deniability using the supplied default password (it was a different age...), bought a copy of the "Advanced User Guide" and the "Econet user guide" and history was about to be made...

Myself and a couple of friends decided we'd write a networked virus - viruses weren't very common in those days, they mainly came on floppy disks for Amigas or Atari ST's and did something nasty to your computer. Networked computers were rare outside of government or big business, so the opportunity was there, and we took it :)

I probably ought to say that the virus didn't do anything destructive, it just appended "Copyright (c) The Virus, 1988" to the end of any directory listing (get a directory listing was one of the vectors).

[technical aside]

The BBC micro had two different "interrupt" type mechanisms ("events" and "interrupts"), and the OS was highly vectored (so on an interrupt or event, the 6502 would jump to the location provided by a table of 2-byte entries in RAM, with the event/interrupt being the index into that table).

Everything was vectored, "get a character", "write a byte to a device", "perform an OS call", ... And all the devices (floppy disk, network, ...) were implemented in a similar manner. It was a hackers dream of a computer, really.

[/aside]

What we also did was enable the virus from any event (key-press mainly) or interrupt (VBI, NMI,...), and the events enabled the interrupts, and the interrupts enabled the events. We also made it re-enable itself specifically when you typed "*." (which made the "get a directory listing on the current device" OS call) - this was sneaky, we thought, because if you'd somehow managed to disable the other code, you'd do a "*." to see if the virus was still there...

The virus wrote itself as !Boot in the root directory of the current media (and of course hid that entry from view, so you couldn't see it) which meant the next time you used that account, it would be activated on that machine.

Come April Fools day, we decided we were ready. We put the virus on one machine in the lab, one of the 10 machines that were in the "damn I need to get my lab-report written up" section that wasn't actually in the lab itself, but was still networked to your account.

We were sitting in the same section updating our own lab work, and heard the "WTF!" Students gathered round, the affected person logged out, went to a different machine (thinking there was a problem with the machine) and logged in there, infecting that second machine with the virus. Someone else logged into the first machine, and they were infected too... Since the !Boot file was on the account on the network server, turning the machine off/on and then logging in re-infected the machine...

It spread like wildfire.

We had built in a vulcan-death-grip-style "disable the virus" key combination, so we wouldn't be affected, and thought ourselves very clever. The idea was not to be affected, but soon after release it was necessary to ignore that because 3 accounts unaccountably (sorry!) uninfected would have stood out like a sore thumb.

A couple of days later, an all-students meeting was called. "Authority" was taking this very seriously, they shut down the network, turned off all the machines, and disinfected the network server by hand, removing the !Boot file from every account. They said something along the lines of "this was not funny, don't do it again or there'll be serious consequences". Everyone went back, and life went on.

About a week later, the virus again raced through the network, infecting every account in a matter of hours. We hadn't re-released it, and with some horror, realised what had happened - someone had done a "*." on their backup floppy disk, and then brought it back into the lab and booted from it, infecting the machine, and thereafter the network. The thing was too damn infectious for its own good.

If we thought "Authority" had no sense of humour last time, this time the meeting was very short, the message was "when we find who did this, we will expel them". Excrement and Fans were in close proximity. Hitting each other, one might say. We couldn't "own up", it was too late. We had no control over what people did with their floppy disks, and things had escalated way too far. We came up with a plan...

We wrote another virus. Hear me out. This one was silent, had a time-to-die (when it would delete itself) of about 2 months, and (virtually) "pressed" the key combination that deleted the old virus. We purposefully infected lots of machines with the new virus, waited, and prayed.

Things worked out fine. Everyone got infected with the new virus for a while, which destroyed the old one, without being aware of that fact, "Authority" thought they'd laid down the law and been taken seriously, and we managed to not get expelled.

And breathe

I have never written anything remotely like a virus ever since.

To me, the administration clearly screwed up. They were thinking about implementing something that was done as a prank. They could have just told everyone it was a prank and not to worry but instead, they reacted like the backlash was too bad and then told everyone we might be doing it anyway but not just now. This would have been an easy way for them to see the reaction and be thankful that they didn't do it and could just say it was a prank.

Subject: You're hired! Body: April Fools!

"....could have got me fired"

"....could have got me fired" not "...might have got me fired".

Hot take: workplace and social media April Fools jokes aren't funny and are often inappropriate and disrespectful to people's time.

It's cool to do these to your friends in High school, but I once wasted a good amount of time at work because of an April's fool joke. I already didn't want to do the work so I got really upset to have wasted time doing something boring and useless.

Additionally, the scale of social media can create situations where it wastes everybody's time several times per day... Including on HN.

Feel free to prank your friends, but don't bring it to work or the Internet, please.

TLDR: Just skip to the 7th paragraph where the story starts.

For reference, see the HN thread from a few days ago: "How to write blog posts that developers read": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43503872

Edit: A few section headers might help. For example, paragraphs 2-6 could be under "Background," then add a header "The Joke" before paragraph 7. "Aftermath" might be good towards the end, too.

---

BTW, taking a joke is an important life skill, too. The people who flipped out over a silly April Fool's email need to get a life.

Imgur was pretty good the negative points and comic sans

I won't read this as by rule I am against everything related to pranks, and especially today of all days. I will take this space however to say that we should really do away with this nonsense.