What's the cruellest thing you've ever done to a non-technical person as a prank?

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Had a discussion online earlier regarding tricks or p***-takes on non-technical people at work ('pranks on planks' if you will. Oh yes - I like that)

My top three

3 - Telling someone that the reason their network connection kept dropping was that the cable tray under their desk was interfering with the Cat-5 cable because it was made from some special reinforced titanium which 'played havoc with the signal to noise ratio' of the cable. I compounded this by telling them that - believe it or not - ALL network cables were made with UNSHIELDED twisted pair - which made this a common problem in modern offices. They spent 20 minutes arguing with first line support about it - who eventually came out and replaced the broken RJ-45 on the dude's LAN cable.

2 - Putting a note round the office one evening before going home telling everyone to change their screensavers to plain black because the one they were currently using (a horrible corporate one someone had pimped out three years before) was 'too white' - and, therefore, contributed to global warming. In our efforts to 'go green' I was encouraging people to switch to a more 'eco-friendly' screensaver - plain black was far less damaging to the environment than plain white. I took a count the next lunchtime - four people had done it out of an office of fifteen...

1 - My personal fave (and one I need to tip my hat to Dilbert for) - I had just started a contract where there was a particularly obnoxious arsehole of a graphic designer who (as graphic designers often do) spent 50% of his time moaning that he couldn't use a Mac, and the other 50% moaning that his PC was too slow. When the support guys had received about their tenth call in a month from this numbnuts saying that his 'PC was running slowly' I told them to leave it to me. I toddled off to his desk and took the side of his case off and muttered something about the 'processor stepping being wrong' and 'budget cuts meaning I couldn't afford to upgrade him', then suggested a quick fix for him - involving placing two large technical manuals underneath the back of his PC 'so that the electricity ran through the processor faster'. Laughably, it worked - all the support calls from him stopped! Actually, that may have been more down to the scan I ran later that evening which detected a torrent client, about 40 gb worth of music he'd downloaded and Christ knows what else - whereupon I took a screenshot of the offending files, overlaid it on a screendump of our AUP (with the part about non-compliance being grounds for dismissal highlighted with a red circle) and set it via GPO as his desktop wallpaper... but those books were still there under his PC when i left a year later.

 

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A nice old simple one for me that works on both Technical and non technical users - Take a screenshot of their desktop and apply it as a wallpaper, then remove all of their actual icons from said desktop! hehe!

 

Sold someone my 486DX-2 66Mhz back in 96 to someone for £500 then told them that I could provide them with a pentium overdrive thingaby jig that would give them blistering performance for an extra £70 I gave them the over drive and it gave them a whopping 12MHz extra twisted: I used to be EVIL

JUst add I got conned buying the overdrive anyway as it was supposed to give me upto 80 odd MHz but it bloody didn't

 

we did this to a hardware tech support guy and it took him ages to work it out!!.

The best one we did was rotate the display of an O2 server support tech's pc. He had no clue of how to rotate it back, so he just put the monitor upside down!!

Funnily enough I am not with O2!!

 

We often play move the keys on the keyboard.

An oldie but a goldie

 

we did that to a guy on his last day (tech guy though). rearranged the keys to spell w*nker where the ASDF keys are

 

After watching War Games when I was about 15 I spent the afternoon producing an absolutely awful Barclays Bank logon screen on my ZX Spectrum.

I then managed to convince my Grandfather, who had watched the film with me, that I had been inspired and had managed to crack the password for the bank.

Poor bloke almost had a seizure, pulled the mains lead out of the wall and went to tell my mum.

Never mind the fact that the Internet hadn't been invented and we didn't have a modem or anything like that. I think he just assumed that we were communicating over the national grid...

 

We play pranks on Tech leavers, but dont really do it to the Computer User Non Technical's (Think about the acronym for that for a second...)

 

Lol, brilliant.

I've done the usual, keyboard keys, rotating display ect.

One of my personal favourites for a while was to rename word and excel, swapping them around. Watching a user thinking he opened to wrong one, about 5 times, just cracks me up. They never seem to realise the icons havent changed.