Engineer was so sick of office pranks, he 'wiped' his antagonist's disk
Monday mornings are no joke, so The Register always tries to lighten them up with a new installment of "Who, Me?" – our reader-contributed column that shares your stories of workplace japes, mistakes, and escapes.
This week, meet a reader we'll Regomize as "Joe" who told us that while studying for an electrical engineering degree in the late 1990s, he scored a gig in the messaging lab at an Australian mobile carrier.
"The office there was full of practical jokers," he wrote.
"Boxes of confetti balanced on a door, a bag of prawn heads left under the carpet in one of the senior engineer's cars, hand cream on the phone earpieces... all the usual stuff." Joe told us that one colleague, whom he suggested we call "TF," took the pranks a little too far.
"TF liked to sneak up behind me and ROAR in my ear to scare me in the hope I would jump," Joe wrote.
"As this was not an especially clever tactic, I resolved to make my revenge a legendary once-and-for-all-time affair." Joe couldn't find an opportunity until his last week in the job, which helpfully coincided with TF attending a conference.
"All the PCs had Borland C compilers installed," Joe explained.
"I used it to write a completely harmless program that looked exactly like MS-DOS formatting a disk." The program even wrote junk data to a temporary file so the PC's disk activity light would flash, making the fake formatting operation more convincing.
After a few minutes of blinkenlights faking the formatting, the program displayed a message revealing the prank.
Joe added the program to autoexec.bat so it would run whenever the PC booted, but set it to termintate immediately until a month after his departure.
"About five or six weeks later I got a phone call from one of the other guys," Joe recalled.
"You're a bloody genius, TF just about shat himself this morning." "Mission accomplished!" Joe declared.
By then, he was safely out of the job.
Have you pranked your way to revenge? Email Who, Me? and tell us how it went. ®
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