Prank wisely

The Old-School Favorite: Move the Desktop Icons, Take a Screenshot, Set as the Wallpaper

Most geeks have done this at some point in their career, because it’s both simple and irritating, especially for somebody who isn’t expecting it. The basic principle works one of a couple of ways:

1. Take a screenshot of the desktop with the icons where they are, set it as the wallpaper, and then hide the desktop icons.
2. Move the desktop icons around, or create bogus icons, take a screenshot, and then set it as the wallpaper. This way some icons work, and some don’t.
3. Take the screenshot of the desktop, and then hide the taskbar below the bottom of the screen before setting the wallpaper (this only works on XP). Even better: flip the image upside down before doing it.

The result looks something like the image above, assuming you followed the second idea and created a folder on the desktop that they’d be sure to notice right away. They’ll keep clicking, but nothing will happen.

Bonus? Combine this with the shutdown shortcut so when they do figure it out and try and open the folder… it’ll give them the shutdown prank too!

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Geeky typos

Add Common Typos or Funny Words to MS Word’s Dictionary or AutoComplete

There’s any number of possibilities for this one, and the sky is really the limit—the idea is that you put something custom into the AutoCorrect so whatever they type gets replaced with something else.

You can go subtle with it, and just replace a properly typed word with a typo instead, or you can get in their face with something more fun—like making anytime they type their name end up replacing it with “<Name> is a jerk”. Loads of fun.

For Word 2007 or 2010, head to the Office button –> Options –> Proofing –> AutoCorrect Options. For previous versions… I have no idea. If you want this to be system-wide, you can use AutoHotkey instead.

Setup Task Scheduler Jobs to Launch Random Apps (or a Web Page)

Even a serious geek is going to be pretty lost on how to troubleshoot a new tab repeatedly opening to a certain page every couple of minutes, if you bury that inside the task scheduler. Just go in and create a new task, run through the wizard and pick the browser executable, plug the site name into the arguments box, and then set the schedule to repeat the task every 5 minutes.

Set the Mouse Pointer to Look Always Busy (to Make Their PC Look Like It’s Hanging)

Nice and simple, but oh so fun! Just head into Control Panel –> Mouse –> Pointers and change the Normal pointer to the busy one. They’ll think their computer is hanging all the time, but it’s really not. For extra fun, you could make the mouse pointers gigantic.

Activate High Contrast Mode (with a Single Hotkey!)

There’s a built-in accessibility option that can be very confusing to somebody who doesn’t know how to turn it off, and it requires only pressing one shortcut key sequence:

Shift + Alt + Printscreen

That’s it. Once you press that key combo, their desktop will get flipped to the high contrast mode—you can press it again to go back to normal. The great thing is that even if their computer is locked, you can enable high contrast with the icon on the lower left corner. On Mac OS X, you can press Ctrl+Opt+Cmd+8 to invert the screen’s colors.

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Twitter : @techietoad / @abcoftech

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