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Why my dad called tech support

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  • Why my dad called tech support

    Here's a story from the annals of my sordid youth that might amuse everyone:

    This particular story takes place back in the dark ages, when computers booted into DOS, and then you accessed Windows from there. At the time, I was just getting interested in the inner workings of computers, largely because I had a boyfriend at the time who was a pretty big geek. He taught me a trick wherein he could change his C: prompt to whatever he wanted it to say. I think he had it say something like "How can I serve you, Master?"

    Anyway, this newfound skill of mine gave me an idea. One day, when my father was off doing something else, I snuck over to his laptop, fired it up, and changed his command prompt to read: "DRIVE C: FATAL ERROR. REFORMAT DRIVE C:? (Y/N)" or something of that sort. The idea was that he'd turn on his computer, have a really big scare, call me in to fix it, and I'd reveal the prank and we'd both have a good laugh, and he'd be impressed with my computer genius.

    Unfortunately, that's not how it turned out. Instead, my father decided that this problem was too ugly to entrust to his daughter, and so, without alerting me, he called tech support.

    Apparantly, it took a long time before she figured out what I'd done. Fortunately, my dad's not an SC, so everyone had a pretty good laugh. (Knowing my dad, he probably flirted with her, though.) Afterwards, he tracked me down and pranked me back, by pretending that he'd called tech support and they'd really made him reformat his C: drive. I about had a heart attack until he started laughing at the look on my face.

    He told me that the lady he'd talked to told him she'd never seen that particular trick before.

  • #2
    One of the more amusing ones I was taught was how to hex edit the cursor for the mouse to make the hot spot (where it clicks the UI) move to the bottom right of the icon from where the arrow's point is.

    Much amusement was expended when a chum wondered what the hades we'd done to his machine. "Have you moved my icons but left them in the same place?" he pleaded at one point.

    Rapscallion

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    • #3
      Raps: Something like that apparently happened to our magazine delivery lady and her little barcodescanner/pda/weirdness thing. Except it was the touch screen, and it just got misaligned at some point. So she'd hit it with the stylus, and the touch would register a little bit off to the right or something. Apparently took her a while to figure it out, as I heard about how the things was slow or broken for weeks. ^^;

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      • #4
        My favorite prank to play is to take a snapshot of the whole desktop (hide the cursor in the lower right corner first) and then set that as the wallpaper. Then use Windows "Hide Icons" feature and watch hilarity ensue as the user tries to click on the "icons" that are really just part of the wallpaper.

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        • #5
          Quoth iridios View Post
          My favorite prank to play is to take a snapshot of the whole desktop (hide the cursor in the lower right corner first) and then set that as the wallpaper. Then use Windows "Hide Icons" feature and watch hilarity ensue as the user tries to click on the "icons" that are really just part of the wallpaper.
          I have done that to so many people! *Grin* another favourite is to change their mouse to left handed, with UBER SLOW double click speed while doing the desktop icon thing. Much steam is blown out of ears...
          The report button - not just for decoration

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          • #6
            I love April Fool's day around here. Without fail, I will get one or two coworkers. Last year, it was my boss. A simple thing, really... I put a piece of cellophane tape over the eye of his mouse. As he'd been having issues with USB drivers, he spent half the day using the laptop touch pad.

            Of course, as sysadmin I also get to use the admin rights to all computers in the domain. So, I always have fun with the programs from RJL and put one in the desktop support guy's startup folder. We had one guy who was a little too set in his ways and when I did that to him, using the one that alters your display to appear as a bad cable or poor video card or etc, he went through a dozen different troubleshooting methods before I had the heart to turn it off for him. He never understood that it was a piece of software causing it. I'm so glad that I don't have to work with him any more. He was dense.

            BTW, to do the command line prompt, put the following in the autoexec.bat file:
            set prompt="DRIVE C: FATAL ERROR. REFORMAT DRIVE C:? (Y/N)"
            Last edited by Kilamon; 01-16-2007, 07:21 PM.
            Bears are bad. If an animal is going to be mean it should look so, like sharks and alligators. - Mark Healey

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            • #7
              hilarious! i wrote a batch file that killed the explorer proccess and put in a lot of start files once, seems everyone had problems with not finding the start menu that day

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              • #8
                Ahhh...I so love the desktop snapshot trick, cuz it works so well.

                We had this obnoxious IT guy at this warehouse I worked at, so what I did was find a desktop snapshot of a LINUX desktop, then hid the icons and taskbar, then walked away. Poor guy about had a heart attack when he saw it, and was asking why I had done this to company equipment.

                The look on his face when I replied "What...add wallpaper?" was priceless.
                Who is this rectal-cranial inverted twit....and where is my sledgehammer??

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                • #9
                  Quoth iradney View Post
                  I have done that to so many people! *Grin* another favourite is to change their mouse to left handed, with UBER SLOW double click speed while doing the desktop icon thing. Much steam is blown out of ears...
                  Unless of course, the "victim" is ambidextuous and can use a mouse with either hand.

                  Then it's just a wasted effort.
                  Human Resources - the adult version of "I'm telling Mom." - Agent Anthony "Tony" DiNozzo (NCIS)

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