Nostalgia for April Fools

Yeah, it's April Fools day, but I haven't played any pranks today. Well, that's not exactly true. I played a few minor tricks, such as:

* I disconnected the battery of my wife's car
* I hid all of my children's shoes
* I poured half a cup of salt into the milk jug

But these are really just halfhearted attempts at April Foolery. What I've always loved to do are April Fools jokes with computers. Not anymore, of course. Nosirree. I'm just taking a walk down memory lane of April Fools jokes I've played on computers back in the day.

So today, instead of actually performing any pranks on other people's computers, I'm restricting myself to reminiscing about pranks I've played in the past.

Autoexec.bat

Remember the autoexec.bat file? Those of you who do are probably reading this with bifocals, but you remember that you could put in any application or utility, including simple looping and branching commands. When the computer started, it would execute that batch file before it did anything else.

It was a prankster's playground.

I used to tweak coworkers' autoexec.bat files so they would simply loop the same phrase, forever. Or make them answer three questions before they could go on (What is your name? What is your quest? What is the air-speed velocity of an unladen swallow?). Or I would have it play a primitive audio (PCs haven't always been the best at playing sound; for a long time, it was quite a trick to make them do more than beep) telling my victim to bow down before my awesomeness.

Good times.

Keyboard Hijinx

Long before anyone coined the term "spyware," I created a nice little macro inside WordPerfect (yes, it was that long ago) that monitored keystrokes. It did just a few simple things:

• Whenever the user typed "th" the computer would instead type "ht." But only one-third of the time. Since this is a mistake people make anyway, it simply caused people to think they were becoming worse typists.
• Every couple hundred keystrokes, the computer would hold the next ten keystrokes in a buffer for three seconds, then spit them out all at once.
• Every once in a while, it inserted an exclamation point (!) instead of the period. Just, you know, to add a little excitement to the document.

It wasn't until much later that I heard that one coworker, incredibly frustrated by the strange behavior exhibited by his computer, had reformatted his hard drive. Frankly, I didn't know whether to feel ashamed or incredibly proud.

Ping Pong

This one was fun, because for certain people it practically mimics real life. I set up an Outlook rule in Peter's computer so that whenever he gets an email from Paul, he sends an autoreply of "That's an outstanding idea!"

Then I set up an Outlook rule in Paul's computer so that whenever he gets an email from Peter, he sends an autoreply of "I totally agree!"

And then I'd sit back and watch them fill each other's inboxes with profuse (albeit unintentional and increasingly redundant) praise.

The Startup Folder

To be honest, this one is almost too easy. I mean, can dragging and dropping icons into a folder really be considered a technical prank?

And yet, dragging every application the coworker had on his computer into his startup folder, so that when he started his computer in the morning it launched application after application after application, creating a startup time of...oh, I don't know, maybe 45 minutes, has its draw.

Oh, I miss the days when people didn't lock their computers.

Now, though, with everybody in the world all in a twist about the problems that viruses, malware, Microsoft Vista, and spyware cause every day, a good ol' April Fools prank is likely to not even go noticed. (And if it is noticed, it's not likely to be appreciated.)

Man, I miss the good ol' days, when I could play April Fools jokes on my coworkers' computers.

And I'm sure, of course, they feel the same way about me.

Editor's Note: Elden Nelson is an old friend and (as you can see) prankster extraordinaire. We thought you would enjoy something out of the ordinary from the Juice this April Fool's Day.