Try these on your friends and co-workers:
Telephone Call. It was a weekend, and also April Fool's Day, but I still had to pull some kind of prank, so I called my brother. After we talked for a while, I asked him what that mark was on his cheek. Silence. Then I said, "No, the other cheek." Silence. More silence. Then it hit him. Duh!
Insurance Test. Pass around a memo saying that the insurance company needs to test the emergency brakes in the elevators, and that each floor/department/whatever needs two volunteers (in order to fill the elevators to capacity -- adjust the numbers as needed) to man the elevators as they are released from the top floor. Sign up below. The Facilities Manager at the law firm I worked at got really pissed 'cause the building owner didn't notify him of this test.
Telephone Cleaning. This is a good one if you had a new telephone system installed recently. Send a memo around saying that you are going to clean the telephone lines by forcing compressed air through them. Offer special bags to put their phones in so the dust doesn't get all over their office. Note how many people who spent entirely too much time in college request the bags.
>DUMMY MODE ON<
[From the bastard Glossary:
DUMMY MODE, n. The mode in which a user, overcome by technical terms, will believe, and/or do, anything he or she is told.]
Parity Reset. We just moved our office, so this one was a natural. I explained that since we had moved from an odd numbered room to an even numbered room, all terminals had to be converted from odd parity to even parity. Since there were so many terminals, each user was requested to carry his/her terminal back to our office for the conversion, in order to save my back. Don't bother mentioning that no one uses parity any more. Or that their terminal can't tell what numbered room the server is in.
Network Traffic. So we have this network with Internet access and, of course, e-mail. So I send a memo around telling people that in order to better gauge the network resources used by e-mail, they have to count the number of characters in each e-mail and send me a count. By e-mail. Of course, they would then have to send another e-mail telling me a count of their message giving me their first e-mail count. Then they would have to send me another e-mail giving me the count..., well, you get the picture. Anyway, people wanted to know if there was a program to do this, if they could just multiply the number of lines by the width of their screen, etc. One chick even got seriously pissed 'cause she didn't have the time to do this. She calmed down a few days after someone told her it was a joke. Can anyone say "Lighten up!"?
Virus Scare. This one's a little lame, even for me. But I wanted to see how *really* stupid people can be, so I went with it. We had a virus on one of our computers that wiped out the hard drive. So I sent an e-mail to people saying that we could protect them with Norton Anti-Virus Spray. That's right, spray. In a can. Just a squirt in your floppy drive, and you're good to go. So who's gullible enough to think a can of compressed air with a Norton Anti-Virus logo taped to it will protect their computer? Well, let's just say that the combined years they spent in higher education approximate my age. Of course, their cumulative IQ is still a fraction.
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