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Eight April Fool's Computer Pranks IT Channel Partners Hate
By Ericka Chickowski on 2010-03-31



There's nothing like April Fool's hi-jinx to highlight the disparity of computer experience between users within any given organization. The strong prey on the weak in this yearly ritual of mysterious computer ailments. While hilarity inevitably ensues, so too does a call to the partner's helpdesk when the prank goes too far and the less knowledgeable worker thinks their machine is ready for the garbage heap. Which is why so very many IT people have grown to hate the first day in April.
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Disappearing Desktop

Prankster replaces the mark's desktop image with a screencap of said desktop, while removing all desktop icons. After repeatedly clicking on the screencap icons to no avail, the mark is convinced his computer is hosed.

Mouse Mayhem

Prankster surreptitiously plugs a wireless mouse receiver into the back of the mark's machine. The mark wonders why the heck her pointer keeps moving with a life of its own.

Bluescreen BS

Thank Microsoft for this one. Prankster downloads a special bluescreen of death screensaver. Mark believes his computer bit it.
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb897558.aspx

Keyboard Khaos

By going Regional and Language Options within Windows and choosing to remap a keyboard layout, a wily prankster can easily make it very hard for the mark to type up his office memos.

Outlook Rules Rage

Endless pranks are born out of the prankster's monkeying with Outlook rules to automatically send messages to special folders, play weird noises, forward inappropriate messages and so on.

Waiting Worries

When pranksters know how to change the mouse settings to permanently replace a pointer with an hourglass, many a mark will believe their system is stuck 'thinking' about an imaginary process.

Spooky Speakers

Why is the mark's speaker randomly playing high-pitched screeches, ghost noises and inappropriate moans? Because the prankster plugged them into her computer, of course.

AutoCorrect Confusion

Similarly, the prankster's playing with Word's AutoCorrect feature to replace, say the word 'the' with 'boss is an idiot' will convince less experienced marks that their word processor is busted.

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