2023-03-31 Friday Humor (Happy Planning Day.....)

[Dale_Rosema]

Have a great weekend. I will be off the end of next week so there may not be a post next Friday.

Spend some time with family on Easter. "He is not here"!

Since tomorrow is April Fool's Day.

From the internet....

Back in the mid 80s, we started to get our first personal computers. Prior to then, everything was on the mainframe computer.

You may remember in the early days of PCs there were lots of add-ons, one of these was an 'anti glare' screen. Well my co-worked wanted one of these, it was the means to a great prank. I had figured how to print white characters on a totally black background, so I printed………..

C:>

If you are old enough, you recognize this prompt after the computer booted to DOS. I then placed the all black and white text printout BEHIND the anti-glare screen.

To make a long story short, it was close to an hour before the victim realized that his computer was actually on and responding, all he ever saw on the screen was C:>

We all had a great time playing along trying figure out what was wrong. We were tripped up when the co-worker turned the entire PC off and the image was still on the screen.

[BenLoosli]

My best trick on a co-worker was when we were on Vaxstations and I worked second shift and he was on first.

He forgot to log off one day. He also claimed to know a lot about VMS.

I went into his login.cmd file and entered LOGOUT as the first line, and saved the file.

Logged him off and did my work for the night.

Next morning he comes in, logins in and immediately gets logged off.

Took the IT system administrator over an hour to figure out what I had done.

Very simple solution.

When logging in, enter USERNAME /nolgicmd

The nolgicmd tells VMS to not run the login.cmd file when logging in.

When I got in to work that afternoon, I was called into the bosses office and told to not do that again. The lead CAD designer was in the in office and when we left, he said it was the best trick ever.

[kdirth]

My son, the software engineer, came up with this one that I used to great affect:

I bought a cheap wireless mouse and plugged the receiver into the back of a coworker's computer.  He got very frustrated as I stood behind him controlling the mouse; moving the curser around, minimizing windows, and opening programs.

Actually, he wanted me to tape it to the bottom of chair in the next cubicle.  This way the mouse would jump every time that person moved.

[StephenW]

I did something similar. Before pro/e was running on windows pc's, I took a screenshot of my pro/e session, put it on my 486 as a background. Told my boss i didn't need the expensive workstation anymore. He was impressed and tried to spin the model and see how responsive it was.  Took him a minute to figure out why it was not responsive at all. He had a good laugh and told me to get my lazy %^&^% back to work.

[FriedhelmK]

Ok, then I'll try to rehash old stories too 😉

We taped the earpiece of the colleague's phone shut with adhesive foil.
For two weeks, he constantly asked his conversation partners to speak louder before he noticed it.

Old mainframe monitor, green writing on a black background. At the colleague's we set the brightness and contrast to 0.
We were in eastern Belgium, the technician came from Brussels. The joy was great and of course no one had done it.

The thickness of an anodized layer is measured in microns and so the new employee was sent to get the micron gauge for a sample to be measured. He went to the department and asked for it as ordered.

They had a caliper of 6 meters to measure the length of the sawed profiles exactly. They gave it to him.

He was allowed to bring it back afterwards, of course.

The first fax machine.
A roller on which the document A4 was clamped and wound.
The recipient clamped in the same way a sheet of paper with a black background and a white plastic cover.
Function:
Sensor at the encoder detects black spots, sends signal and there the plastic coating is burned and the black background appears. For the start first telephone contact to press each other the start button.
Revolutionary technology at that time.
The joke was, we made a drawing that was for the beginning like a drawing but then completely black.
A transfer took a few minutes. Of course the receiver didn't stand by the whole time and went back to work. When the black part was then burned far enough and the office had to be aired out we scolded each other again.
But who thought at that time already about delicious substances like dioxin.

Enough for today and watch out for tomorrow's newspaper and other media.

Best regards

[Marco_Tosin]

During training for the junior officer course at Smalp (Alpine military school) there was a classic prank that was played on the junior course students by the senior course students.

Always moving through mountainous terrain, it was likely to come in contact with vipers.

Therefore, before training outings, the young men would be sent in search of the serum against the Bofors viper's venom.

They were usually loaded with the heaviest packs that were in the infirmary.

But the Bofors viper was the one used for de-mining minefields ...

https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetranitrato_di_pentaeritrite

A few months after my military service, I worked for a couple of years in a goldsmith company where necklaces were produced.

The classic joke played on new hires was to go in search of the gold magnet.

After running them through all the departments, they were eventually sent to where the chains were beaten into metal molds, to give them the desired shape.

Of course they always came back with the heaviest mold which was over 20 kg (45-50 pounds).