Don’t be an April Fool! Fool!

Things may look the same but are
often not always what they seem.

I think most people know that April 1^st is synonymous with April Fool’s Day. I’ve played some pretty good jokes on people over the years. I’ve also been the butt of many jokes but it’s all in good fun. One of my most memorable gags was sprung on one of my direct-reports at work. There was a woman who worked for me in one of my early engineering jobs. She was what was called a Process Technician and helped me set up different pieces of equipment and processes throughout the plant. She was giving me a hard time about how messy my office always was and how I must have had “one million icons on the desktop of my computer”. We were always playing jokes on each other. I knew I had to come up with something good for April Fool’s Day so I could take the title of best prankster in the office. I was organizing my computer desktop when it hit me.

My assistant had a bad habit of not locking her computer when she was away from her desk. On the morning of April 1^st, she went to take a break and my diabolical scheme was implemented. I jumped on her computer and carried out the following actions as quick as possible. This is spelled out step by step in case you want to play this prank on one of your friends.

1)      I took a screen shot of her current desktop and saved it to My Documents (Shift+Print Screen).

2)      I opened the picture in Internet Explorer and right clicked on it.

3)      I scrolled down to “Set as desktop background” and clicked it.

4)      I right clicked the mouse on the desktop and went to “Properties”.

5)      Under properties I went to the “Background” tab and set the picture to “Stretch”.

6)      After the new picture was in place I created a “catch-all” folder to move all of her desktop icons into a central location.

7)       I renamed the folder to the same name as one on the desktop and placed it directly on top of the one set as the wallpaper background picture. Since her desktop was as messy as mine it was easy to set up the remainder of the prank.

8)      Everything was now set. The desktop appeared the same when she got back from break…….she just couldn’t click on anything on the desktop except for the “catch all” folder that was well hidden.

Total chaos ensued when she got back from break. I asked her if she could send me a file I was looking for to set the prank into action. She started clicking on the desktop folder but it wouldn’t open.  She tried other folders…..no luck. She started yelling at the computer and restarted it. She looked at me and said “I think the frickin computer locked up so I had to restart it. I’ll send you the file in a minute.”

So the computer restarted and somehow I kept calm, I was laughing hysterically on the inside. She tried to click on the folder again and no luck. I walked over and looked at the computer to “try to help her out”. I mysteriously couldn’t figure it out either. I recommended she call the IT guy and have him look at it. So she called the IT guy and he showed up ten minutes later. The IT guy looked at her computer, clicked on a few things, hit it a few times, and restarted it…..still no luck. He looked at my assistant and said “I think I’ll have to set everything up again and reinstall all the programs to fix this. I hope you didn’t have anything important saved on it.” Things started to get ugly at this point so I let the cat out of the bag. A day or two later my assistant started talking to me again. She was still pissed, but then again I was still laughing at her. BAZINGA!